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| David Brooks -- New York Times |
For Democrats, the signs of the times appear to be pointing
downward, and the American media also appears to be tottering on the abyss.
“Just 7% of Americans have ‘a great deal’ of trust and
confidence in the media” Gallup reported recently, “and 27%
have a fair amount… Meanwhile, 28% of U.S. adults say they do not have very
much confidence and 38% have none at all in newspapers, TV and radio. Notably,
this is the first time that the percentage of Americans with no trust at all in
the media is higher than the percentage with a great deal or a fair amount
combined.”
Citing “The Economist / YouGov poll on
Wednesday,” Newsweek reports, “Biden's net
approval fell 14 points to 39 percent. Earlier, Biden had an unusually high
approval rating from ‘less committed Democrats’ YouGov says. The president
ended the week with a 45 percent approval rating. Independents, however, seem
to be giving Biden the cold shoulder as his approval fell a whopping 18 percent
in the past week.”
New York Times columnist David Brooks, whose head does not
instantly burst into flame when struck by a progressive or far-right hammer,
provides some sobering statistics in a recent column, “Why the Republicans are surging in the
polls.”
The news wrung out of telling statistics, he notes, “…is not
good for team blue. In the latest New York Times/Siena College poll, 49% of
likely voters said they planned to vote for a Republican for Congress, and 45%
said they planned to vote for a Democrat. Democrats held a 1-point lead last
month.”
Pushing abortion rights as a central pillar of Democrat
campaigns has been a flop. “Over the past month, the gender gap, which used to
favor Democrats, has evaporated. In September, women who identified as
independent voters favored Democrats by 14 percentage points. Now, they favor
Republicans by 18 points.”
An AP-NORIC poll shows voters trusting Republicans rather
than Democrats to do “a better job handling the economy, by 39% to 29%... As
the Times’ Jim Tankersley has reported, Democratic candidates in competitive
Senate races are barely talking about the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan,
which included direct payments to citizens.”
Brooks continues to lay on the bad news with a trowel: “Democrats
have a crime problem… Democrats have not won back Hispanics. In 2016, Donald
Trump won 28% of the Hispanic vote. In 2020, it was up to 38%. This year, as
William A. Galston noted in The Wall Street Journal, recent surveys suggest
that Republicans will once again win about 34% to 38% of the Hispanic vote. In
Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis is leading Democrat Charlie Crist by 16 points among
Hispanics likely to vote… The Jan. 6 committee and the warnings about
MAGA fascism didn’t change minds.” Brooksallows that the committee’s
work has been morally and legally important. “But Trump’s favorability rating
is pretty much where it was at the committee’s first public hearing. In the
Times poll, Trump is roughly tied with Biden in a theoretical 2024 rematch.
According to Politico, less than 2% of broadcast TV spending in House races has
been devoted to Jan. 6 ads.”
A persistent critic of Trump – “The Trumpified GOP deserves to be a
marginalized and disgraced force in American life “– Brooks notes that “The
Republicans may just have a clearer narrative… GOP candidates are
telling a very clear class/culture/status war narrative in which common-sense
Americans are being assaulted by elite progressives who let the homeless take
over the streets, teach Sex-Ed to 5-year-olds, manufacture fake news, run woke
corporations, open the border, and refuse to do anything about fentanyl deaths
and the sorts of things that affect regular people.”
The art of political campaigning is the art of telling a majority of
people what they already know, and the data flourished by Brooks suggests that
Americans generally are not amenable to solutions that do not solve problems or
politicians who, slathering honeyed words on painful problems, appear to
believe that words themselves, produced by the cartload in Washington DC, are,
like voodoo ceremonies, capable of changing the realities that threaten us.
This is not rational politics. It is the homeopathic magic practiced by
primitive tribes in deepest, darkest Washington D.C., the home of high taxes,
economic experts, improvident spending and, so far, successful progressive
Democrat policies.
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