There’s a reason why President Trump is becoming more popular in important Midwestern battleground states like Pennsylvania: Voters don’t want to lose the ongoing economic renaissance that is transforming their lives.
According to a recent opinion survey from The Wall Street Journal, the president “cumulatively leads a generic Democratic opponent, 46 percent to 40 percent,” in Pennsylvania, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin.
The survey’s findings are not surprising, and it’s no small coincidence that those states are all thriving under the president’s pro-growth economic policies.
Indeed, Trump’s economic agenda has had a profound effect on Pennsylvania: The state’s 4.0 percent unemployment rate is now the lowest it’s been in nearly two decades, and the economy continues to add new jobs at a dizzying pace.
Significantly, Trump has been committed to reviving the coal mining industry across America, slashing regulations that put too many Pennsylvania miners out of work in the past.
Pennsylvania voters, however, also have another compelling reason to support Trump in 2020: The Democratic Party is moving further and further to the left, touting an even more radical brand of the socialist policies that strangled America’s prosperity under President Obama.
“The more we have presidential candidates or newly elected congresspeople talking about the Green New Deal, talking about ‘Medicare for all,’ talking about socialism, the more that plays into the Trump campaign’s hands,” said former Pennsylvania governor and national Democratic National Committee chairman Ed Rendell.
Rendell is right — but there’s no sign that the Democrats are willing to abandon their radical ideas and shift toward the political center.
Despite the fact that the Green New Deal is projected to cost taxpayers as much as $93 trillion, or $600,000 per household, many leading Democratic presidential candidates have embraced the proposal, arguing that the country needs more environmental regulations no matter what the cost.
California Sen. Kamala Harris, for instance, recently insisted that she supports the Green New Deal “because we need … a bold agenda to address the climate crisis,” while New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker compared the initiative to defeating Nazi Germany and putting a man on the moon.
Yet, while voters have had more than two years to see the positive effects of Trump’s agenda, including the elimination of more than 30,000 pages worth of job-killing regulations from the Federal Register, Democrats are now asking them to forsake those benefits in exchange for pie-in-the-sky promises based on long-discredited socialist policies.
The Democrats may promise to create a workers’ paradise by embracing so-called “democratic socialism,” but the unsustainable policies that their ideology demands would only push those workers into poverty and destroy crucial industries such as coal mining.
Pennsylvania is prospering under Trump, and the latest opinion polling shows that voters know a good thing when they see it. The Democrats certainly have their work cut out for them in 2020.
David Urban, an Aliquippa native, is a commentator for CNN. He worked as senior adviser for the 2016 Trump campaign in Pennsylvania.
