1. My last post observed that in 1970, people with higher incomes were less likely to say that people who are successful get ahead because of luck, but that in 2016 no relationship was visible. How about education? In 1970, there was no relationship between education and opinions after you controlled for income. In 2016, there was:
Luck
Not HS grad 19%
HS only 16%
Some college 10%
College grad 14%
Grad educ 16%
That is, the middle levels of education were least likely to say that luck was what mattered. This supports my general point about people at the top becoming less likely to assert their superiority (also see this post).
2. In January, I tried to understand the persistence of Republican support for Donald Trump by comparing it to views of Watergate. Views on whether Watergate was a "very serious matter" or "just politics" shifted towards "a very serious matter" during the earlier part of the Watergate investigation, but then stabilized. They were pretty evenly divided in the summer of 1974 (not long before Nixon resigned) and in several later surveys that asked people to look back.
In that post, I said "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." I later found some questions from 1979 that were prefaced "there has been some talk of President Nixon getting back into active political life" and then asked what they thought about several possible ways. (I don't remember whether there actually was such talk or whether the people doing the survey just thought it was an interesting question). The percent saying it would be a good idea for him to:
Republicans Independents Democrats
Run for office 18% 14% 7%
Be appointed to high post 14% 10% 5%
Speak out on issues 55% 33% 27%
Take active role in party 31% 19% 14%
About 8 or 9 percent said they weren't sure--that was pretty constant across all the party/question combinations. So a substantial number of Republicans supported the idea of Nixon taking "an active role in the workings of the Republican party," and some even thought he should run for office.
After Trump's loss, Republican elites seemed to expect their voters to spontaneously turn against him, and then be surprised that he retained substantial popular support (or interpreted it as evidence that he had a unique personal appeal). This example shows that they shouldn't have been surprised: Nixon had significant support from Republican voters even after he had acknowledged wrongdoing, resigned, and kept a low profile for several years.
Why was elite behavior different in the two cases? The most apparent factor is that in the 1970s there was a stronger core of leadership that could speak for the majority of the party in Congress. But I think that there's also another: there's now a stronger sense of "team spirit" among both politicians and opinion leaders. That is, Republicans were reluctant to make common cause with Democrats. As a result, even those who aren't Trump supporters have promoted the idea that he's being unfairly treated, that Democrats have done similar things in the past or are trying to do them now--e. g. Ross Douthat's indignation about efforts to remove Trump from the ballot ("antidemocratic and incompetent at once, signifying ... a general elite fear of the voting public"). That makes it easier for ordinary Republicans to conclude that it's all "just politics."
[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]
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