Why We Can Never Give Up on Trump Voters
By 
Shortly after the inauguration, I asked American voters how much of a priority they thought a range of policy moves should be for Mr. Trump. The very top of the list? “Reduce the cost of living.” Also high up on the list were actions on immigration, which explains why my polling has found that Mr. Trump’s immigration job approval remains positive even as his approval in other areas has grown weaker.
In contrast, “passing additional tariffs” and “firing large numbers of federal government employees” — the stuff of the headlines of the last few weeks — fall far down the rankings. Only one in four voters thought each of those items should be “one of the top priorities.” And while the numbers look more robust among Trump voters, fewer than half of them identified mass firings or tariffs as a top priority. Instead, Trump voter priorities looked just like voter priorities overall: reduce the cost of living, deport criminal illegal immigrants, secure the southern border.
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But this is a dangerous gamble if Mr. Trump’s agenda is carried out almost exclusively through executive power and public opinion gives government control back to his opponents; the Affordable Care Act proved too difficult for Republicans to uproot because it was enshrined in law by Congress, while many of Mr. Trump’s actions are products of pen-and-phone alone.
Mr. Trump feels America has sent him to Washington on a mission. He has, at various points in time, branded himself both as an agent of chaos and as an antidote to it. Some of his core supporters will cheer as he takes a bull-in-a-china-shop approach to institutions, and there is some evidence that voters are willing to give him leeway on his unorthodox approaches to many of the problems they think we face — a let’s-just-do-it-and-be-legends mind-set.
But the No. 1 issue in America remains the No. 1 issue, and there are real political risks to a strategy that asks voters to grin and bear it in the checkout line today for a promise of something better tomorrow.
What I don’t like about the conversations around here since the election is the “fuck all Trump voters, they get what they deserve and also who do I throw under the bus to get them back?” And what I don’t like about it is that you are saying you want to lose forever. It’s a zero politics, a politics of complete failure that centers your own self-righteousness rather than desiring to win. It’s true, America is pretty broken. The continued popularity of Trump’s immigration actions demonstrates the deep racism at the core of this horrible nation. It makes me sad. The nation may in fact be horrible, made up of stupid, terrible people, but it’s my horrible nation and so I have to deal with that reality. Huge numbers of Trump voters at least purportedly voted for him because they felt economically insecure. Make fun of them if you want to, I don’t care. But if you ever want to win again–ever–these are the precise voters you have to appeal to.