In Gravis/OANN Poll, Trump Hits... 40% Among Republicans

Before getting to that, this AllahPundit piece examines a claimed NYMag report that Roger Ailes now wants to take Trump out of the race; the claim is that Ailes says Trump is flatly unelectable, and Ailes views it as his mission to "save the country" (from a Democrat President, I guess).

This piece by very liberal but also pretty darn sharp Damon Linker is very good indeed.

How America's Political and Economic Elite Gave Birth to the Trump Campaign

...

Anti-immigrant sentiment has been on the rise (in intensity if not always in sheer numbers) throughout the Western world in recent years. The severe economic downturn that began in 2008 and the painfully slow recovery that followed has no doubt helped to fuel it. But so has a visceral frustration at what many believe to be a failure of representative institutions to respond to popular discontent about the changing ethnic and economic character of Western nation states over the past several decades.

These institutions have been sluggish to respond to this discontent because two (sometimes overlapping) factions of our political and economic elite strongly support high levels of immigration -- or at least oppose doing very much to stop it.

One of the factions -- the business class and its neoliberal champions in government, think tanks, and NGOs -- believes in a free-flowing international labor market that treats borders as superfluous.

The other faction -- liberal lawyers, activists, intellectuals, journalists, academics, members of the clergy, and (once again) NGO staffers — has a deep-seated moral suspicion of nations and political boundaries in general. Why should an American count for more than a Mexican who crosses the border into the United States? Shouldn't a refugee fleeing violence in North Africa enjoy full political rights upon setting foot in the European Union? Don't all human beings deserve to be treated equally under the law? Isn't opposition to such equality an example of bald-faced racism?

Both of these factions make deeply anti-political assumptions, denying the legitimacy of particularistic affiliations and dismissing the intuition that citizenship in a particular political community is a distinction that should not be open to all comers. The first faction denies these fundamentally political distinctions in the name of economic universalism; the second denies them in the name of moral universalism....

Out of fairness, I must stop quoting him there, but I assure you, his subsequent conclusions are just as important. His basic point is that while the public may favor a liberal immigration policy, they have not and probably will not agree to a virtual opens border policy, which is the policy preference of the "political and economic elites," as he calls them.

Anyway, on to the poll.

My one problem here is that this is sponsored by the One America News Network. I don't really know this outfit, other than they hired Sarah Palin.

I have nothing against them, but I also have no track record yielding anything for them, either.

Also, while I've heard of Gravis, that's the extent of my knowledge of them. I've just heard of them.

Oh, I just looked up methodology: It's a real poll (not an internet survey), but it's a robopoll. As I understand it, these are considered less reliable than human-conducted polls. I'm just going to guess here that that's because people feel far more comfortable hanging up on a robot, and therefore the survey becomes more self-selecting than with a human-conducted poll (that is, people who want to be polled stay on the line, skewing the survey towards the most animated people.)

That caveat aside, let the screaming about Trump, pro or con, commence.

There's a chart with all the candidates on it. It's below the fold because it's pretty wide.

Scott Walker's numbers have plunged, obviously.

posted by Ace at 04:59 PM

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