AFP, Washington :
US President Donald Trump warned evangelical leaders that if Republicans lose control of Congress in the midterm elections, Democrats will institute change “quickly and violently,” The New York Times has reported.
At a meeting with those leaders at the White House on Monday, Trump said everything was at stake for his conservative agenda if his party loses in November, according to an audiotape of the meeting obtained by the Times.
Democrats “will overturn everything that we’ve done and they’ll do it quickly and violently,” Trump said, according to the Times report published Tuesday night.
“They will end everything immediately.”
“When you look at Antifa,” he added, referring to militant leftist anti-fascism groups, “and you look at some of these groups, these are violent people.”
The Times said a White House spokesman, Hogan Gidley, declined to expand on what the president meant.
It was not the first time Trump has warned of violence if things did not go his way.
During the 2016 presidential campaign, he said his supporters would probably react violently if he did not win the Republican nomination.
“I think you’d have riots,” Trump warned.
The Times said reporters were allowed to listen in on brief comments by Trump during the Monday meeting with ministers and pastors, and heard him talk about abortion, religious freedom and youth unemployment.
But after the press was shown out of the room, Trump changed the subject and suggested how the evangelical leaders could help Republicans win in November, the Times reported.
“I just ask you to go out and make sure all of your people vote,” Trump said.
Meanwhile, women and well-off suburban Republicans will play decisive roles in countering Donald Trump’s loyalists in November’s midterm elections, according to Ipsos pollsters who are armed with new tools to face their first big test after the billionaire’s shock 2016 victory.
Trump’s capture of the White House took the entire polling industry by surprise, as election forecasters floundered by predicting a Hillary Clinton win.
In order to obtain a more comprehensive view of a complex electorate this year, Ipsos is using three sources of information: traditional polls, expert analysis from the University of Virginia and social media trends.
The new tool, available for free online, was unveiled Tuesday in Washington.
“It’s really come out of our experience with the 2016 elections… The market writ large got the elections wrong,” Cliff Young, president of Ipsos Public Affairs, said in an interview.
There has been extensive debate over why so many polling organizations missed the mark two years ago, but in Ipsos’s view it was because “the market, in general, depended on one single input and that was polls,” Young said.
“We overstated Hillary slightly” in crucial swing states and tended to “underestimate rural, white, under-educated individuals,” he added.
Larry Sabato, who heads the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, said “we got drunk on polls, all of us did.”
