Last updated on March 5th, 2019 at 11:52 am
By a three-to-one margin most people who voted for Donald Trump believe he will still build a border wall and make Mexico pay for it, according to a new HuffPost/YouGov survey.
The poll was taken before this week’s government shutdown over wall funding, but it shows the high degree of confidence that Trump’s base of supporters still have in their chosen leader.
According to the poll, sixty-three percent of Americans who voted for Trump in the 2016 election think that he will fulfill his campaign promise to build the border wall with Mexico. Just 22 percent of 2016 Trump voters believe he probably will not get the wall built.
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And, showing that some people do read Trump’s lies on Twitter, four percent of Trump voters said that they believe the border wall with Mexico has ALREADY been built, which the president has claimed in several recent tweets.
According to the Huffington Post, the level of confidence that Trump voters have that he will keep his biggest campaign promise has been mostly stable over the past two years.
And of course, to most Trump voters, it is very important that the Mexican border wall be built. Of all the promises they most want to see their president fulfill, building the wall is tied with “draining the swamp†for first place. Thirty nine percent of poll respondents said those are the top two priorities they want Trump to accomplish during his presidency.
Trump knows that he can always fire up his base and generate more support by promising to build the wall. But what he doesn’t know is how his supporters will react once they figure out that the wall will never be built. And Democratic leaders have made one thing very clear: they will never provide funding for Trump’s beloved wall.
So, it may mean that Trump has over-promised, and ultimately will under-deliver on his most important promise. This could be bad for him politically.
The poll results suggest that as long as Trump continues to tweet about the wall, his strongest supporters will believe it remains a possibility, but if he gives up on it, they may do so also. In fact, the survey does discuss what might happen if Trump ultimately abandons his goal of building the wall.
In September of 2017, nearly half of Trump voters said that the repeal of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was their top priority, and over 80 percent of them still expected him to get the healthcare bill repealed.
But eventually Republicans abandoned the idea, once they figured out it would never happen, and would not be politically advantageous to keep trying. When this happened, most Trump voters went along and said it was no longer their top priority either.
In the new poll, just 47 percent expect the president to achieve a repeal of the ACA but another 15 percent now believe that he already has done so. (It’s not clear where they got that idea.)
But less than a third of Trump voters now say that repealing the ACA is very important.
This may mean that if Trump abandons his quest for the wall, then the Trump voters’ desire for the wall will also decline. Their interest in the border wall seems to be proportionate to the extent to which Trump promises them that it will still be built.
The poll also shows that most Trump voters don’t “expect†him to fulfill his campaign promises because they believe that he has ALREADY fulfilled his promises.
According to the survey, fifty-six percent of Trump voters now say he has lived up to most of what he promised. Another 36 percent say that he hasn’t done it yet, but they believe he will soon fulfill his promises.
The first group is composed primarily of voters who identify very strongly with the Republican Party. They also label themselves as “strongly conservative.â€
It is very clear that Trump voters still believe in him. Because of his ongoing need for their praise, he keeps promising that he will deliver on his promises that got him elected. This is what they want to hear, but in the long run, as they come to see that Trump will NOT deliver on his most important promises, it is very possible that they will abandon him. This is why he keeps up his losing fight for the wall, and why he blames everyone but himself for his failure to build it.
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I am a lifelong Democrat with a passion for social justice and progressive issues. I have degrees in writing, economics and law from the University of Iowa.
