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Pod Save MAGA?

New proprietary polling from Echelon Insights, in partnership with Puck, shows that Donald Trump is entering office with goodwill from voters. It also illustrates that Democrats don’t simply have a political and coalition problem. They have a pretty severe media handicap, too.

Democrats and progressive pundits have been circulating charts, polling, and data showing that voters who closely follow the news were more likely to vote for Harris, while voters who don’t were more likely to vote for Trump.
Democrats and progressive pundits have been circulating charts, polling, and data showing that voters who closely follow the news were more likely to vote for Harris, while voters who don’t were more likely to vote for Trump. Photo: Allison Robbert-Pool/Getty Images
Peter Hamby
November 19, 2024

Donald Trump is rolling out the most unequivocally controversial battery of political appointees in American history. It’s hard to quibble with the credentials of some of Trump’s nominations, like Marco Rubio for secretary of state, or Doug Burgum for interior secretary, both pretty standard-issue Republican picks despite their years of Trump genuflection. But appointments of a Fox News host who settled a sexual assault allegation (Pete Hegseth for secretary of defense), a Botox-loving Florida man who was investigated for allegedly having sex with a teenager (Matt Gaetz for attorney general), and a centibillionaire grappling with a bleak and uncontrollable addiction to memes (Elon Musk for DOGE, the newly invented Department of Government Efficiency that probably won’t exist in a few months once Trump gets sick of him) don’t quite pass the smell test. And we can’t look past Kremlin favorite Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence and vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for H.H.S. secretary.