Whither President Donald J. Trump?
Well into his second year in office, Trump continues to divide the nation in a manner not seen since the late ‘60s. Polls show his job approval consistently hovers in the low 40s and Republican congressional leaders are concerned his status will result in massive losses come Election Day.
But there remain some places where Trump is viewed with regard. And, despite drooping survey numbers, Kentucky likely lines up as one of those places.
Kentuckians voted for Democrats in 26 of the 50 presidential elections since the Commonwealth entered the union as the 15th state in 1792, with Republicans managing to win a majority in only 15 of those contests. The GOP has done a good job of playing catch up recently, though, winning 10 of the last 13, with Bill Clinton, twice, and Jimmy Carter the only Democrats to break the streak. There’s little reason to believe Republicans won’t achieve similar success in 2020, regardless of who’s atop the ticket.
Trump, who captured 62.5 percent of the vote in 2016, over Democrat Hillary Clinton, is the second-most popular Republican to run for president in the state’s history. He fared better than the sainted Ronald Reagan, better than Herbert Hoover running against the Catholic New York City product Al Smith in 1928. Only Richard Nixon, who grabbed 63.4 percent of the vote against South Dakota Sen. George McGovern in 1972, outperformed Trump among GOP presidential candidates in the entire history of the commonwealth.
We all know how that turned out for the man known as Tricky Dick. Perhaps the second most popular Republican presidential candidate in the state’s history is headed for a similar fate. We could only hope. But it’s going to take some doing to knock him down.
By the way, only three Democratic presidential candidates received a higher percentage of the vote than Trump, one being Lyndon Johnson, who racked up 64 percent against Barry Goldwater in 1964. The other two times barely count since they came as a reaction to the Civil War and Reconstruction – George B. McClellan, who you’ll remember as the commanding general of the Union army during the early days of the conflict, received 69.8 percent of the vote, ironically, against Kentucky’s own Abraham Lincoln in 1864. And Horatio Seymour got the all-time record 74.5 percent against U.S. Grant in 1868.
Obviously, then, Trump is in pretty high cotton in the commonwealth. Yet, while Trump remains more popular in Kentucky than the nation as a whole, it’s fair to say the Bluegrass isn’t bonkers about him these days either. The Big Red Poll, conducted by the Western Kentucky University Social Science Research Center April 11-15, showed that only 45 percent of the commonwealth’s residents approve of the job The Donald is doing, while 45 percent offer a thumbs down and 10 percent remain undecided.
Not exactly a glowing review.
Trump does maintain support among his fellow Republicans, 73 percent approve, and conservatives, with 65 percent offering support. Despite those results, the best bet, unless something unanticipated occurs, is that 30 months hence Kentuckians will almost certainly head for the polls and pull the Trump lever for a second time.
Simply put, if Trump can’t carry Kentucky in November 2020 he doesn’t stand a chance nationwide. And all factors point to his continued success.
Political analysts will tell you the easiest way to predict an election outcome is not the issues or personalities but party registration – Republicans vote for Republicans and Democrats vote for Democrats. It’s pretty simple but that’s not the way Kentucky, where Democrats continue to maintain a voter registration advantage, operates. As has been shown during the last five presidential elections, Kentuckians overwhelmingly prefer the GOP candidates for president, going with George W. Bush, Sen. John McCain, Mitt Romney and Trump in succession. Clinton, the last Democrat to carry the state, failed to get more than 45.8 percent in his two campaigns.
Reams have been written about the source of Trump’s standing in Kentucky. The president constantly makes a play for white voters at the expense of Latinos and African-Americans. It sells well in a state that is not particularly diverse, with a white population of 85 percent, and many folks live along or near the poverty line.
It’s a socially conservative place and a lot of Christian activists have gone so far as to compare Trump, who has had three wives amidst several documented affairs with women to whom he was not married, to Cyrus the Great, a pagan ruler in Persia of the 500s BC who liberated the Jews from captivity in Babylonia and returned them to their homeland to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem.
Trump, the theory holds, is doing the same thing for poor, persecuted Christians in the 21st Century as Cyrus did for the Jews way back in the day. Trump doesn’t exactly embrace the lifestyle promoted by evangelicals and the like, but his anti-abortion efforts, his attempts to keep transgender kids out of the bathrooms of their choice and the campaign to fill the federal courts with die-hard right-wingers like Justice Neil Gorsuch has earned their undying devotion.
A lot of folks these days tend to vote against a candidate more frequently than they vote for one. Trump benefitted from that in 2016. And a lot of voters will be looking to once again annoy the liberal elites by voting for a man regardless of whether he’s proved up for the job.
In order to vote for Trump, Kentucky voters will have to ignore a lot. On the plus side, the economy hasn’t collapsed and there hasn’t yet been a nuclear holocaust, for which we are all grateful, but it does seem to be a historically low bar.
It’s true, as his supporters assert, that a lot of the opposition to Trump, and the urge to impeach him, is political, that his foes don’t like his policies. To a certain extent that’s true. Anyone like Trump bent on destroying the environment, attempting to deprive the American public of affordable health care and appointing judges that make Antonin Scalia look like William O. Douglas is going to attract a lot of opposition from progressives.
But it’s more than that. There’s the widespread notion that Trump has carted the high office of the President of the United States into the gutter. Last week offered a good accounting of that.
In his own, bird whistle sort of way he characterized those trying to cross the southern border illegally as “animals,’’ insisting later that he was only referring to gang members. Regardless, the impression was left.
He said that those who refuse to stand for the Star Spangled Banner perhaps “shouldn’t be in the country,’’ a ghastly thing for a president to say. He continues to attack his own Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation for failing to bend to his whims, ludicrously accusing the FBI in particular of planting in his 2016 campaign. He continues to call for the prosecution of Hillary Clinton for imagined crimes, leading sycophants at his political rallies in the cheer of “Lock her up.’’
He lies constantly. Trump simply makes stuff up out of thin air and then convinces his masses that it’s the truth. He used a Memorial Day tweet to say just how happy dead American military personnel would be if they were able to view his accomplishments.
And of course, most recently there’s his policy of separating asylum seekers from their children at the Mexican border, a truly evil and immoral initiative that he, astoundingly, blamed on Democrats.
There’s more, of course. This rundown is just from the last few days. Unmentioned, for instance, is his actions during a pep rally in Nashville, inducing supporters to boo Sen. John McCain, R-AZ, who is dying from brain cancer.
Trump is unfit, gloriously unfit, to serve as president of the United States. But he’s the man Kentucky voters wanted in overwhelming fashion.
The NKyTribune’s Washington columnist Bill Straub served 11 years as the Frankfort Bureau chief for The Kentucky Post. He also is the former White House/political correspondent for Scripps Howard News Service. A member of the Kentucky Journalism Hall of Fame, he currently resides in Silver Spring, Maryland, and writes frequently about the federal government and politics. Email him at williamgstraub@gmail.com.
I’m sure you’re correct; if the election were held today, 45 would still win by a large margin in Kentucky. There are lots nice Kentuckians who have little interest in politics but have been taught to always vote for the guy or gal with an “R” behind their name. I expect better from the rest of the country. On Wednesday morning, the Lexington Herald Leader had an article that puts a different light on our voting habits. I think it may very well apply to our Commonwealth. Your can read it here:
http://www.kentucky.com/news/nation-world/article212233984.html
Get to the doctor soon ! Sounds like you have a bad case of Trump derangement syndrome !!