Once again we get the same results we've gotten over and over again in other recent polls: at least two-thirds of independents agree with nearly every Democrat on major issues -- and a majority of Republicans are on the other side.
I'll keep saying it: Democrats are the normal people in America. Republicans are the out-of-touch, beyond-the-pale extremists. A majority of them think it's fine for America to take Greenland by force or coercion. Large majorities of them think Trump's arbitrary and onerous tariffs are just fine, and think ICE and the Border Patrol are doing a terrific job in Minneapolis and elsewhere.
They are not normal Americans. People who are dissatisfied with Donald Trump's presidency are normal Americans. Our political culture needs to wake up to this fact.
I'm not a real journalist, but maybe some people who really are journalists -- independent or otherwise -- need to conduct some safaris to the heartland to find the many Americans who aren't upscale, overeducated city-dwelling white liberals but who loathe Donald Trump anyway. They're there. They're everywhere. There are millions of them, and they're invisible.
Even a shellacking of the Republicans in the midterms might not get the point across -- pundits will say the vote was merely "thermostatic," or they'll fixate on winnable races Democrats lost. Even when Trump lost the popular vote in 2016, he was seen as the candidate who represented the zeitgeist, much more so than when Joe Biden won the most votes of any presidential candidate in American history four years later, and despite the fact that Biden's popular-vote margin was three times greater than Trump's in 2024. (Even Hillary Clinton's popular-vote win in her 2016 Electoral College loss was greater than Trump's popular-vote win eight years later.)
Democrats represent the zeitgeist now. It's time for the political world to acknowledge that.
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