That is Kristen Soltis Anderson, pictured above. She is a pollster, speaker, commentator, and author of The Selfie Vote: Where Millennials Are Leading America (And How Republicans Can Keep Up). Amazon calls her "the GOP’s leading millennial pollster."
I haven't read Anderson's book, and my only contact with her, and with her thinking, comes from a "Guest Essay" she wrote for the Opinion section of The New York Times on March 18, 2025. Her opinion piece outlines why Anderson thinks that president Trump's poll numbers are sagging (which she says they are). Here is her analysis:
Mr. Trump seems to view his job differently than many voters, which is one reason for his falling poll numbers. He strongly believes that he was elected to return to Washington as a disrupter, this time with significantly more experience and effectiveness than in his first term. He sees himself as bringing strength back to the Oval Office after four years of a weak Joe Biden. In this, he believes he has the latitude to go big and bold, to create some turbulence and cause some prices to rise in the short term as he asserts himself in Washington and around the globe. All of this, Mr. Trump says, is in hopes of establishing a stronger American position over the long term.
But as I dug into Mr. Trump’s polling data, it looked increasingly that American voters’ mandate to the president was more narrow than he sees it. After a prolonged period of inflation, with a Biden administration that told Americans not to believe their lying wallets, voters clearly wanted the next president to stabilize the economy and make their cost of living more manageable (emphasis added).
Putting it a different way, Anderson asks this question:
Are Mr. Trump’s actions in step with what voters want from him, or is he going rogue on America, doing his own thing, polls be damned? Did people want him to remake the government and disrupt the global financial order, or did they just want cheaper groceries (emphasis added)?
Ms. Anderson is a Republican. She is being polite. Anyone who comes from the "Democratic" side of our partisan political divide has no doubt whatsoever that our current president is not only "going" rogue on America; he has already "gone" rogue.
Robert Hubbell, to pick an example of someone who comes from the political side opposite to the side occupied by Kristen Soltis Anderson, wrote in his March 18, 2025 blog posting that our greatest danger is to accept as a "fact" that our president's dictatorial ambitions have been fully realized, and that "democracy is over." I do have certain Facebook Friends who make claims like that. Hubbell says, and I agree, that it is important not to accept any claim that our president has successfully eliminated democratic self-government, or that he has successfully installed "fascism" - although it's pretty important, I think, to understand that this is exactly what our current president is attempting to do, and wants to do.
Here's Hubbell:
Why am I confident that Trump's defiance of the judiciary will not “finish our democracy?”
Because we have broken faith with the Constitution on numerous occasions in our past but always managed to return to our founding document, which serves as our north star and moral compass. We will do so again.
There is danger in telling people that “democracy is finished” if Trump successfully ignores a court order. If we make that claim often enough, people will believe us—even though it is not true, not by a long shot. American democracy will not end so long as we do not give up on the Constitution.
And we aren’t going to give up on the Constitution. I am not. You won’t. Your neighbors and friends won’t. Hundreds of millions of Americans are not going to quit. In the words of Alexei Navalny, “You are not allowed to give up” (emphasis added).
Our president has, in fact, "gone rogue" on our system of government. Unless we give up (and I do include our elected representatives in Congress in a listing of those who must not "give up"), we and our system of democratic self-government is not only going to survive, but to prevail.
Just in case there may be some reading this blog posting who have never read the 1950 Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech given by William Faulkner, which uses language quite similar to the language that I just used, let me provide a significant part of the text below. Faulkner outlines the kind of attitude towards danger and adversity that we must all seek to sustain.
Let's not capitulate or stipulate that Trump, and Musk, and all of Trump's other minions, have succeeded in wrenching away self-government from our hands.
That will never be true - unless and until we give up!
oooOOOooo
William Faulkner Banquet Speech
Ladies and gentlemen,
Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.
He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed – love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.
Until he relearns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking.
I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail (emphasis added).
Foundation of Freedom
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