With midterm elections only six weeks away, some interesting numbers:
In a CBS News poll from last month, a remarkable 58 percent of Democratic respondents had a positive view of socialism, with only 18 percent viewing it negatively (perhaps the codgers who actually remember that thing called the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics). That number goes up to 71 percent for Democrats with a college degree or more, thus raising some interesting thoughts about what our colleges are teaching and the possibility that an inverse relationship has come to exist between intelligence on the one hand and educational credentials on the other.
Only 32 percent of Democrats in the CBS poll had a positive view of capitalism. Even allowing for some confusion over what the term “socialism” means and the likelihood that the phrase “free enterprise” might evoke a better response than the pejorative “capitalism,” this a remarkable result, and one suggesting that for the first time in our nation’s history we have a major socialist political party.
Few saw this coming when the Berlin Wall fell.
That 72 percent of Republicans in the CBS survey view capitalism favorably and 74 percent socialism negatively at least tells us that one of our parties doesn’t suffer from historical amnesia and economic illiteracy.
Democrats’ turn toward socialism is good news for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), who is apparently contemplating a run for the presidency and recently re-upped her Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) membership after a lapse.
However initially implausible such a candidacy might seem, her chances might be better than many realize, at least in terms of winning the Democratic nomination if not the general election: She is the current front-runner according to the market predictor Polymarket, narrowly ahead of presumably more credible figures like Gavin Newsom, Kamala Harris, and Pete Buttigieg.
Those surprising odds might actually understate her competitiveness in such a field. As Mark Halperin notes, the DSA is a powerful insurgent force within the Democratic Party, but it has no presidential prospect other than her at this point, leaving a large and growing lane wide open. The other often-mentioned candidates–not just Harris, Newsom, and Buttigieg but also Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff, and Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly–are all largely indistinguishable in ideological terms and would therefore be competing for the same non-socialist votes. It would be AOC with the DSA core and socialist sympathizers versus the field (with former Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel trying to run in a center lane in a party without centrists).
All of which is demoralizing for those of us seeking a “return to normalcy” in our politics (defined as boring, competent, problem-solving government), since, apart from her extremist views, AOC has demonstrated nothing resembling any substantial knowledge of public-policy issues or any capacity to govern–she was elected as a complete novice in a deep-blue New York City borough and safely re-elected since.
She is purely a creature of social media, an entertainer playing the role of elected official. That she is being taken seriously as a prospective major party presidential nominee tells us how unserious our politics has become.
Alas, an increasingly juvenile electorate begets an increasingly juvenile, unserious politics.
For nearly the entirety of his second term, Donald Trump has been “underwater” in terms of poll approval/disapproval, in recent months by roughly 20 points. Still, just a few weeks ago he claimed that if a presidential election were held, he would win the popular vote by a whopping 25 percent.
Even taking into account the degree to which just about anything Trump says (and does) is simply preposterous, this might set a new record in the delusional sweepstakes, since no presidential candidate has won an election by such a margin in more than a century (since Calvin Coolidge won the popular vote by 25.22 percent back in 1924), not FDR, not Dwight Eisenhower, not Ronald Reagan.
But somehow Trump believes he would, despite having lost the popular vote in the past to such electoral juggernauts as Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden.
We are left to shake our heads and wonder who Trump is communicating with, who he believes will believe such obvious guff.
The scary part is the possibility that he’s not communicating with anyone but himself; that our commander-in-chief really is now living in his own fantasy world, entirely detached from reality.
There’s a widely accepted psychological diagnosis for such a thing.
Our greatest president ever (based on his own rankings, in which he occupied the top tier all by himself) might not be quite as popular as he thinks he is can be confirmed by a recent Gallup poll (“fake,” as usual), in which prospective voters now lean Democrat over Republican by 10 percentage points (49-39), the biggest lead for Democrats since 2008 and a reversal of no less than 14 points since the fall of 2024.
Trump naturally wants to make the midterms all about him. The Democrats do too.
So is Trump, living in that fantasy world, simply clueless as to how unpopular he is? Or is he sabotaging his own party so he can have a Democratic Congress as a useful scapegoat to blame his failures on?
Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.
