Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders caused a political earthquake in the past 12 months, but Washington insiders aren’t feeling at all rattled, because they have Hillary Clinton there to preserve the status quo.
That’s the big picture painted by the Washington Examiner/Echelon Influential Insights poll of 400 Washington insiders. For the Examiner, Echelon Insights surveyed voters who live in and around the capital, all of whom follow the news daily and are employed.
“In response to the popularity of outsider candidates in this election,” our pollsters asked, “do you expect that policymakers in Washington will significantly change their approach to issues, or will things probably not really change much?”
An overwhelming majority, 62 percent, said things “probably will not change,” while only 32 percent said policymakers “will significantly change their approach.”
That 62 percent was, coincidentally, the same exact portion of D.C. insiders that supported Hillary Clinton for president.
Along similar lines, the very successful campaigns of outsiders Sanders and Trump made only 29 percent of D.C. insiders “feel more out of touch with the rest of the country.”
It was mostly liberals, who are overwhelmingly supporting Clinton, mostly with great enthusiasm according to the poll, who predicted little to no change, cross-tabulations showed.
The simplest explanation of these numbers is this: Most of the people who are closest to power in Washington think policymakers are just fine with the way things are. They see Clinton as representing the status quo, and they expect her to win and preserve that status quo.
This contrasts with the tumult caused by Trump’s upending the Republican Party, which holds the majority in Congress, and by Sanders’ eye-catching success.
Trump ran against Washington as an outsider’s outsider. A total political novice, he successfully cast even Ted Cruz, the devil of the Washington political class, as “too establishment.” Trump trounced a Republican field of 17 candidates (including nine governors and five senators) while breaking countless political and policy taboos.
He called for building a 50-foot-tall border wall, banning all entrants to the U.S. from Muslim countries, slapping 35 percent tariffs on imports, torture, killing terrorists’ relatives and many other policy proposals far outside the Beltway mainstream. While media and political figures predicted each policy would sink him, they each seemed to lift him higher in the polls during the primary.
It was as a war against Washington lobbyists and politicians that Trump framed his campaign against mass immigration and free trade explicitly. In short, he took over the party that controls Congress by campaigning against Washington. And yet Washington still doesn’t expect that to change much, according to today’s poll.
The inside-the-Beltway expectation that “things probably not really change much” in policymaking also clashes with the promises of Bernie Sanders. Sanders called his campaign a “political revolution” that will “transform American society.” Sanders won 23 states, including New Hampshire and Michigan, and 12 million votes.
He promised at the convention to evolve his campaign apparatus into a force that would continue to push the Democratic Party to the left. Sanders forces already succeeded in shaping the most liberal platform in party history. Also, Sanders has pushed Hillary Clinton to endorse strict new campaign-finance rules and a $15 minimum wage, and to oppose the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal.
All that change? Washington insiders don’t believe it will happen, the numbers suggest.
If D.C. elites are correct, it means Sanders’ revolution was merely another failed primary contest, and Trump’s hostile takeover of the GOP was a mere spasm.
Timothy P. Carney, The Washington Examiner’s senior political columnist, can be contacted at [email protected]. His column appears Tuesday and Thursday nights on washingtonexaminer.com.
