August 1, 2017

What Republicans Think These Days

We have some interesting results from a YouGov poll released last week. First up, here are the number of Republicans who trust Donald Trump more than various news sources:

Republicans trust Trump by enormous margins over mainstream news sources. They trust Trump by enormous margins over conservative news sources. And they even trust Trump by 2:1 over Fox News (54 percent vs. 23 percent).

In other words, reporting what Trump does hardly has any effect. In fact, it probably helps Trump since most Republicans figure it’s just more lies and fake news designed to make their guy look bad. As a result, here are a few thing Republicans believe:

  • 44 percent say Obamacare has been a “complete” failure.
  • 47 percent explicitly say that punishing biased news outlets is more important than protecting freedom of the press.
  • 28 percent approve of creating a single-payer system for the US, even though only 15 percent approve of Obamacare.
  • 54 percent think the FBI investigation of Trump is a politically motivated attempt to embarrass him, and 65 percent approve of Trump’s firing of James Comey.
  • 68 percent think Trump understands important issues “in detail.”

How do you fight stuff like that if the usual news outlets are now almost entirely untrusted by Trump voters? Maybe there’s no way. Maybe all you can do is pick off some of the moderates in the middle and leave the hard core Republicans alone to their fantasies.

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We've never been very good at being conservative.

And usually, that serves us well in doing the ambitious, hard-hitting journalism that you turn to Mother Jones for. But it also means we can't afford to come up short when it comes to scratching together the funds it takes to keep our team firing on all cylinders, and the truth is, we finished our budgeting cycle on June 30 about $100,000 short of our online goal.

This is no time to come up short. It's time to fight like hell, as our namesake would tell us to do, for a democracy where minority rule cannot impose an extreme agenda, where facts matter, and where accountability has a chance at the polls and in the press. If you value our reporting and you can right now, please help us dig out of the $100,000 hole we're starting our new budgeting cycle in with an always-needed and always-appreciated donation today.

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