Not so much.
About ten percent swapped from “strongly approve” to “approve” shortly after the election, but it’s been fairly steady at about 55/35 since then. You expect to see a little fade after the post-election honeymoon wears off. Nothing surprising there.
That ten percent may be old-school Republicans who are disappointed by Trump’s chaos, but they could also be fascists annoyed that he hasn’t already eliminated all the mudbloods.
Yes.
I don’t think that national opinion polls are relevant. Even pre-Trump, the Confederate states were wildly undemocratic. With the current acceleration of voter suppression and disenfranchisement, I do not think that there is any chance that the midterms will be a real election in the GOP-controlled states.
It doesn’t matter how many Californians and New Yorkers come out to vote. So long as the GOP holds the red states, they hold the country. They don’t need to rig every vote to succeed; just enough to maintain the balance of power.
The cold war within the GOP continues. The Trumpeters have the base and the executive, the establishment GOP have the party infrastructure, the VP and most of the legislature.
The Pence faction would love to topple Trump, but they know that they can’t do it without the base. They are attempting to turn the base by white-anting Trump (hence all the leaks and the partial legislative resistance), but they won’t move overtly unless Trump’s intra-GOP disapproval exceeds 50%.
Even if they do move, that still leaves you with a shamelessly corrupt fascist government. They aren’t ever going to turn back into old-school Republicans. They’ve seen what you can get away with if you’re sufficiently shameless, and that genie is never going back into the bottle.
On the other side: the Trumpeters are stupid, but they aren’t blind. They know what the Pence faction are doing.
So, they’re purging the disloyal from the West Wing and Cabinet, and preparing to revise the legislature at the midterms. Any GOP Congress member who has shown disloyalty to Trump is going to face aggressive Trumpist challengers (fresh from 4Chan and Stormfront), with the West Wing actively and loudly supporting the new blood.
The point that electoral administration in the USA is devolved to the states makes it more vulnerable to subversion, not less. You only need to mess with the outcome in a couple of states to flip the balance of the country, and you have fifty targets to choose from. Hit the weakest link.
The GOP doesn’t control just a few states, though; they control most of them. The degree of disenfranchisement and structural bias in the red states pre-Trump was already bad enough to make their status as democratically governed regions highly questionable. Turning up the volume on that throws them completely over the edge.
From what I’ve seen, the last few years of gerrymander related court decisions have mostly consisted of the courts saying “hey, that’s a bit too far even for us; but if you’d kept it to this still-effective but slightly less blatant level, that would’ve been okay”. They’re just defining the boundaries of minimally-plausible deniability, and the states are responding by tuning their procedures right to the edge of that marker.
Ultimately, questions of electoral bias are going to end up with the USSC. For Gorsuch et al to deal with.
On that, I completely agree.
