In a new Washington Post project, over seventy activists, politicians, and ordinary American citizens looked back over the four-year movement to oust Donald Trump. GQR Managing Partner Anna Greenberg spoke with the Post to reflect on a number of key moments during the Trump presidency.
On the historic January 21, 2017 Women’s March, which galvanized support for the resistance, particularly among women:
- “It started with a Facebook post and then was bottom-up, and it was happening all over the country. It wasn’t just happening in blue states, it wasn’t just happening in cities. It’s happening everywhere. And for me, the thing that I saw was the number of women who decided to run — and not just run in potentially competitive districts, but run everywhere [and] women, for the first time in my life working on campaigns, actually had an advantage in the primary.”
On the health-care battle to repeal the Affordable Care Act and Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) monumental “no” vote that sunk the GOP effort:
- “That was the moment when Obamacare, which had been sort of a problem for Democrats, became the issue in the 2018 election.”
On the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy on immigration, family separations and deplorable detention facility conditions, and the resulting outrage among American citizens:
- “People cared less about it than I thought they would. I mean, I had some pretty shocking moments in focus groups where people would say, “Well, they came here illegally. You do the crime, you do the time.” Or, “They should have known.” On the other hand, immigration ended up not being the issue that the Republicans wanted it to be. They’ve run immigration ads every cycle and … it just didn’t work for them in 2018.”
On the impassioned hearings to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court of the United States:
- “I was in the field doing polls at that time, and in every race I was working in, there was a jump in Republican enthusiasm and every poll got closer. … You saw more conservative voters kind of shift a little bit away from Democrats.”
Read the full Washington Post piece HERE.