The Republican Won in Georgia?  Move Along, Folks, Nothing To See Here

Printed from: https://newbostonpost.com/2017/06/21/the-republican-won-in-georgia-move-along-folks-nothing-to-see-here/

Expect the Republican’s victory Tuesday in a special election for U.S. House of Representatives in Georgia to be gone and forgotten within 48 hours.

Had the race the gone the other way, and the Democrat been the victor, we’d be hearing how it was the beginning of the end of President Donald Trump. Over and over.

Now, though, it will soon be treated as a non-entity.

Republicans have gone four-for-four in special elections to the U.S. House since Trump became president. All of them were in Republican-leaning districts, so they should have been GOP victories. But in the Montana and Georgia races, we were treated to breathless the-GOP-could-lose-and-Trump-is-finished preview stories that didn’t pan out. (The Kansas and South Carolina races, not as much.)

 

So why can’t the Democrats put the Trump albatross around the GOP candidates in these off-cycle races?

The truth is:  President Trump’s approval ratings may be low, but he’s not that unpopular. That is:  There isn’t much depth to his unpopularity. He hasn’t accomplished that much yet, and the news concerning the White House has tended to be negative, so it stands to reason his favorability rating would be low. It’s about 38 percent. By comparison, incidentally, that’s a tick higher than Bill Clinton’s was in June of his first year as president.

Americans aren’t buying the idea that the Russia investigations are anything like Watergate. And they aren’t punishing Republicans for their dissatisfaction with the president’s performance thus far. That means that if the president can notch some meaningful legislative victories and oversee some economic growth, he can turn around his political standing in the country.

But don’t expect the mainstream media to latch onto that.