Donald Trump is both showman and chameleon. While many politicians evolve their positions over time, Trump seems to change his deeply held beliefs depending entirely upon who the audience is that he happens to be in front of at any given time.
For many stalwart hard right wingers – those driven by a hatred of liberal values like equal opportunity, women’s rights, separation of church and state, environmentalism, etc. – Trump can do or say no wrong. But for the many traditional, “principled” conservatives, Trump’s wild, real-time, and constant changes of position have worn thin.
As the American electorate gets sliced and diced for the purposes of analysis, Trump’s numbers are, not surprisingly, extraordinarily low with those groups he’s vilified throughout his xenophobic campaign (and life).
The votes he is expected to receive among Hispanics, college-educated women, intellectuals, African Americans, and young people are by and large in the single digits.
The Washington Post is reporting that Trump is polling just as poorly, if not worse, among a very surprising and traditionally party-neutral block of American voters: Catholics.
According to the Post:
“Back in 2012, GOP nominee Mitt Romney lost the Catholic vote by just 2 points, 50 percent to 48 percent. And the GOP has actually won the Catholic vote as recently as 2004 and in 5 of the last 11 presidential elections.”
The piece continues by laying out Trump’s very bad news (which happens to be very good news for rational Americans), and that is:
“Trump trails among Catholics by a huge margin. A new poll from the Public Religion Research Institute released this week shows him down 23 points, 55-32.”
To put this into even greater perspective the article states that:
“If you compare the difference between Romney’s margin among Catholics in 2012 and Trump’s margin among Catholics this year, the 25-point difference is tied for the biggest shift of any demographic group in the Post-ABC poll.”
Trump’s very public feud with the Pontiff may be a major factor at play here. As you may recall, back in February of this year, the Pope suggested with reference to Trump’s sudden Christian convictions, that it would be fair to question the religious motives of anyone so dead set against helping the needy.
Of course Trump, being Trump, punched back with a statement on his Facebook page. Because it was more that 140 characters long, grammatically correct, all the words are spelled right, and he read it from a prepared sheet, one can surmise that it was written by someone other than Trump. Here’s how that statement began:
“In response to the Pope:
If and when the Vatican is attacked by ISIS, which as everyone knows is ISIS’s ultimate trophy, I can promise you that the Pope would have only wished and prayed that Donald Trump would have been President because this would not have happened. ISIS would have been eradicated unlike what is happening now with our all talk, no action politicians.”
I’m sure it’s difficult for a megalomaniac like Trump to fathom that people might actually side with the Pope in this case. But whatever the root cause, Trump’s numbers among Catholics are startlingly low.
Even I’ll raise a glass of communion wine to toast this positive development!
Here’s Donald Trump doing his very best to read his pitiful papal counter-punch:
Featured image from YouTube video.
