The 5-Minute Fix: Why chaotic town halls may mean less than you think

Scott Jennings, a former aide to President George W. Bush who has also worked for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), made what I think is a valuable point about all of this:

Whether Tuesday's protesters in Anderson County, Ky., who told McConnell to “do your job” were actually “out-of-town malcontents" -- the same allegation Gibbs made in 2009 — is kind of beside the point. Even if these people lived in Anderson County, or anyplace in Kentucky, do their chants really represent the broader population in their county or their state? Just because a small group of people is making good TV, does that mean McConnell should really be concerned? And has there been an appreciable change in voter sentiments less than four months since the election?

Polling suggests we're in pretty much at the same position. Trump was elected as an unpopular candidate, and he's now an unpopular president. The opposition to him was extremely vocal during the campaign — calling him a racist, sexist, misogynist and Islamophobe — and it remains extremely vocal today.

But the comparison between today and 2009 is an instructive one. It's entirely possible that those protests more than seven years ago were being organized and weren't totally organic, as Gibbs alleged. But it's also clear that any such organizing was successful precisely because actual opposition to the Affordable Care Act was a strong motivator for people to turn out to the town halls. And opposition to Obama's health-care plan became such a rallying cry on the right that it spurred the Republican takeover of the House in 2010 and then helped them take the Senate in 2014. It was certainly more substantial than Gibbs professed to believe at the time; it amounted to the canary in the coal mine for Democrats in Congress.

That said, it's just so difficult to know where to draw the line between flashy protests at town halls and legitimate, game-changing shifts in the political zeitgeist. It's not that we shouldn't cover these protests and try to understand them. And it's not that these burgeoning town hall events couldn't become a sign of something bigger; they certainly could, and opposition to Trump has majority status in the United States. But we should always be aware that anecdotes can also be just that — anecdotes.