I’ve mentioned a few times that Donald Trump is giving Democrats a big, big opening by so conspicuously surrounding himself and seeking the counsel of almost all of the country’s super-billionaires. If you’re a bruised party looking to get a footing in a populist moment, having the billionaire (at least branded as such) head of the opposite party surround himself with the country’s top billionaires and basically say, “We’re Team Billinoaire” is a pretty good opening. And the American people seem to agree.
AP has a new poll out which asked whether people think it’s a good or bad thing that the President “relies on billionaires for advice about government policy.” When I first saw the results of this poll as “good” coming in at “+12” I thought they meant “net” 12% and I thought, “eeeesh, the honeymoon phase is more intense than I thought!” But no, 12%: as in, 12% of the public think it’s a good thing. 60% think it’s not. That’s U.S. adults. The only outliers are Republicans, 20% of whom think this is a good thing. But even that is pretty feeble. To put it simply, these are terrible numbers.
The most important thing to remember about polls is that the opinions captured in them are often less important than the salience of those numbers. Maybe Donald Trump likes linguini and 90% of Americans are against it. But who cares? No one’s going to make their vote on that basis. Salience is critical. On its own I’m not sure surrounding yourself with billionaire friends is a major voting issue. But it’s unlikely to stay on its own since we’re about to see huge shifts in fiscal policy which favor billionaires at the expense of everyone else. The biggest point is that Democrats need to make it salient. But these numbers show there’s very fertile ground for doing so.
One consistent challenge for Democrats over the years in populist fiscal policy is, who’s rich? The family making over $400,000 a year, $500,000, $1,000,000? A mix of the spiraling rates of wealth inequality combined with Trump’s own decisions have managed to make many of these questions quite dated. Elon Musk is currently worth $426 billion; Jeff Bezos $249 billion; Mark Zuckerberg $219 billion. If you go down the list of the two or three hundred top billionaires it’s hard to find more than a few associated with supporting Democrats and maybe half of those are the ex-wives of the guys at the top of the list. When you’re focused in on wealth at this scale, in political terms, the difference between a hundred thousand or a few hundred thousand dollars a year recedes into the background. And that is a helpful fact for a party many of whose core supporters are solidly in the middle and upper middle class if not higher.
A few other data points. 29% support “DOGE”; 39% oppose it. A fairly large 20% don’t know and 12% don’t have a clear opinion. Rather strikingly, when asked which things the government isn’t spending enough money on social security (67%) and education (65%) ranked highest, with assistance to the poor (62%) and Medicare (61%) just slightly behind. Notably, just slightly further behind are Medicaid (55%) and Border Security at (51%)
