A substantial share of the American electorate remains willing to cast a ballot for Donald Trump. Photo / Maansi Srivastava, The New York Times
OPINION
Over the past nine years, Donald Trump has been described as mendacious, authoritarian, ignorant, incompetent, egotistic and racist — as someone who demonises minorities and fans ethnic hostility. These assessments are a major reason roughly half of American voters, according to polls, say they will not vote for him.
But even as Trump has steadily escalated his defiance of behavioural norms, a substantial share of the American electorate remains willing to cast a ballot for him. Approximately half of the electorate views Trump as a legitimate 2024 presidential contender, repeatedly demonstrating in surveys that they plan to vote for him in a matchup with President Biden.
In other words, these voters have normalised perhaps the least normal president in American history.
Followers granting political legitimacy to Trump go well beyond his hard-core MAGA supporters. His adherents at present include half of all whites, 18 per cent of Black voters, 31 per cent of Hispanics and pluralities of independent (40 per cent) and suburban (44 per cent) voters, according to an Economist/YouGov survey of 1,660 US adults conducted January 14-16.
Results from the Iowa caucuses last week and Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary reaffirm Trump’s strong backing among Republican voters. It’s the first time in 40 years that the same Republican candidate won both states, when Ronald Reagan ran virtually unopposed. Polling on a Trump vs. Biden rematch in the fall demonstrates that — at least so far — Trump’s extremist behavior has failed to destroy his chances in November.
Racial issues and those involving immigration are crucial to Trump’s continued level of support. “While many of the positions that Trump is taking (and the rhetoric that he is using) on these issues may appear extreme to objective observers,” Zoltan Hajnal, a political scientist at the University of California-San Diego, wrote by email, “public opinion data suggest that much of America believes in much of what Trump is selling on race and immigration.”
Many whites, Hajnal continued,
hold deeply negative stereotypes about people of color and we know that many feel deeply threatened by a “changing America.” Ultimately, Americans who are anxious about racial change are likely to be attracted rather than concerned about Trump’s authoritarian threat. Deep down, they may believe that Trump and the Republican Party will protect them.
If Trump wins in November, Hajnal argued,
It will be because he is able to assemble a slightly more diverse coalition that is mostly comprised of MAGA supporters but that also includes some never Trumpers who see no clear alternative, a number of fiscal and social conservatives who like specific aspects of the Republican agenda, and others who pay relatively little attention to politics and may not know or fully support the MAGA movement.
“Race and immigration,” Hajnal added, “are core issues that are not only undermining Biden’s candidacy but are also threatening the success of the Democratic Party.”
It would be difficult to overestimate the role of racial animosity in the evolution of the two parties since the mid-1960s, a development that most recently found expression in Trump’s domination of the Republican Party.
In their April 2022 paper, The Origins and Consequences of Racialized Schemas About US Parties, Kirill Zhirkov and Nicholas A. Valentino, political scientists at the University of Virginia and the University of Michigan, wrote that “Overall, our results show that American parties are increasingly seen as distinct racial and ethnic camps rather than institutions for delivering unique policy bundles, and this has major implications for understanding current political processes in the United States.”
This perception is based on real demographic change, the two authors pointed out:
First, the partisan realignment caused by the civil rights movement led African Americans to become one of the most reliable segments of the Democratic Party’s coalition, and simultaneously pushed formerly Democratic, racially conservative whites to the Republican Party. Second, the growing Latino population in the 1980s and 1990s caused a defection of non-Hispanic whites out of the Democratic Party. Third, ethnic and racial minority groups in the United States tend to be lower in socioeconomic status and therefore more attractive targets for the Democratic Party even beyond the appeal of racial identity. As a result, the Democratic Party coalition has become increasingly racially diverse, whereas the Republican Party has remained almost entirely white.
At the same time, Zhirkov and Valentino reported that over the past half-century, race has become increasing infused into the political psychology of the electorate:
In 1980, moving from lowest to highest on the white feeling thermometer resulted in a 10-degree increase in warmth toward the Democrats. By 2016, the effect sign flips: the same shift in 2016 led to a 10-degree decrease in the Democratic thermometer. For the Republican Party, in 1980 a move from low to high on the white feeling thermometer resulted in a 15-degree increase in warmth. By the end of the analyzed period, the effect almost doubles: same shift on the white thermometer led to a 28-degree increase in warmth for the Republicans.
The corresponding effects of the Black “feeling thermometer,” they wrote,
show the opposite pattern. Warm feelings toward African Americans were positively and significantly linked to feelings toward Democrats in 1980, and this effect slightly increased by 2016. The magnitude of the change over time is even larger for the relationship between feelings toward African Americans and the Republican Party: from almost zero effect in 1980 to significantly negative in 2016.
In addition, they find “a non-trivial share of American electorate currently views the Democratic Party as nonwhite and the Republican Party as white, though in reality whites continue to be a majority of both parties.”
We have long understood that Republican and Democratic partisans increasingly live in alternate universes, with less and less in common. This separation of Democrats has, in turn, facilitated Trump’s efforts to turn the Republican Party into a truth-denying sect.
In this context, I asked Gary Jacobson, a political scientist at the University of California-San Diego, whether a majority of the electorate had “normalised” Trump and whether enough voters have granted him political legitimacy to make him a fully competitive presidential candidate.
Jacobson’s emailed reply:
Clearly yes. He’s running neck and neck with Biden in the horse race polls and has very strong support among about two-thirds of ordinary Republicans. His “normalisation” is reflected as well as a consequence of the majority of Republican politicians who endorse him despite all; examples are nearly all his rivals for the nomination and pols like McConnell who may despise him but nonetheless say they will vote for him if he is nominated.
Jacobson cited the divisive power of the issue of immigration:
It splits the Democrats and the border mess feeds into the narrative that Biden is not up to the job. Crime, too, to a lesser extent, though that may be fading. As issues they don’t outweigh abortion and maintaining democracy among Democrats and moderate independents, but Trump-leaning Republicans and independents simply don’t see Trump as a threat to democracy.
There are a variety of factors holding together the disparate factions in the Republican coalition.
Many Republicans who reject some of Trump’s policies still view him as an acceptable presidential candidate and will pull the Trump lever on Election Day, according to Marc Hetherington, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina.
“A staggering percentage of Republicans,” Hetherington wrote in an email responding to my inquiries, “will support Trump even when they disagree with him on the most central of issues.” In the case of Covid mitigation, “huge swaths of Republicans disagreed with him on how he was handling an issue that killed over 200,000 people by the time of the 2020 election,” Hetherington wrote. “Republicans did not follow him on policy in lock step, but they did vote for him in lock step.”
In fact, Hetherington continued, “Trump in 2020 lost the same percentage of Republicans as Ronald Reagan did in 1984 — 6 per cent. Our analysis suggests that Republicans so deeply dislike the Democratic Party now that they’ll still support candidates with whom they deeply disagree on even the most important political matters.”
Which then raises the following questions:
Has Trump created a broad and enduring Republican coalition out of MAGA supporters, added backing from Republicans hostile to Democrats, a scattering of minority voters as well as white independents and Democrats who reject liberal social justice policies?
Thomas J. Rudolph, a political scientist at the University of Illinois, cast doubt on the viability of a post-Trump Republican Party based on this alliance, writing by email:
Even if Trump is able to put together such a coalition and win the election, that does not necessarily mean that it will provide the basis of an enduring Republican coalition that will outlive Trump. As the Republican primaries have demonstrated thus far, few other Republican candidates appear able to command the support of the MAGA base as well as Trump.
Trump himself remains a viable candidate this year, Rudolph argued:
Trump enjoys the continued loyal support of his MAGA base. By even the most generous of estimates, though, the size of that base constitutes less than half of Republicans and less than one quarter of the electorate. To regain the White House, Trump will need to assemble a bigger coalition of supporters.
In today’s polarised electorate, such a coalition might include non-MAGA Republicans who dislike Democrats more than they dislike Trump. To build a winning coalition, however, Trump will also need to attract a larger share of Independents and minority voters than he did in 2020. Biden’s persistently low approval ratings have opened the door to that possibility.
I asked Rudolph whether it was possible that a majority of voters now believe Trump could, in effect, preserve a white majority and white hegemony in the United States, that he could quell crime and that he could revive racial hierarchies — that he could “make America great again”?
Rudolph replied:
Trump’s favourable standings in the polls should not necessarily be interpreted as a sign that a majority of voters now embrace his positions on race, crime or, for that matter, on any particular issue. Voting is a fairly blunt instrument for measuring voters’ issue preferences.
Voters must make a binary choice between them. From some, a vote for Trump may signal full-throated support for his agenda. For others, it may merely reflect frustration with the status quo and the incumbent administration.
Stanley Feldman, a political scientist at Stony Brook University, shared Rudolph’s doubts about the viability of a post-Trump Republican Party with MAGA voters at its core.
“This is not a stable coalition,” Feldman wrote by email:
A Republican Party that has trouble acknowledging that slavery was the leading cause of the Civil War and talks about deporting millions of undocumented Latinos is not going to be able to make substantial inroads among African American and Latino voters. There are not that many Whites who reject social justice policies and who are not already Republican identifiers. And, moving forward, young people are increasingly secular and comfortable with diversity. They are not going to identify with and vote for a party that also has to court evangelical voters.
“Look at the current state of the Republican Party,” Feldman continued:
They have a majority in the House and can’t pass any legislation. Republican primary voters in a number of states nominate MAGA candidates for statewide office who then lose the general election because they are too extreme. Trump is not building a durable, competitive Republican Party. If anything, he is making it more difficult for Republicans to win in a number of states.
Feldman does not, however, dispute the potential strength of Trump’s current presidential campaign:
It’s obvious that Trump has a core group of strong supporters, most of whom are nationalistic and xenophobic. They are frightened by social changes that have been altering American society for the past several decades: immigration, increasing diversity and the decline of the white, protestant majority, and changes in gender roles (gay and transgender rights, women’s rights, etc.).
These voters, in Feldman’s view, “want a strong leader who they think will stand up to progressive forces in society that they blame for undermining the white, patriarchal, morally conservative country they believe the United States was and should be. They are not turned off by Trump’s extreme, authoritarian rhetoric — they are attracted to it.”
Biden and the Democratic Party will continue to portray Trump as a threat to democracy, but, Feldman warned,
Voting to protect democracy isn’t as straightforward as it may seem. Democracy is an abstraction to many voters. Viktor Orban argues that Hungary is a democracy since there are still regular elections. Many Trump voters don’t think that he’s a threat to democracy. To many Republicans, bringing criminal charges against Trump at this point looks like the Biden administration is trying to subvert democracy by getting rid of a candidate who can win in November.
A staffer on the Biden campaign — who refused to be identified because he did not have authority to speak on the record — disputed the notion that voters have normalized Trump.
In an email, the staffer wrote:
No, I don’t think they have normalized Trump. I think once he becomes the true nominee, reality and PTSD will sink in. Voters have not come to grips that this is going to be a Trump vs. Biden rematch. We hear it in focus groups all the time.
We also hear that while they believe the economy was better under Trump, that his behaviour and the chaos he brings to people’s daily lives worries them to a very intense level and usually swings them to Biden. So I think the head-to-head poll numbers are noise right now. And I think when Trump is the nominee and if and when he is in a real trial on a daily basis, we will see his real vote ceiling which is below where it is now.
Ryan Enos, a political scientist at Harvard, shares this view. In response to my inquiry, Enos emailed me to say:
It’s certainly not the case that a majority of voters have normalized Trump. He remains a candidate favoured only by a slight majority of voters within a minority party. But, given the US electoral system, that makes him a legitimate candidate.
Even though many voters are willing to vote for Trump, Enos argued,
It doesn’t imply that they have accepted his vision of America — only that they prefer him to the other candidate and are willing to look past things about him that others find disqualifying. To many, Trump’s rhetoric and past actions make him unfit to hold office — and to be clear, he is a genuine threat to American democracy — but, unfortunately, not enough people see it that way, so he remains electorally viable.
Douglas Massey, a sociologist at Princeton, described the Trump phenomenon this way in an email:
Trumpism is a cult grounded in fictions that are amplified by his supporters’ selective consumption of content on the internet and the broadcast media, which is then intensified by social media. There appears to be no way to penetrate the ideological bubble that Trumpists inhabit, at least as long as Trump is alive and kicking.
In Massey’s view,
The attitudes and behaviours of Trump supporters and Republicans generally are out-of-step with those of most Americans. Trump lost in 2020 and the red wave failed to materialize in 2022. Access to abortion has proven to be a major motivator for Democratic and independent voters, and I think awareness of the very real threat to democracy posed by Trump is spreading.
In the eight presidential elections since 1992, Republicans have only won the popular vote once. The biggest threat to democracy stems from the fact that we have a constitution written by slaveholders who wanted to make it difficult if not impossible for slavery ever to be ended by constitutional means, so they gave tremendous powers to a minority of states and voters to block progressive change, which is why we have the Electoral College.
However this election year may surprise us, it will test, under heavy fire, the strength of the Trump coalition.
Jonathan Weiler, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina, put it this way by email:
The kind of scrutiny a presidential campaign brings is just beginning. So, in spite of the fact that Trump receives more attention than is typical of non-presidents, he still has not yet been under the microscope as a ‘presidential candidate’ to nearly the extent that he will in the coming months. And that will expose his liabilities — including what appear to be his growing cognitive challenges — to a much larger swath of the public.
For nearly a decade, Trump has avoided, time and again, the kind of public condemnation that destroys political careers. At the age of 77, he has lost a step. The next nine months will test what remains of his stamina, agility and cunning.
Thomas B. Edsall has been a contributor to The New York Times Opinion section since 2011. His column on strategic and demographic trends in American politics appears every Wednesday. He previously covered politics for The Washington Post.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Thomas B. Edsall
Photographs by: Maansi Srivastava
©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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