If a new poll is any indication, even those who voted for Donald Trump likely won't buy that his picking a Wall Street lawyer to head the Securities and Exchange Commission is a method of "draining the swamp."
A study out Wednesday by the left-leaning Center for American Progress and the firm Hart Research Associates asked voters across 14 key battleground states — each having U.S. Senate seats Democrats will seek to defend in 2008, including Florida — about their confidence in the president-elect so far, how the current Republican agenda compares to their views and whether Trump and the GOP Congress ought to have Democrats in the Senate as a check on their power.
On that last question, there was overwhelming support for keeping senators like Florida's Bill Nelson on hand to safeguard against things like privatizing Medicare and repealing Obamacare despite the hits Democrats took in November.
Hart Research’s Geoff Garin said that 59 percent of those surveyed said whether the survey used the word "opposing" or the word "blocking," close to 60 percent of respondents said they want to see Senate Democrats challenge Trump and the GOP.
"I really want to emphasize that this desire for Democratic Senators to be an independent check and balance on Donald Trump, even if it means opposing or blocking his policies, is true even in the reddest of states,” he said.
Although the sample size was relatively small, it included voters from states that overwhelmingly went to Trump (Indiana, Missouri Montana, North Dakota, West Virginia), blue Midwestern states including some that flipped for Trump (Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio) and Atlantic Coast states with a mix of rural and urban voters (Florida, Maine, New Jersey, Virginia), all of which Democrats will be defending Senate seats in in 2018.
Key among concerns, survey participants indicated, were Trump's potential conflicts of interest and government corruption in general, which Trump voters said was their number-one concern. Among voters in general, safeguarding Medicare was the top concern.
Nearly a quarter of those polled “do not think Donald Trump should be able to receive payments from foreign governments to his business holdings while serving as president,” Garin added
Nearly 60 percent are concerned about repealing Obamacare without a replacement.
Same goes for raising the federal minimum wage.
Part of the reason may be that a good chunk of voters who went for Trump on Election Day did so with some reticence.
“Thirty-seven percent of all Trump voters in these states said they voted for him only with mixed feelings and not with a sense of strong support. That group of Trump voters are especially inclined to want their Democratic senators to act as a check and balance on Trump,” Garin said.
The bottom line, they said, was that the populist campaign themes that helped Trump get elected — and thus, the wishes of the voters — appear to be at odds with Trump's agenda when he takes office. At the top of that agenda, for example, is getting rid of Obamacare, possibly in part by executive order, without replacing it.
“What we'v seen to far is that the GOP... are using the election results to jam thought an agenda that ...even Trump's own voters have real qualms about,” said Center for American Progress president Neera Tanden.
For U.S. Senators like Nelson, who will likely face a challenge from someone like Florida Governor Rick Scott in 2018, the survey suggests he's “on very strong ground as he looks toward reelection” Tanden said.
