Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse



In the Trump era, Republicans have been revising their views on right and wrong.

In 2011, the Public Religion Research Institute asked voters if

an elected official who commits an immoral act in their personal life can still behave ethically and fulfill their duties in their public and professional life.

White evangelical Protestants were the least forgiving. Sixty-one percent said such a politician could not “behave ethically,” twice the 30 percent who felt that such a politician could manage it.

Every other religious group was less judgmental. Catholics, 49 no, 42, yes; white mainline Protestants: 44 percent no, 38 percent yes; the religiously unaffiliated, 26 no, 63 yes.

Are the moral convictions of white evangelical Protestants writ in stone? Apparently not.

Five years later, in October, 2016, P.R.R.I. asked the same question. The percentage of white evangelical Protestants who said that a politician who commits an immoral act in their personal life could still behave ethically shot up from 30 to 72 percent. The percentage saying such a politician could not serve ethically plunged from 63 to 20 percent.

“In a head-spinning reversal,” Robert P. Jones, the C.E.O. of P.R.R.I., wrote in the July 2017 issue of The Atlantic,

white evangelicals went from being the least likely to the most likely group to agree that a candidate’s personal immorality has no bearing on his performance in public office.

What happened in the interim? The answer is obvious: the advent of Donald Trump.
 
Griffin, Halpin and Teixeira argue that

Democrats allowed themselves to become the party of the status quo — a status quo perceived to be elitist, exclusionary, and disconnected from the entire range of working-class concerns, but particularly from those voters in white working-class areas.

In the 2016 campaign, they continue,

rightly or wrongly, Hillary Clinton’s campaign exemplified a professional-class status quo that failed to rally enough working-class voters of color and failed to blunt the drift of white working-class voters to Republicans.
Opinion | The Democratic Party Is in Worse Shape Than You Thought

EVEN NYT AGREES DEM PARTY HAS LOST IT
 

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