The latest Republican presidential poll from Fox News, released over the weekend, may qualify as a watershed event.
It suggests that an insurrection is boiling over on the American right wing — against both the national political condition and the Republicans in office who are adjudged to be its accomplices or guilty by mere association.
For the first time in this Fox poll, candidates running from outside government and openly disdaining the condition of it won a cumulative outright majority. They swamped by 18 points the more standard and generally bland conservatives who are running on once-relevant resumes of service and accomplishment in government.
That’s the case even when, for these purposes, I include certain officeholders or former officeholders as establishment candidates though they probably aren’t.
I mean Mike Huckabee, Bobby Jindal, Rick Santorum and Rick Perry. Fortunately, they have such scant support that it hardly matters where you put them.
If all of that doesn’t tell you that the conservatives of this country are seriously peeved about the state of affairs and ready to turn this government on its head, then nothing would.
I’m thinking of the message I received the other day: “So are you still supporting the corrupt Obama-McConnell-Boehner government?”
That’s not even a thing — an Obama-McConnell-Boehner government.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker Boehner have opposed every initiative by President Barack Obama — by personally affirmed malice aforethought, at least on McConnell’s part.
Never mind corruption, which I don’t see except to the extent that blind partisan resistance of the McConnell-Boehner variety qualifies as corruption, which, actually, it very well may, now that I think about it.
So let’s get to the numbers in that Fox poll.
Trump leads with 25 percent. He does so by saying everyone in Washington is stupid and that he’d straighten things out in the same way he made all those business deals, four of which went into bankruptcy.
Dr. Ben Carson is second at 12 percent. He has no experience in political office. His background is in brain surgery. He says he’s the only candidate who ever removed half a brain but that it looks to him like someone has been removing half of a lot of them in Washington. Apparently, some GOP voters are thinking the presidency isn’t brain surgery.
U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz is next at 10 percent, and, while he holds office, he does so with open contempt for his colleagues. He is so strident about being a no-compromise conservative that he once angered even the mild-mannered John Boozman. He did it in a Senate GOP caucus by questioning the genuine voter-responsive conservatism of senators not as committed as he to no-compromise extremism.
Carly Fiorina, who runs from the business world from which she got fired, is at 5 percent.
U.S. Sen. Rand Paul, like Cruz a member of the Senate but disdainful of it — and a Tea Party libertarian — is at 3 percent.
Add Trump’s 25, Carson’s 12, Cruz’s 10, Fiorina’s 5 and Paul’s 3. That’s 55 percent, a solid majority.
The establishment candidates — generously extended to include the least outsider-ish of the outsiders — are, by comparison, anemic and pitiable.
Add these: Jeb Bush is at 9 percent, Scott Walker 6, Mike Huckabee 6, Marco Rubio 5, John Kasich 5, Chris Christie 3, Rick Santorum 1, Bobby Jindal 1 and Rick Perry 1.
It comes to 37.
So the outsiders possessed of no government experience and expressly contemptuous thereof have opened an 18-point lead on conventionality in the Republican presidential primary.
That’s significant. Here’s the kind of thing it portends: If Republicans ever again find themselves shutting down the government, they’ll likely shut it down longer and not give an inch no matter the outcry.
The irony is that the strident, uncompromising outsiders would make an even bigger mess of the mess of a government they disdain.
Meantime, on the Democratic side, Bernie Sanders has closed to 49-30 in the Fox poll against Hillary Clinton. That represents an agitated rising-up by true liberals tired of being finessed by their own presidents — Bill Clinton and Obama — and bashed by the Republicans.
They wanted Elizabeth Warren, and they’ve transferred that fervor to Bernie for a while.
Hillary Clinton is both without personal scintillation and a victim of systematic Republican assault.
But she remains a seeming lock, albeit an ever-loosening one.
John Brummett’s column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected]. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.