New Poll Shows How Every Dem Running for President Is Out of Touch with Americans
Even for Democrats, this is embarrassing.
It’s hard to find an issue where the current crop of Democratic presidential contenders agrees with most Americans.
Open borders, free health care for illegal aliens and higher taxes are all anathema to most voters, but that doesn’t stop Democrats aiming for the Oval Office from backing them.
Now, a new Gallup poll has turned up an issue where Democratic candidates are so out of touch that even Democratic voters don’t agree with them.
The poll surveyed Americans on their feelings about statehood for the District of Columbia and found a whopping 64 percent opposed to it — while 100 percent of the Democrats running for president are in favor of it, according to Politico.
That’s a serious disconnect.
“People just don’t see the reason why D.C. should be a state,” Gallup senior editor Jeff Jones said, according to Politico. “They’re comfortable with the status quo.”
LOL @ all my very pro-DC statehood friends. https://t.co/3BaqcSBG2z
— Nick Solheim (@NickSSolheim) July 15, 2019
There’s a good chance that at least some of the people who don’t think D.C. should be a state know that the Founding Fathers didn’t want D.C. to be a state.
If Madison, Jefferson & Co. had wanted the nation’s capital to be in a state, they wouldn’t have bothered creating the District of Columbia specifically to house the federal government.
As commentator Inez Feltscher Stepman wrote in The Federalist in 2017:
“The Founders intended for the capital of the newly created United States to be a neutral ground for co-equal sovereign states to come together to transact the nation’s business. At the time, state governments were much more powerful than they are today, so a worry about placing the capital within a state was that the state might exercise unfair influence or pressure on the federal government. Today, with the expanded powers of the federal government vis-à-vis the states, the inappropriate influence has the potential to go both ways. Granting DC statehood would put the other 50 states (perhaps minus Virginia and Maryland) at a distinct disadvantage when looking to influence federal policy, grants, and regulation.”
And the Founding Fathers — as farsighted as any group of mortals ever born — could not have imagined the lunatic asylum that D.C. government would become in a short 230 years since they wrote the Constitution.
This is an area that elected a Marion Barry as mayor. Its residents watched him go to prison after an undercover drug arrest that would have humiliated a city with any self-respect. And, as The Washington Post reported, when he got out, he was elected to City Council, then elected mayor again.
The country doesn’t need more of that craziness and corruption on a grand scale — not when it already has Illinois.
And if anyone thinks D.C. has come a long way since Barry’s day, just remember, It’s one of the cities that that wants to give 16-year-olds the right to vote.
Beyond that local, particularly D.C. brand of insanity, granting D.C. statehood is a shorthand way of giving Democrats at least one more U.S. representative and two more senators such a state would be guaranteed under the Constitution.
Like most capital areas around the country (even in red states), Washington’s population is overwhelmingly Democratic. For conservatives to favor increasing Democratic power by granting D.C. statehood would be political insanity on a historic scale.
In one of those developments that gives hope for the future, the Gallup poll showed not even Democrats liked the idea.
“While support was slightly higher among women, nonwhite voters and self-identified Democrats, no group had even close to a majority of respondents in favor,” Politico reported.
But naturally, the Democratic Party leadership doesn’t give that a whole lot of consideration.
Besides the clown car of Democratic presidential contenders, a full 216 members of the House (all Democrats, of course) have co-sponsored a bill to grant statehood to the District, according to The Post.
Thankfully, the idea is dead in the Senate, with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, the Kentucky Republican, running the show.
“As long as I’m the majority leader of the Senate, none of that stuff is going anywhere,” McConnell said in June, according to Politico.
So, Democratic candidates for president this year are so far out of touch with their own voters that Mitch McConnell is closer.
Even for Democrats, that’s embarrassing.
Truth and Accuracy
We are committed to truth and accuracy in all of our journalism. Read our editorial standards.
