Democrats Who Voted Trump in 2016 are Set to Do it Again Next Year

Democrats hoped they’d built the blue wall back up with their victories in the 2018 midterms. After Donald Trump shocked the country by turning Midwest Obama voters into his supporters in 2016, moderate Democrats managed to break into those tight districts, get Trump voters to pull the lever for them, and take control of the House of Representatives. Surely, the Hillary Curse was over, and the path to presidential success in 2020 was clear.

Well, not so fast.

From the New York Times:

Success in the midterms might not mean as much for Democratic presidential candidates as the party might think. Nearly two-thirds of voters in six battleground states who voted for President Trump in 2016 — but for Democratic congressional candidates in 2018 — say they intend to back the president against each of his top rivals, according to recent polling by The New York Times Upshot/Siena College.

The results suggest that the party’s winning formula in last year’s midterms may not be so easy to replicate in a presidential election. The Democrats’ relatively moderate House candidates succeeded in large part by flipping a crucial segment of voters who backed the president in 2016. If these voters remain open-minded again in 2020, Democrats will have a ready-made blueprint for winning back the crucial Rust Belt battlegrounds.

This group is only a sliver of the electorate — 2 percent of registered voters — and is not representative of all voters. They are overwhelmingly white, 60 percent are male, and two-thirds have no college degree. But the president’s strength among them helps explain why he is highly competitive in states that Democrats carried just one year ago.

Drilling down on their poll results, the Times found that Democrats have little to celebrate when it comes to their so-called “Blue Wave” of 2018. Not only are Trump supporters poised to come back and vote for the president next year, they weren’t all that enamored with the Democrats during the midterms. Many of them simply wanted to put a check on the Executive’s power.

“Michelle Bassaro, 61, is a Trump supporter, but in the midterm election, she voted for the Democrat in her district to balance the administration’s power,” the Times reported. “She said she had voted for Republicans when Democrats were in the White House for the same reason, consistent with research that shows that some people intentionally vote for divided government.”

When you put this next to other recent polls that show Trump gaining steam in Wisconsin and other Midwest states amid this ludicrous impeachment push, and the Democrats could be looking down the barrel at disaster in 2020.

Sad!