Print Column: Making America Feel Great Again
President Donald Trump while delivering an address about tax reform in the Farm Bureau Building at the Indiana State Fairgrounds in Indianapolis, Sept. 27, 2017. Trump on Wednesday began a full-throttle push to slash taxes, proposing a politically challenging array of tax cuts for individuals and businesses that would constitute the most sweeping changes to the federal tax code in decades. (Tom Brenner/The New York Times)
MINOT, N.D. — Recently while interviewing Kelly Armstrong, a state Senator from Dickinson and a Republican candidate for North Dakota’s U.S. House seat, he told me that he doesn’t believe a “blue wave” is coming to North Dakota.
That’s a term some commentators have used to describe the likelihood of Democratic gains this election year. You might expect a Republican like Armstrong to be dismissive, given where his interests lay, but there’s data to support his conclusion.
In January of 2016, as the Barack Obama administration was winding down and Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton were gearing up for an epic election year showdown, the folks at CNN released polling data they commissioned showing that most Americans felt things were going badly in the country.
“Overall, 57% say things in the country today are going badly, while 42% say they’re going well,” the cable news network reported at the time.
Sure, this is just one poll from one source, but can anyone doubt that circa 2016 a general malaise had fallen over our country?
Into that malaise, Trump injected his “Make America Great Again” mantra.
