Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Every time President-Elect Trump bashes the media, his popularity pops upward. Why? The feeling on the street is that however many lumps President-Elect Donald Trump delivers to the media, just or unjust, they deserve it. The approval rating of the media among americana  ordinarius   is on a par with that of Connecticut Governor Dannel Malloy, hovering as I write around 24 percent. Approval ratings may not matter all that much. Both Mr. Trump and his Democratic Presidential opponent, the vanquished Hillary Clinton, were, according to fallible polls, highly unpopular. The polls themselves, this time around, were highly unreliable. In the post-election period, one imagines pollsters lying on psychiatrist couches, the psychiatrists digging deeply into their psyches in an attempt to salvage their sanity.

Former Governor Lowell Weicker has been dragged out of mothballs by Neil Vigdor in The Connecticut Post to offer comment on the lamentable and Weicker-like Donald Trump. “’Out of 350 million people, we’re left with Donald Trump? You’ve got to be kidding me,’ said former Gov.  Lowell Weicker  Jr., an estranged Republican who has butted heads with Trump. ‘I think it’s the last act in what has been a long string of Republicans destroying themselves. I suspect after this election there will be a total reformation of the party.’” “Estranged Republican” is a delicate touch. During his last year in the U.S. Senate, Mr. Weicker managed to compile an Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) rating twenty points higher than that of U.S. Senator Chris Dodd. The abrasive Republican continually abused his own party as a foil to ingratiate himself with Democrats, who outnumber Republicans in his state by a two to one ratio, a case of mathematics determining political orientation....

                                                                                    Q: Who are the Trump supporters? A: Right now, they are, for the most part, people who are unattached, emotionally or ideologically, to either of the two major parties. The Obama administration has abandoned altogether what used to be called moderate, Reagan Democrats. Some of these people, left in the lurch by progressives, have crossed over to vote for Trump. He is running very strong among Republican, Democrat and unaffiliated white males. Within the narrower category of alienated moderate Republicans and Democrats, there are numerous sub-groups: resentment Republicans and Democrats, people who have, in one way or another, been slighted by what they refer to, disdainfully, as the party ...