All posts tagged "Popularity"

New York Times White House Correspondent Zolan Kanno-Youngs says Republicans are facing a tough decision and probably a delicate dance around how much to include an unpopular president in their re-election campaigns in 2026.

“We're talking about eight Republican seats, two Democrats, that … people are focused on and on the senate side of the capitol, we have battlegrounds … from the middle of the country going east: Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, New Hampshire, Maine, Ohio, Iowa, Texas, Minnesota,” said CNN “Inside Politics” anchor Dana Bash.

Even President Donald Trump admitted his Republican Party was struggling to go uphill in 2026, without admitting that part of the problem is his deep unpopularity with American voters....

New York Times writer E.J. Dionne Jr., says a great many Americans who helped put Donald Trump in office have absorbed what’s happened since.

“They may not be glued to every chaotic twist of this presidency, but they do pay attention and have concluded, reasonably, that this is not what they voted for,” said Dionne.

Compared to Trump’s 49.8 percent of the 2024 popular vote, Trump’s approval ratings are a slide. A New York Times analysis of public polling this month found his net approval rating had dropped to 42 percent, while a A.P./NORC poll and a Gallup poll put him at 36 percent. ...

Former George W. Bush speechwriter Tim Miller says the Trump train is running off the rails as Trump faced arguably his worst week in his second term.

“We think the wheels are coming off of the Trump train right now,” said Miller, who spoke with MSNBC anchor Nicole Wallace and used U.S. attorney Lindsey Halligan’s appearance in court as a springboard to a greater collapse.

“The incompetence almost papers over ... the perniciousness of this,” said Miller, adding the conclusion hit him as he watched Salesforce CEO Mark Benioff take a selfie with U.S. AG Pam Bondi at a state dinner for Saudi Arabia leader Mohammed bin Salman....

Tim Wise has written an interesting post about the rising popularity of Ayn Rand and Rand's own youthful infatuation with a young man who killed and mutilated a 12-year-old girl, who Rand admired because here was a man that just took what he pleased him and saw social norms as the tedious restraints on brilliant minds like his own. No, I'm not kidding. You can read more here. It's initially sort of surprising, but it actually makes sense. Sociopathy---remember, not all sociopathy is sadistic---is the purest expression of Rand's "philosophy". It's not that Rand though chopping up little girls and leaving half their torsos for their fathers to find when they expected to find a live girl was a great idea. Indeed, it seems she didn't think much of the act either way. She was just enamored of the idea of someone who had shaken off that pesky burden of considering the little people to be human beings whose pain counted, and whose lives matter. The story of Rand's time as a murder groupie is interesting, and I recommend following the links, but this post is about something else, something Paul Rosenberg has labeled the cultural contradictions of conservatism. As we've learned in the past year, right wingers will portray themselves as: