News not fit to link

 A recent piece in the New York Times says "In 1960, about 4 percent of Americans said they would be displeased if their child married someone from the other party. By 2020, that had grown to nearly four in 10. Indeed, only about 4 percent of all marriages today are between a Republican and a Democrat."  That is, they included a link to the source of the second piece of information, but not the first and the third.  But my standards of what's fit to link are lower, so I'll try to provide them.

The first is from The Civic Culture, by Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba, but the third was new to me.  Ideally, you would have a survey that had separate interviews of both members of married couples, but there aren't many like that, so I looked for surveys that asked people about spouse's politics.  I couldn't find any that asked about their spouse's party identification or registration, but there was one from 2016 (just after the election) that asked people about how they and their spouse had voted.  There were also some earlier surveys that had parallel questions.  The results:

            Same     Different      Ratio  
1944   72%         4%                   18
1960   67%         5%                   13.4
1984   64%        6%                    10.7
2016   63%        4%                    15.8
[2016  68%       10%]                   6.8

Although I can't be sure, I'd guess that the 2016 survey was the source of the statement in the Times.  In any case, it makes it possible to compare things to the past.    In 1944, 1960, and 1984, almost all votes were for the Democratic or Republican candidate--the columns don't add to 100 because some people said that their spouse hadn't voted and others didn't know how they'd voted.  But in 2016, about 6% of the vote went to other candidates, and the figures in brackets include those votes.  If you don't count the 2016 "others," there's no clear pattern--the samples are only one or two thousand, so there's a good deal of sampling error.  If you count the "others," there was more intra-marriage disagreement in 2016 than in earlier elections.  But maybe at least some of those should be counted as intermediate (e. g., one for Trump, one a write-in) rather than disagreement?  I won't get into that--I'll just observe that the surveys don't provide evidence that married couples are more likely to vote the same way now as they were in the middle of the 20th century.  But what about the question about how you would feel if a child married someone from the other party, where there is evidence of change?  I'll consider that in a future post.  

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

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Indictments

 After the 2022 election, it looked like Donald Trump's support in the Republican Party was finally weakening. As Trump made a comeback in the middle of 2023, some people said that one reason for his resurgence was that Republicans were rallying around him because he had been indicted on various charges.  Now this seems to have become conventional wisdom:  a news story in the NY Times says "But far from diminishing the former president’s standing with Republicans, the charges actually rallied the party around him."

A few months ago, I looked for relevant data.  Lots of surveys asked if you had a favorable or unfavorable view of Trump, but I wanted ones that asked for degree of favorability--my idea was that the indictments wouldn't convert people from unfavorable to favorable, but they might make people who were already favorable more strongly committed.  Surveys that ask people for degree of favorability or unfavorability are less common, and I didn't find enough for an analysis.  After the New Hampshire primary, I tried again and found a source I hadn't known about before:  a company called Echelon Insights has monthly polls that include a question about views of Trump (very favorable, somewhat favorable, somewhat unfavorable, and very unfavorable) and breaks them down by party identification.  Very and somewhat favorable ratings of Trump among Republicans:

The first indictment came on March 30, after data collection for the March survey was complete.  There was a lasting increase in very favorable ratings and decline in somewhat favorable ratings starting in April.  Of course, in principle the pattern could be the result of something else that happened at around the same time, but I can't think of any other obvious candidate.  There was no lasting change after the second and third indictments, but it seems reasonable that the first one would have more impact.  

There also has been some polarization of ratings among independents, with both very favorable and very unfavorable ratings becoming more common, but this was a gradual change--there's no sign that the indictments had any special impact.  The latest figures among independents are 17% very favorable and 46% very unfavorable.   For Democrats, very unfavorable ratings have been steady at about 85 percent over the whole time period.  

You don't dislike me, you really don't dislike me

 A few days ago, David Brooks wrote that Donald Trump "has an advantage that Haley can't match.  He is reviled by the coastal professional classes. That’s a sacred bond with working-class and rural voters who feel similarly slighted and unseen."  Today, Damon Linker offered a similar analysis: "fundamental to Mr. Trump’s strength is populist anger at 'them' — the progressive-leaning elites who graduate from the country’s most selective universities, control the commanding heights of culture, run America’s leading public institutions and media outlets and sneer at him and his supporters, calling them racists, xenophobes, misogynists and fascists."  I could go on piling up citations--Bret Stephens wrote something similar a few days ago--but this is a blog post, not a research paper, so I'll get to the data.  In 2021, a Pew survey asked how people felt about various possible characteristics of political leaders, including "Has a degree from a prestigious university, such as Harvard or Stanford."  Overall, 7% said they liked that a lot, 14% that they liked it a little, 5.6% that they disliked it a little, and 5.8% that they disliked it a lot.  The majority (about 67%) said they neither liked nor disliked it.    What if we break it down by groups?  To make comparison easier, I show the percent who say they like it minus the percent who say they dislike it--e. g., among college graduates, 23% say like and 10% say disklike, for a net of +13.

College grad        +13
Some college         +8
No college             +8

Metropolitan       +12
Non-metro             -3

Educational differences are small, and there are more likes than dislikes in all groups; the metro/non-metro difference (coded by the survey organization, not a self-report) is bigger, and people outside of metropolitan areas are more likely to see an elite degree as a minus than as a plus. 

There are substantial partisan differences:

Democrats               +18
Republicans                 0
Neither                      +5

Turning to some other groups:

aged 18-29                    +15
         30-49                   +15
         50-64                   +4
         65+                      +3

White                            +7
Black                             +7
Hispanic                        +20
Asian                             +17

Men                                +8
Women                           +11

I was a bit surprised at the age differences:  my impression is that anti-elite rhetoric has been growing in recent years, so younger people would be more attuned to it.  (For example, Donald Trump seems to admire elite universities:  he frequently boasts that he's not just a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, but of the Wharton School, and a secondary part of his "birther" campaign was a demand that Obama release his academic records to prove that he deserved to be admitted to Columbia and Harvard Law School).  The Pew survey contains a question that has some bearing on this issue:  who was the best president of the last 40 years.

Reagan                +4
GHW Bush        +13
Clinton               +14
GW Bush              -0
Obama                +20
Trump                    -5
Biden                    +8

As the differences by party identification suggest, people who name one of the Democratic presidents as the best have more favorable views of degrees from elite universities, but the people who name Trump are more negative than those who name Reagan or one of the Bushes.

Some of the partisan division is undoubtedly created by the parties--Republican leaders denounce elite universities, so Republican voters follow them and Democratic voters react against them--but the substantial divisions by age, ethnicity, and metro status suggest that opinions have some independent basis.  However, education itself doesn't make much difference, and only 13% of people who didn't attend college see having a degree from an elite university as a negative.    

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

Can't quit you

 In my last post, I said that Donald Trump's strong position in the race for the Republican nomination is not the result of his personal hold on Republican voters, but of support (or at least lack of opposition) from Republican elites.  A Republican who doesn't pay much attention to politics is likely to recall that things went pretty well while Trump was in office (up until Covid, which wasn't his fault), and therefore will be inclined to give Trump another chance unless he's given a reason not to.  The obvious reasons are Trump's weak performance in general elections and his campaign to overthrow the 2020 results, but leading Republicans haven't emphasized either one.  

On the first point, here's a comparison of the 2012-2020 results:

                      Rep         Dem        Other
2012             47.2%      51%          1.8%
2016             45.9%      48%           6.1%
2020             46.8%      51.3%        1.9%

In 2012, Mitt Romney was running against an incumbent president who was a skilled politician.  In 2016, Trump was running against an opponent who was neither an incumbent nor a skilled politician.  In 2020, Trump was an incumbent himself, and in addition to the normal advantage of incumbency, there's a tendency to rally round the leader in times of national emergency.   Yet both times he fell short of Mitt Romney's share of the vote in 2012.  Usually after a candidate loses an election, people in his party start talking about why he lost, what the party needs to do differently, what kind of leaders it needs moving forward, etc.  That's never really happened with Trump.  

On his campaign to overturn the election, for a few weeks after January 6, it seemed like many Republican leaders were ready to turn against him.  But since then, the dominant tendency has been to downplay it by saying that even if the 2020 election wasn't "stolen," there was something wrong with it, or that the Democrats are engaged in "election interference" themselves.  For example, when Maine's Secretary of State ruled that Trump shouldn't appear on the primary ballot, Susan Collins denounced the decision on Twitter.  She didn't have to say anything--she could have waited until a reporter asked and then just said it was up to the courts.  Or she could have said while Trump's conduct might not qualify as insurrection, it was a serious matter, and that was why she had voted to impeach Trump and would not be voting for him in the primary.   Other Republicans went farther, saying that there is or will be a Democratic push to get Trump taken off the ballot.  

So why haven't Republican elites made the case against Trump?  I think that some of it is that they thought his support would fade away after he left office and didn't command as much media attention.  A second is that the appearance of disunity usually hurts a party with voters.  Right-wing Republicans have been willing to engage in intra-party fights in order to get what they want.   Rather than fighting back, moderate and mainstream Republicans have tried to placate them in order to maintain as much party unity as they can.  This is partly because of electoral considerations--moderate and mainstream Republicans are more likely to be from swing states or districts where they have to get some support from Democrats and independents.   I think it may also because their long period of being in the minority in Congress gave Republicans a tradition of being concerned with sticking together.  So someone like Collins, who is clearly not a fan of Trump, gives a generic Republican response rather than taking the opportunity to try to weaken him.

I am their leader, I must follow them

Three years after the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021, surveys find a large number of people continue to believe that Donald Trump didn't do anything wrong.  Many observers say that this reflects the strong hold he has on his followers, or the power of social media and Fox News, or even a change in our relation to reality.  Of course, you can't definitively prove or disprove any interpretation, but there is a historical example that sheds some light on the issue.  

 In April 1973, the Gallup Poll asked people which of these two statements came closer to their views on Watergate:  "It is a very serious matter because it reveals corruption in the Nixon administration," or "It's just politics--the kind of thing that both parties engage in."  The question was repeated a number of times up until late June 1974 (a couple of months before Nixon resigned).  

There was a substantial movement towards seeing it as very serious between April and June 1973, but not much change after that time.  

Gallup asked the question again in 1982, 1992, 2002, and 2014, with slight changes in wording ("is" to "was" and an introduction mentioning how long ago it happened).  The results (including the June 1974 survey for reference):

Again, not much change--between 42 and 46 percent said it was "just politics".  

Nixon resigned after several leading Congressional Republicans told him that his support had collapsed and he was almost certain to be impeached and removed from office.  Virtually all of the mainstream media agreed that it was time for Nixon to go, and there was no Fox News or conservative social media where holdouts could voice their opinion.  That is, political and media elites united behind the position that Watergate was a very serious matter, and as later generations came along that presumably was what they were taught in school, but almost half the public continued to say that it was "just politics."  

So the important difference between the two cases doesn't involve the public, but elites. Of course, Nixon was ineligible to run for President,  but no one said he should remain a major voice in the party and no one sought his endorsement when running for office.  In contrast, Trump has had a lot of support from Republican officeholders--according to Ballotpedia, he has 162 "noteworthy" endorsements, compared to 17 for DeSantis, 5 for Haley, and 1 for Ramaswamy (Doug Burgum and Tim Scott got a few before dropping out).  That's considerably more lopsided than the distribution of support among likely Republican primary voters.  

That leads to the question of why he continues to get so much support among Republican elites.  I've had a few posts that touch on the issue (especially this one), but will try a more systematic one in the near future.  

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

Party images

 A few weeks ago, Thomas Edsall mentioned a survey question on which party was better at looking out for the middle class.  The Democrats led, but only by 36% to 34%, which was the smallest in the 30-year history of the question.  I followed the links and found that the question was part of a group: which party was better at dealing with crime, immigration, education, health care, abortion, looking out for the middle class, and dealing with the economy.  Not all questions were asked in all surveys, and there were substantial gaps for some of them, but they still provide information on how party images have or haven't changed.  I show percent saying Republicans minus percent saying Democrats--that is, positive numbers mean the Republicans have an advantage on the issue.  The color of the points indicates the party of the administration.

Republicans consistently had an advantage on dealing with crime, but it's been larger under Biden than it was in the 1990s or the one time it was asked during the Trump administration (October 2020).

Neither party has a consistent advantage.  The Democrats generally had an advantage during the Bush, and Trump administrations, but the Republicans have had a big advantage under Biden.  Things were up and down under Obama--overall the parties were close.  Thus, it seems that people react against the party in power, but the reaction has been especially strong under Biden.  

Unfortunately, there is a long gap (1996-2011) on this question.  But there is an interesting pattern beginning in 2011--the Republicans made steady gains under Obama and Trump.  

On dealing with the economy, there's a similar pattern of steady Republican gains in recent years.  There are also signs of the reaction against the incumbent party that was seen for immigration.

 

The Democrats consistently have an advantage on education, although there's a good deal of fluctuation in the size.  Under Biden, the lead has been small by historical standards.  

The Democrats have consistently had an advantage on abortion, although the Republicans seemed to be closing the gap in the 1990s and early 2000s.  Since the Dobbs decision, the Democratic lead has increased.  

On health care, the Democrats have consistently had an advantage.  It was smaller under Obama, but has grown under Trump and Biden.  There seems to have been a reaction against Democratic attempts at reform under Clinton and Obama, but as people have experienced the Obama reform they have returned to the Democrats.  

For me, the most surprising thing is that Republican gains on the economy and the middle class didn't start with Biden, but have been pretty steady since the early years of the Obama administration.  Since these are important to voters, this is bad news for the Democrats.  However, there is one case in which views about the middle class changed quickly---the Democratic advantage fell from 20 points to 9 between October 1993 and 1994, but then went back to 19 by December 1995.