A recent NY Times/Siena College poll finds Donald Trump with a big lead among Republicans, with 54% vs. 17% for Ron DeSantis and a combined 13% for the next five. Does this mean that he has an unbreakable grip on the party, or just that people are familiar with Trump and not with the other candidates? Most people don't pay much attention to politics, especially when the next election is far off. So if someone thinks that things were pretty good when Trump was president and doesn't know much about the other possibilities, they may default to Trump. How many people like that are there? There's a historical example that sheds some light on this question. In 1980, Gerald Ford didn't actively run for the nomination, but he indicated that it was a possibility and it wasn't until March 15 that he said that he would not be a candidate . Just after the announcement, a Time/Yankelovich survey asked "If Gerald Ford were running for President, who would be your first choice for the (1980) Republican nomination?" (The previous question had asked about choice among the actual candidates--Reagan, Bush, John Anderson, and Philip Crane) 39% said Ford, 28% Reagan, and 14% Anderson. Since he had just said he wasn't a candidate, this may have exaggerated his potential support--some people may just have been expressing general positive feelings toward him. But earlier polls that included him on a list of possibilities put him in first or second. For example, a Gallup poll from November 1979 that listed a large number of possible candidates showed 35% for Reagan and 24% for Ford, followed by 15% for Howard Baker.
Ford had not been elected president or vice-president, he wasn't charismatic, and his presidency wasn't generally regarded as very successful. Moreover, Ronald Reagan was well known from his attempt to get the nomination in 1976 and he had a core of enthusiastic supporters, and the rest of the field included some prominent figures. So the fact that a substantial number of people still said that they were for Ford suggests that sheer familiarity is an important factor.
Of course, one of the things that people knew about Ford was that he had lost in 1976, and that undoubtedly hurt him. That raises the question of why the other candidates aren't emphasizing the point that Trump lost in 2020, and lost to a candidate with a lot of weaknesses. The obvious factor is fear of attracting negative attention from Trump, but I think that there are others as well. One is that Republicans have become infatuated with "fighters," people who won't give an inch. From this point of view, even saying that Joe Biden got more votes than Trump did is a concession to "the Left." A second, and related, one is a perception that even if Trump didn't get enough voters, he got the right kind of voters: his support was from "the people," not "the elites." Some of this perception is correct (he did well among non-college voters) and some of it isn't (exaggerated claims about his support among black and Latino voters), but it's a force.
At some point, I think that Trump's opponents will decide that he's not going to just fade away, and that the first step in stopping him is to emphasize that he lost in 2020. But I've been expecting this for a long time, and there's still no sign of it happening.
[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]
I guess my main thought about Trump and elections in general is that it seems that the candidates that are most talked about two years before the election never win. Trump is a great example - no one thought he had a chance to get the nomination much less win. Now he's everywhere claimed to be the top candidate for the Repugs but it seems unlikely to hold deep into election season. By that time he'll probably be running from a jail cell.
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