Polling data tracking voters’ real-time reactions to President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address, showed Independents and Republicans were highly motivated when the president urged members of Congress to pass restrictions on congressional stock trading, but Democrats appeared less enthused.
This moment in Trump’s address was one of the few moments during the speech when Democrats inside the House chamber, including Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., offered standing applause.
“They stood up for that, I can’t believe it. I can’t believe it,” Trump quipped after calling for an end to congressional stock trading. “Think Nancy Pelosi would stand up if she was here? Doubt it. Pass the Stop Insider Trading Act without delay,” the president continued to a roaring applause. During one moment, a camera panned over to Warren, who could be seen standing and clapping.
FACT-CHECKERS CHALLENGE TRUMP’S ‘EIGHT WARS’ CLAIM, BACK HIM ON CRIME
The dial test administered by Lee Carter, the president of Maslansky & Partners, showed that after Trump said the Stop Insider Trading Act must be passed “without delay” that Democrats remained largely stagnant, but Republicans and Independents reacted far more positively.
As the crowd inside the House chamber Tuesday night continued to applaud following Trump’s remark that a law on congressional stock trading restrictions should be passed immediately, the Democrats’ dial returned to baseline. It had taken a turn downwards after Trump took a jab at Pelosi over the matter. She has long been the brunt of criticism over the success of her stock portfolio and the manner in which certain trades have lined up with matters in front of lawmakers.
The group of voters monitored during the president’s speech Tuesday night, included 29 Democrats, 41 Republicans and 30 Independents.
Warren and other Democrats could be seen giving a standing ovation to the president’s urgency around adding stricter restrictions to congressional stock trading. Warren was also reportedly seen standing after Trump insisted Iran cannot be allowed to obtain a nuclear weapon.
When asked to respond to Trump’s jab at her Tuesday night, Pelosi told Trump to “look at your own self.”
DEMOCRATS’ BIG MISFIRE AT STATE OF THE UNION HAS GOP STRATEGISTS SALIVATING: ‘HUGE MOMENT’
“The inference he wants to draw is there was something wrong with that, which there wasn’t, and if there was, people get prosecuted for it. For a long time now we’ve been trying to pass this law. It doesn’t have — now it has more support than it had before, and —” Pelosi said before being cut off by CNN’s Kasie Hunt, who pointed out Warren stood up to applaud Trump’s urging to pass the Stop Insider Trading Act.
“Well, we all did. I did too,” the former House speaker shot back. “He said, ‘Did Nancy stand up?’ Yeah, I did too. A lot of people stood up, a lot of Democrats stood up.”
The Stop Insider Trading Act would go beyond the current rules members of Congress must follow when trading on the stock market, ushered in by the 2012 STOCK Act. Since 2012, lawmakers have attempted to implement tighter federal restrictions to no avail.
While Trump’s urging to get the latest restrictions passed was one of the rare moments that Democrats appeared to applaud the president during his SOTU speech, left-wing nonprofit groups have simultaneously argued that the Stop Insider Trading Act does not actually go far enough to stop insider trading.
“Passing SITA would hide insider trading instead of stopping it, leading to the same concerns we see today,” said a statement earlier this month from Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW). “The only path forward that can rejuvenate the American people’s faith in Congress is serious reform though meaningful bipartisan cooperation.”
CREW points to a bill it believes would do a better job at reining in insider trading among lawmakers called the Restore Trust in Congress Act, which “effectively bans members of Congress from buying, selling and owning stocks and their equivalents and ends the conflicts of interest that have plagued Congress for far too long.”
“Abandoning viable, bipartisan legislation in favor of partisanship and ineffectual half measures would be a political and ethical failure that would further erode Americans’ trust in government,” CREW insisted.
