I Don't Understand

    We constantly hear how divided we are as a nation.  Why?  It seems to have no relation to reality.  The idea of division implies a persistent ambivalence and lack of some sort of majority opinion.  That's just not what's happening.
    If you go back to the 2016 election and look at the real numbers for and against you find a persistent majority opinion.  Certainly, Mrs Clinton polled almost 3 million more votes than Donald Trump head to head.  However, if you look at all the votes cast you find that nearly 12 million more people voted against Donald Trump than voted for him.  There is no reason to believe, had the election been head to head, Trump versus Clinton, that Trump would have garnered any additional support and he certainly would have lost in the Electoral College.
    The Trump supporters like to point out the inaccurate pre-election polling.  That's not true.  The polls were accurate to the decimal point.  The pollsters just didn't dig deep enough into the distribution of those votes and they failed to account for the Electoral College. Yeah, we know all that, why bring it up?  Because that supposed inaccuracy is used to spread an almost subliminal distrust of polling in general. That distrust opens the door to some bad conclusions about circumstances in general.
    If you look at the Congressional elections of 2016,  you notice something else that's never discussed.  The party with the successful presidential candidate actually lost seats in both houses of Congress. That never happens. The 2018, House elections were a rout for the republicans.  There doesn't seem to be any reason to think 2020 will be any different no matter what party you support except the republicans seem to have many more vulnerable Senate seats.
    Except for the months coming up to election day, presidential polling is confined to and judged by job approval numbers.  Usually, those numbers are all over the map, driven by current events. Rapid shifts of 20-30 points aren't unusual no matter the President.  Not this time.
    For nearly 3 years Donald Trump's approval numbers have remained persistently dismal.  People just don't like this guy. A continuing, solid majority are, in fact, united in their opinion of this guy.  I've never seen anything like this kind of solidarity.  I've never seen anything like this kind of unity.  If I were an establishment republican I certainly would be more worried every day.  The truth is, it takes a lot of time to establish a non-encumbent presidential candidate and they are rapidly running out of that time.