I concede NOTHING!

 In 2016 and 2020, surveys sponsored by CNN asked "Once every state has officially certified its vote for president, do you think that the loser of the presidential election has an obligation to accept the results and concede, or not?"  The results:

Oct 20 2016      77%     20%    2%

Aug 15 2020     87%     10%     4%

Oct 4 2020        86%        9%    5%

There were also a couple of surveys after the election asking if Donald Trump should concede--in early December, before the electoral college vote, 65% said that he should and 29% that he should not; a few days after the electoral college vote, 70% said he should and 26% that he should not. 

So despite the general increase in partisan polarization, there's still strong support for the principle that the loser should concede (and it may have been even stronger in 2020 than 2016).  It's not surprising that Donald Trump was unwilling to concede, but it's interesting that he didn't get much pressure from Republicans, even after the Electoral College vote.  Most leading Republicans didn't say much, and some, notably Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz, vocally supported Trump.   Hawley and Cruz both clearly want to be president, so on the face of it they would seem to have an interest in pushing Trump out--not by openly confronting him, but by talking about how the Republican Party needs to look to the future, bring in a new generation, etc.  But rather than doing that, they attached themselves to a project that was certain to fail.   Why?  I think there are two main factors.  One is that they guessed that after Trump left office he wouldn't get as much media attention, so that his support would fade.  By sticking with him now they'd help themselves with his supporters, leaving them well placed to start the 2024 campaign.  The other is the fascination that many Republicans have with being a "working-class party"--that is, keeping the kind of voters that Trump attracted and not worrying too much about the ones he repelled.  A Washington Post story with the headline "Republicans largely silent about consequences of deadly attack and Trump's role in inciting it" closed with this quotation:   "'If you can replicate his draw amongst rural, working-class voters without the insanity, you have a permanent governing majority,' said Josh Holmes, a top adviser to McConnell."  The reasoning may be that "the insanity" is what drove away middle-class voters, while something else was what appealed to "rural, working-class voters."  So if you keep that something else but drop the insanity, you can expand the coalition.  

 However, I don't think that's the whole story--it's striking that Republicans talk about being a "working-class party" rather than a "multi-class party."  Traditionally, conservatives have deprecated appeals to class interests, and held that their policies benefit all classes.  But now, they seem to regard getting working-class votes as better than getting middle-class votes.  One reason for this is the general growth of social egalitarianism that I've mentioned in several posts.  I'll discuss another possible reason in my next post.

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]