Trump is a disaster, and that's helping Democrats. But not how you think.
By Greg Sargent May 8 at 10:51 AM
There’s a narrative about our politics right now that you constantly encounter on social and political media. It goes like this: Democrats are too obsessed with the Russia investigation, or with Stormy Daniels, or they’re just too focused on “not being President Trump,” and as a result, they aren’t articulating an affirmative agenda and risk getting caught flat-footed by Trump’s supposedly rising popularity. But this narrative is entirely wrong, and two new pieces this morning help set the record straight. Taken together, they point to a much more accurate version of what’s happening: Trump’s unpopularity does in fact remain historically abysmal. This and Trump’s many scandals are in fact helping Democrats — but not in a way that is immediately apparent and not in a manner that betrays any unhealthy Democratic obsession with those things.
The first article is by Nate Silver, and it puts Trump’s job-approval numbers in their proper perspective. You constantly read headlines and punditry claiming that Trump’s approval is rising. But, while Silver agrees that Trump’s approval has “increased slightly,” the big picture is this:
For the past 66 days, Trump’s approval rating has been somewhere between 40.0 percent and 42.1 percent, according to our tracker. It’s been toward the higher end of that range recently — but that isn’t much of range. Indeed, over the whole course of his presidency, the range Trump’s approval ratings travel in has been remarkably narrow.
If Trump’s numbers are rising, they are only doing so inside a very narrow range that remains abysmally low. And don’t forget the polling that shows strong disapproval of Trump is running higher than strong approval, which could impact disparities in voter engagement.
The second piece is by Ron Brownstein, and it reports accurately on how Democrats are actually running their campaigns right now. As Brownstein notes, many Democrats think that their chances of winning this fall turn less on whether Trump gets further dragged down by scandal, and more on their ability to link the GOP’s tax cuts to its failed (but continuing) drive to roll back health coverage, which together amount to a deeply unpopular overall set of GOP priorities:
In the district-by-district battle to retake the House, many Democrats are focusing less on condemning Trump’s character than on discrediting the Republican agenda. Central to that mission is arguing that the GOP has benefited the wealthy, and burdened the middle class, with its twin legislative priorities of the past 17 months: passing a large tax cut and attempting to repeal the Affordable Care Act.
There is an additional nuance that should be noted, and it gets at how Democrats actually are capitalizing on Trump’s unpopularity. What we have seen in the last year of elections, in Virginia, in Alabama, in Pennsylvania’s 18th District and in dozens of state legislative races, is that Trump’s unpopularity is driving Democratic turnout and Democratic volunteering, and is turning white, better-educated, suburban swing voters and independents against the GOP — because alienation from Trump has led such voters to give Democrats more of a hearing. The intensity of this outpouring against Trump is undoubtedly driven in part by Trump’s scandals and his response to them, and crucially, it is happening even as Democratic candidates are not particularly focused on Trump in their own campaigns.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2018/05/08/trump-is-a-disaster-and-thats-helping-democrats-but-not-how-you-think/
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another set of Democrats get their wings!!! 
