Democrats are warming to Arizona senator John McCain, according to a Pew poll released Wednesday, joining Republicans in sharing a favorable view of President Donald Trump’s leading GOP critic.
An almost equal share of Democrats and Republicans polled view McCain, described since Election Day as Trump’s Republican “nemesis” and “critic in chief,” favorably, at 57 percent and 59 percent, respectively.
For Democrats, that represents a 19-percentage point jump since September 2013, when 38 percent viewed the Arizona Republican favorably.
While Republicans have maintained a favorable view of McCain, 52 percent of GOPers also said that they would trust Trump over Republican leaders in Congress if the two disagreed.
McCain has let loose increasingly heated rhetoric over the president’s vows to improve relations with Russia and his denunciation of the press, among other issues. The Pew survey was conducted from February 7 to 12, just as McCain ramped up veiled criticism of Trump at home and overseas.
The Arizona Republican slammed Trump—
Referring to Russian president Vladimir Putin, McCain said, “There is no moral equivalence between that butcher and thug and KGB colonel and the United States of America, the country that Ronald Reagan used to call a shining city on a hill.”
“To allege some kind of moral equivalence between the two is either terribly misinformed or incredibly biased,” he said. “Neither can be accurate in any way.”
McCain reiterated that criticism overseas at the Munich Security Conference last week, speaking to fears that America is “laying down the mantle of global leadership.”
“I refuse to accept that our values are morally equivalent to those of our adversaries,” he said. “I am a proud, unapologetic believer in the West, and I believe we must always, always stand up for it—for if we do not, who will?”
