Why?, part 2

 In my last post, I wrote about the rise of Donald Trump.  In this post, I'll consider his return after being defeated in 2020.  This question hasn't gotten much attention, because people just assume that he has an unbreakable hold on the Republican "base."  I don't think this is true (see this post), but in a sense it doesn't matter, because Republican elites never tried to break it.  Although Trump did have opponents for the 2024 nomination, they rarely ventured to criticize him, until Nikki Haley in the waning days of her campaign,  

The third Republican debate (Nov 18, 2023) began with a question from the moderators:  "Speak to Republican voters who are supporting Donald Trump. why should you and not him be the Republican nominee to face Joe Biden a year from now?"  Ron DeSantis started by criticizing the Biden administration.  He then turned to Trump:  "He owes it to you to be on this stage and explain why he should get another chance. He should explain why he didn’t have Mexico pay for the border wall, he should explain why he racked up so much debt."  Nikki Haley also started by talking about the Biden administration, and then said "Everybody wants to talk about President Trump. Well, I can talk about President Trump. I can tell you that I think he was the right president at the right time. I don’t think he’s the right president now. I think that he put us $8 trillion in debt and our kids are never going to forgive us for that." Vivek Ramaswamy criticized the "Republican establishment" and the media, but didn't mention Trump.  Chris Christie spent most of his time talking about the general state of the world, but finally got to Trump:  "Anybody who’s going to be spending the next year and a half of their life focusing on keeping themselves out of jail and courtrooms cannot lead this party or this country, and it needs to be said plainly."  Tim Scott criticized the "radical left" but didn't mention Trump.  The final question of the debate was "I’ll ask you each to please use your closing statement to focus on any topic you didn’t have time to address and why you and not former President Trump would be the party’s best choice to tackle these important issues."  None of them mentioned Trump, although DeSantis did work up the courage to say "I’ll be a nominee that will be able to win the election."  That is, none of them made much of a case against Trump, and none of them (except DeSantis in a veiled way) raised the obvious issue:  that he had lost the 2020 election, and lost by a pretty large margin, to a weak candidate.  Or going back farther, that he had trailed another weak candidate by 3,000,000 votes in 2016.   There were other obvious lines of attack that they missed--he not just failed to get Mexico to pay for the border wall, he didn't build a border wall.  

I've also noted that Trump jumped out to a lead in endorsements as soon as he announced, and his lead grew as the race picked up.  So Republican officials put up very little opposition to his return.  Why?  One factor is that increased partisanship means increased focus on party unity:  being seen as divided is bad for a party, and breaking with the party, even to take a popular position, doesn't help an individual candidate as much as it once would have--Democrats may like you more than they did before, but they'll still vote for the Democrat.  So Republican officials hoped that Trump would just fade away once he was no longer the center of media attention.  A second factor is that American conservatism has an oppositional tradition.  In European countries, conservatism was aligned with the establishment--monarchy, aristocracy, established church--which didn't exist in the United States.*  American politics didn't really get aligned on a left-right basis until the 1930s, when the right was in opposition.  Also, a substantial part of conservative support came from Southern whites--the side that was defeated in the Civil War.**  So conservatives see themselves as insurgents rather than part of the establishment, and this sense has become stronger over the last few decades.    Republicans who were opposed to Trump didn't see it as their job to stop his return--it was the job of Democrats and "liberal elites."  For example, in October 2024, Bret Stephens had a column about how the Democrats were in danger of "falling short in a race against a staggeringly flawed, widely detested opponent."  If they did, the "main culprit" would be "the way in which leading liberal voices in government, academia and media practice politics today."  But that raises the question of why the Republicans nominated "a staggeringly flawed, widely detested candidate."  Stephens didn't address that question in his column, but I think he did in previous columns, and once again it was the fault of the liberals:  indictments and other attempts to discredit Trump drove Republican voters back into his arms.  In any case, some prominent conservatives made that argument and, as far as I know, none have offered an alternative explanation.  

*Seymour Martin Lipset made this point in his writings of the 1950s and 1960s.

**Conservatives didn't necessarily support white supremacy, but white supremacists appealed to conservative values of individual property rights and state and local government autonomy.  

Why?

One popular explanation of the rise and survival of Donald Trump is summarized by Senator Elissa Slotkin, who said that some of her constituents tell her "it’s like I’m a Stage 4 cancer patient. My life has been getting worse, from my grandfather to my father, from my father to me, and my kids are going to do worse than me, so I need experimental chemo. Trump is my experimental chemo."  That is, things were getting worse for a long time, under both Democrats and mainstream Republicans, so they got desperate and turned to someone that promised to be completely different.  My last two posts have been directed against this analysis:  most people don't think that their lives have been getting worse, or that they're worse off than their parents.  Then how would I explain the rise and survival of Trump?  

His initial success is mostly because of American political institutions.  First, it's possible for an outsider to become the leader of an existing party.  Members of Congress never had any special role in nominations, and state party leaders are weaker than they used to be.   You don't even have to appeal to the voters in general:  the Iowa caucuses and first few primaries have an outsize influence, so there's a good deal of unpredictability in who gets the nomination.  Second, the two party system is extremely strong, probably stronger than anywhere else in the world, and our system of electing the president helps to keep it that way.  Most nations which elect a president have a runoff if no one gets a majority in the first round.  The United States doesn't:  if no candidate gets a majority in the Electoral College, it goes to the House of Representatives.  That means that if a political party nominates a candidate who many members find unacceptable, it doesn't make sense for them to break away and nominate another candidate.  In 1912, the Republicans nominated William Howard Taft, but former President Theodore Roosevelt ran as an independent.  He ran ahead of Taft, so if we had a runoff it would have been Roosevelt against Woodrow Wilson, and Roosevelt might well have won (he got 27.4% and Taft got 23.2%, making a total of 50.6%).  But as it was, Wilson won with a large electoral college majority despite getting only 41.8% of the popular vote.  

In March 2016, after Trump had become the front-runner for the nomination, an Opinion Research/CNN poll asked Republicans how they would feel if Trump got the nomination.  21% said they would be "angry" and another 12% said "dissatisfied."  The survey also asked if "you would like to see another Republican run for President as a third-party candidate or not," about 35% of those who said they would be dissatisfied or angry said no.  They were asked a follow-up question about whether that was because they would be comfortable with Trump as the nominee or because it would lead to a Democratic win, and about 90% said that it was because it would lead to a Democratic win.  

So the choice comes down to supporting your party's nominee or helping the other party's nominee to get elected.  There were a few previous cases when many members of the party were unhappy with the nominee, most recently McGovern in 1972 and Goldwater in 1964.  In those cases, many party leaders declined to endorse or even openly opposed them.  But partisanship has become stronger, so fewer people are willing to do that today.  According to Wikipedia, 31 Republican Senators and 19 Republican governors endorsed Trump in 2016, against only 14 and 4 for Goldwater in 1964.  

So Trump won in 2016 because he got the Republican nomination, and then party loyalty and negative partisanship took over.  But why did he get the Republican nomination?  It's natural to think that an important event must have deep roots in social and economic conditions--that voters turned to an outsider because they were profoundly dissatisfied with something.  But that's not necessarily the case--there are always people people who are discontented and looking for something different, and the nature of our system of nominating a president means that they have a chance.  For example, it's not clear that Republicans were more dissatisfied in 1964 than they had been before.  There are also changes in general mood that don't seem to reflect social conditions: e. g. people seem to have been discontented in the early 1990s, without any obvious reason.  So I think that there was a significant risk of a Trump-like figure before Trump came along.  

Then there's the question of why Trump survived and came back from his defeat in 2020.  I'll address that in a future post (probably not the next one, but pretty soon).  

[Some data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

Now and then

 My last post looked at subjective income:  whether you think your income is above average, average, or below average.  The number of people who say that their incomes are average has declined, while the number who say their incomes are below average income has grown--but so has the number who say their incomes are above average.  So there's more dispersion, but no trend in the average rating (there are short-term changes reflecting economic conditions).  This doesn't fit one popular story about the rise and return of Trump:  that people felt like they were falling behind for a long period of time, so they lost faith in "elites" of both parties and turned to an outsider out of frustration.  But that's only one possible comparison:  you sometimes hear that people think that they are no better off, or even worse off, than their parents were.  

Last year (almost exactly one year ago), I wrote about a question that was asked a few times between 1951 and 2016:  "Comparing your present family circumstances with those when you were a child, would you say you are better off, or worse off, than your parents were then?"  In order to get a more complete picture of change, I identified questions that seemed similar--that asked people to compare themselves to their parents at the same age or their family when growing up.  The one that's been asked most frequently is in the GSS starting in 1996:  "Compared to your parents when they were the age you are now, Do you think your own standard of living now is much better, somewhat better, about the same, somewhat worse, or much worse than theirs was?"  Some of the questions had five response categories, some had three, and some just asked better or worse.  I dealt with this by considering the ratio of better to worse answers.  The results:

The ratio was always greater than one, meaning more "better off" than "worse off" answers.  The closest was in September 1980, when 44% said better off, 33% worse off, and 22% about the same.  It seems like opinions have been getting less favorable in the 21st century, but they are still more favorable than in the early 1980s or even the early 1990s (as I've noted before, people seemed to feel negative in the first half of the 1990s).  Specifically, the ratio in 2016 was almost exactly equal to the median of all surveys (there were two surveys:  Gallup found 72% better off and 20% worse off, GSS 59% and 17%, both giving a ratio of 3.6).  

So these data also don't suggest that the rise of Trump was a result of economic frustration.  There are some other interesting things in the figure, like the strongly favorable opinions in the 1980s--the economy was doing well, but no better than in the late 1990s, but the main thing is that people have not been particularly dissatisfied with their living standards in recent years.

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

Above and below

 Many people have observed that in the last 5 or 10 years, a gap has emerged between public ratings of economic conditions and standard measures like unemployment and inflation:  people say that the economy is bad even when the statistics look pretty good.  One view is that the gap is due to politics or the nature of media coverage; the other is that it's because the standard statistics miss something about people's experience of the economy.  In the New York Times, David French writes that he used to favor the first view, but has now shifted to the second.   He says that what the standard statistics miss is the development of complex pricing systems; rather than offering a standard product at a standard price, companies now offer different levels at different prices.  For example, airlines used to distinguish between first class, business class, and economy--now they make a lot of additional distinctions, charging for a little bit of extra legroom, boarding in the first group, and so on.  His idea is that now people are constantly being reminded that other people are getting premium service--they are discontented because they're more aware of what they are missing.  

This change seems likely to have had the most impact on the middle and upper-middle classes:  people who could afford something beyond the necessities, but not at the premium level.  You have to be able to afford to fly before you're aware of all the extras you can't afford.   Since 1972, the General Social Survey has asked "Compared with American families in general, would you say your family income is far below average, below average, average, above average, or far above average?"  If people have reacted in the way that French suggests, the percent who see themselves as "average" or "above average" will have declined in the last decade or so.

The percent who say their income is average:

That's been declining pretty steadily over the whole period.  Now, (somewhat) above and below average.  

They both go up and down with short-term economic conditions--for example, below average rose and above average fell from 2008 to 2010.  But they both have upward trends, and the percent rating themselves as "above average" reached its highest level ever in 2024.  

Finally, far above and far below average:

They both have clear upward trends.  

The basic pattern is that there's more dispersion, but no change in the mean.  In a general way, this matches real changes in the distribution of income:  inequality has increased since the 1970s.  Although the increase has slowed down or stopped in the last 15 years or so, it may take time for people to become aware of that.  In any case, average ratings of your relative economic position haven't declined in recent years.

Although French identifies a real change, it doesn't seem to have affected people's perceptions of their economic position.  I think that's because it can work in both directions--people may look up at the people who get something better, but they may also look at those who get something worse and congratulate themselves at being able to afford an upgrade.  There are also people who could afford an upgrade but pass it up and congratulate themselves at getting a bargain.  

So we're still left with the paradox:  people think their own economic situation is pretty good, but that "the economy" is in bad shape.  Of course, this is just one possible comparison:  looking at other people today.   Another comparison that people talk about is with previous generations:  for example, where your parents were at the same age.  I'll look at that in my next post.

Whose idea was that?

A lot of the commentary after Paul Ehrlich's death said that his ideas were popular among liberals and/or "elites."  For example, Nicholas Eberstadt writes:  "In retrospect, what may look most amazing about Ehrlich’s career is the company he managed to keep. Despite his harsh and jarring rhetoric, his strident ideology, and his proclivity for veering off toward pseudo-science, Ehrlich was embraced into the bosom of the American academy. .... But perhaps this shouldn’t surprise at all. Though polemical and extreme in so many of his formulations, Ehrlich’s pronouncements on the human condition were largely in consonance with the moral panic about the 'population explosion' that swept through the American Establishment during the Cold War era."* But the New York Times obituary mentioned a detail that suggests a different possibility--Ehrlich was a frequent guest on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show.  So maybe his ideas were popular among the sort of people who watched the Tonight Show:  that is, a broad range of people.  

In 1974, a Gallup Poll asked "SOME PEOPLE FEEL THAT THE WORLD WILL REACH THE POINT SOMEDAY WHERE, BECAUSE OF POPULATION AND ECONOMIC GROWTH, THERE WON'T BE ENOUGH WATER, LAND, FOOD, AND OTHER NATURAL RESOURCES FOR EVERYBODY. OTHER PEOPLE BELIEVE THAT THE WORLD CAN CONTINUE TO GROW WITHOUT RUNNING INTO SERIOUS SHORTAGES BECAUSE SOMEBODY WILL ALWAYS BE ABLE TO SOLVE THESE PROBLEMS. DO YOU, YOURSELF, FEEL THAT SOONER OR LATER WORLD POPULATION AND ECONOMIC GROWTH WILL HAVE TO BE REGULATED TO AVOID SERIOUS SHORTAGES, OR NOT?"  62% said yes and 30% said no.  It was asked again in 1976:   65% said yes and 27% said no.  

Using the 1976 survey, here are "yes" answers by self-rated ideology 

Very liberal                                54%                
Moderately liberal                     76%
Middle of the road                     74%

Moderately conservative            66%
Very conservative                       58%
Don't know                                 70%

Support seems to have been somewhat higher in the middle (and those who didn't choose a label) and lower in the extremes.  Why wasn't there a straightforward relationship?  I think it's because there were two offsetting factors:  on the one hand, environmentalism was associated with concern about overpopulation; on the other hand, the Malthusian position suggested that trying to help poor people would be futile or harmful, giving it an affinity with conservatism, 

Not college graduate                      67%

College graduate                            79%

College graduates were more likely to think that regulation would be necessary.  But if we restrict it to whites:

Not college graduate                      73%

College graduate                            80%

The difference by education is smaller (and not statistically significant).  The reason that restricting it to whites makes a difference is that blacks were much less likely to think that regulation would be necessary (divided about 50/50) and less likely to be college graduates.  I considered a few other group differences:  men and younger people were a bit more likely to agree, and there were no clear differences by religion.  I'm not sure why race was so important--I just tried it because it's a standard control variable.  But the general point is that it wasn't just the "Establishment": most people were concerned about the "population explosion," to the point of supporting a policy that would now be regarded as pretty extreme. That's not hard to understand:  world population was growing rapidly, and people often think in terms of a fixed stock of resources.  

*As a sociologist, I have to note that this is an example of the dumbing down of the term "moral panic" to  be just a way of dismissing something as not a real problem.  In the original sense, the "moral" part was important.  

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

Bad to worse?

In late 2022, I had a couple of posts about perceptions of moral conditions.  I concluded that assessments had become more negative in the 1960s, and after that there might have been some further decline.  It turns out that Adam Mastroianni and Daniel Gilbert were doing a similar study, which was published in Nature in 2023.  Their conclusions are completely different:

"A linear model indicated that the proportion of participants who reported moral decline was not significantly influenced by the year in which the survey was administered, b = 0.07, 95% confidence interval (CI) = [−0.11, 0.24], t(175) = 0.77, P = 0.45, adjusted R2 = −0.002, and the same model fit in a Bayesian framework indicated strong evidence of no effect (Bayes Factor of 0.04), which is to say that US Americans have been reporting moral decline at the same rate for as long as researchers have been asking them about it. (These and all tests we report are two-tailed)."

A problem with their model is that it omits a potentially important variable, or a lot of potentially important variables, depending on how you look at it--the specific question asked.*  Their sample of 177 cases includes over 70 distinct questions.  Some of these differences are small, but some are substantial.   For example, "Would you say that people are more willing, less willing, or about as willing to help their neighbors as they were twenty-five years ago?" and "In the last eight years, do you think crime has increased, decreased, or stayed about the same?" are clearly different questions, although they both involve the general topic of change in moral conditions.  So you should consider a model that includes dummy variables for the different questions in addition to the time trend.  The data set is not available to the public (the numbers are the property of the data archives), so I can't fit that model.  However, I can consider two questions that were asked frequently (data are available from the Roper Center).  One is "how satisfied are you with the direction that the country is going in at this time in terms of morals and ethics?...Very satisfied, somewhat satisfied, not very satisfied, not at all satisfied"; the other is "right now, do you think the state of moral values in this country as a whole is getting better or getting worse?"

  The figure shows positive minus negative responses to both questions over time.  For the first question, there is a clear downward trend (a t-ratio of about 10 if you regress the summary measure on time).  For the second, there's no clear trend, but the numbers are consistent with the hypothesis of a drop after 2004.  In addition to the trend, the responses for the first question show some short-term variation--e.g., opinions were more positive in October-December 2001 than in January-March 2001.  It's easy to think of an explanation for that.  

While I'm at it, here's the estimated assessment of moral conditions, adjusting for question, in the data set that I compiled.  It's not the same as the Mastroianni/Gilbert data, but there's some overlap--mine includes the "getting better or getting worse" question, but not "how satisfied are you with the direction."

*Another problem is the appeal to a "Bayesian framework" to claim that there is positive evidence of no change, but I've written about that at length here and here, so I'll leave that aside for now.

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

No problem

 Adrian Vermeule, a professor at Harvard Law School, writes that "the Supreme Court faces a serious problem in the court of public opinion . . . . If the Court, having invalidated the President’s tariffs, also invalidates the birthright citizenship order . .   the Court will have invalidated the President’s two main or signature issues, on which he has campaigned since 2016 and twice won the Presidency."  

In the past year, a number of surveys have asked about birthright citizenship.  The wording varies, so I'll summarize by giving percent in favor of keeping birthright citizenship and percent in favor of eliminating it:

                     Keep     Eliminate
Jan 2025       61%          30%
Jan 2025       56%          43%
Feb 2025       55%          31%
Feb 2025       56%          39%
April 2025     67%          31%
May 2025      54%          28%
June 2025      74%          23%
June 2025      64%          31%
Nov 2025      72%          28%
Dec 2025       70%         24%

Average          63%        31%

All ten surveys showed a majority in favor of keeping birthright citizenship.  The narrowest margin (56%-43%) was for a question that mentioned Trump's executive order: "As you may know, Donald Trump signed an executive order arguing that children born in the United States are only US citizens by birth if they have at least one parent who is a US citizen or a legal permanent resident. Several states and outside groups have sued the Trump administration, arguing that there is a longstanding constitutional guarantee that children born in the US are automatically US citizens by birth. All in all, do you approve or disapprove of Trump's executive order limiting citizenship?"   The widest margin (72%-28%) was for "The Supreme Court is expected to hear arguments asking whether the 14th Amendment’s provision that those 'born in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof,' are U.S. citizens was intended to only apply to newly freed slaves after the Civil War and should not apply to a non-citizen‘s child who is born in the United States today. How do you think the Supreme Court should rule?"  There were some questions that just asked for opinions without giving arguments on either side:  for example, in May 2025 "Do you support or oppose . . . ending birthright citizenship, which makes anyone born in the United States a citizen" got 28% support and 54% opposed.  Although the small number of surveys and variation in wording means that there's a lot of uncertainty, support for birthright citizenship may have increased over the year.  But clearly the Supreme Court will have more trouble in the "court of public opinion" if it supports Trump than if it opposes him on this issue.  

I found only three questions on the subject before 2025--one from late 2024, one from 2023, and one from 2015.  This is relevent to Vermeule's claim that it is "one of his signature issues, on which he has campaigned since 2016."  The general idea of "getting tough" on illegal immigration was certainly a central part of Trump's appeal, but ending birthright citizenship was not a major issue.  The Trump Social Media Archive shows only one mention of birthright citizenship during the 2016 campaign (charging that Ted Cruz had changed positions, but not giving Trump's own position) and none in 2020.  There were a few in 2024 reposting articles supporting Trump's position, but nothing in his own words.  That is, he didn't campaign on the issue--he (or Stephen Miller) just decided to elevate it after his election.   This is part of a general pattern in which the second Trump administration has been more extreme than the first.  After January 6, 2021, mainstream Republicans temporarily distanced themselves from him, and the people who stuck with Trump during his exile have had a lot of influence in his second term.

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]