It used to be pretty common for parties to re-nominate a candidate who had lost a previous presidential election, most recently Richard Nixon in 1968. But in recent decades the tendency has been to denounce any losing candidate as inept, dismiss him as a future contender, and sometimes to excise his/her legacy from the party. Trump is an exception to this (as to many other things)--he's being mentioned as a possible candidate in 2024, and even many opponents of Trump say that "Trumpism" will remain a force. Why? It's not because of his overall performance--he got only 46% of the vote in 2016 against an unpopular opponent, and lost by a significant margin in 2020 despite the advantages of incumbency. Rather. it seems to be because of the perceived composition of his votes--he had "a coalition that was more blue-collar and nonwhite" than those of previous Republican candidates. As I have said before, there seems to be widespread sense that getting support from racial minorities and working-class people is more worthy than getting support from whites or the middle and upper classes.
It's not clear that he actually did better than previous Republican candidates among non-white voters, or among blue-collar voters, but he did do well among whites without a college degree. Republicans have been gaining among this group for a long time, but support jumped in 2016 and stayed high in 2020. One popular view about why this happened was that he appealed to their economic interests with his positions on immigration and trade; another is that he diverted them from their economic interests by talking about threats to their status. A third possibility, which has received less attention, is that his general style or image was appealing to less educated people. I've discussed this a few times, but want to come back to it by considering a historical parallel.
In December 1953, the Gallup Poll had a survey which included several questions about Joe McCarthy--whether you approved of him, of his methods, whether you thought he should be the Republican nominee in 1956, whether you'd vote for him in a three-way race with Eisenhower, Stevenson, and McCarthy, and whether you thought he hurt or helped our relations with allies. I divided education into not a high school graduate (53% of the sample), high school graduate (37%), and college graduate (10%). On all of the questions, less educated people showed more support for McCarthy. For example, 51% of people without high school diplomas, 44% of those with high school, and 30% of those with college degrees said they approved of his methods. Of course, Republicans had more favorable attitudes, but at that time Republican support was higher among more educated people, so the relationship with education is stronger when you take account of partisanship. Here is percent approving of his methods by education and 1952 vote:
Eisenhower Stevenson Non-voter
No HS 74% 45% 71%
HS 71% 28% 56%
College 59% 26% 47%
The appealing feature of this comparison is that there's no reason to think that views of McCarthy were connected to economic interests, or that the status of working class people was threatened at the time. So the educational difference is likely to be a direct result of education, not a reflection of something else. The general point about the relationship between education and support for McCarthy was known at the time, but was generally seen in terms of "authoritarianism," which is a more complicated and controversial idea. The characteristic view of less educated people might better be called something like "impatient" rather than "authoritarian": someone could say that some of McCarthy's charges were excessive, but at least he was doing something about a problem, and not being held back by concerns about what people would think. That's similar to what Trump's defenders said.
Returning to the point, I doubt that a more conventional Republican--someone who did more or less what Trump did but didn't tweet about it--could maintain Trump's appeal to less educated voters. The idea that he didn't care about offending people was part of his appeal.
[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]
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