Why not?

 In January, I had a post about why Trump was renominated in 2024.  I argued that it wasn't because he of strong support among ordinary Republicans, but because of support from Republican elites.  Andrew Gelman recently discussed my post in his blog, which led me to some further thoughts.  My post concluded by saying "'the base' didn't impose Trump on Republican elites; Republican elites asked for him."  In retrospect, saying that they "asked for him" was going too far--it would be more accurate to say that they didn't put up much opposition even though Trump had shown that he was a drag on the party.  He underperformed in both 2016 and 2020, and he hurt Republican chances in Congress by promoting weak candidates like Herschel Walker and Dr. Oz.  So even if they liked some of Trump's policies, they had a good reason to turn to a new candidate in 2024.  

Why didn't Trump encounter significant resistance from Republican elites?  One possibility is that they they realized had so much support from ordinary Republican voters that resistance would be futile (and would expose them to retaliation).  In my earlier post, I looked at questions about whether people would like Trump to run for the 2024 nomination and compared them to earlier questions on whether they wanted Gore, Kerry, and Romney to run for re-nomination after their defeats.  Those questions are usually asked in the first couple of years after the election; once it gets closer to the next election, you get questions about who people would choose out of the declared or potential candidates.  The figure shows the percentages of Republicans favoring Trump and DeSantis in surveys between July 2022 and August 2023.

Trump was ahead in the first few surveys, but his support declined and DeSantis's rose until sometime in early 2023.  After that, Trump steadily gained, but he didn't consistently break 50% until late May 2023.  In the last few surveys, the average was 54% for Trump, 17% for DeSantis, and 29% for all others.

So there was a period when Trump seemed vulnerable and other candidates were starting their campaigns (Trump declared in November 2022, Haley in February 2023, and others in March-June 2023).   During this time, endorsements might have been helpful in getting opposition campaigns off the ground.  But only a few prominent Republicans offered them:  among Republican Senators and Governors, by the middle of May ten had endorsed Trump and no one had endorsed any of his opponents.  There were six for various opponents by the end of June, then one for Trump in July and one more in August.  After that Trump pulled ahead steadily.  That is, very few prominent Republicans endorsed other candidates when their endorsements might have made a difference.  To consider a few examples, Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski both endorsed Nikki Haley, but not until early March 2024, when it was too late to matter.  A few days ago, the New York Times had a story on a new memoir by Lamar Alexander (who left the Senate in January 2021) in which he "says President Trump committed an impeachable offense on Jan. 6."   But Ballotpedia doesn't record an endorsement from Alexander in the 2024 campaign.  Mitch Daniels didn't offer one either.  

 Why did prominent Republicans who didn't support Trump and had no particular reason to fear him stay on the sidelines?  As I've mentioned before, the rise of partisanship means that the perception of party unity has a larger impact on the fortunes of the party--when a party is seen as divided, it does worse.   If a large number of prominent Republicans had come out against Trump, that might have stopped him from getting the nomination, but it would also have hurt Republican chances in 2024 (especially since Trump would not have been a gracious loser).  As an alternative, they hoped that he would fade away on his own, and by the time it became clear that wouldn't happen, it was too late,

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

Time for a change?

 I wanted to write a post on opinion about redistricting, but there are only a few survey questions on the subject.  Two points are clear:  most people think it should be done by some body other than state legislatures and most people pay little attention to the issue (many don't know how it's actually done in their state).  In the course of looking for questions, I ran across one that I'd written about in the pioneering days of this blog, where people were asked to choose among three statements:

a.  "Our form of government, based on the constitution, has stood the test of time and no fundamental changes need to be made in it."

b.  "The Constitution has served its purpose well, but it has not kept up with the times and should be thoroughly revised to make it fit present day needs."

c.  "Changing times have outmoded our system of government and we might as well accept the fact that sooner or later we will have to have a new form of government."

At that time, I just found that it was asked in 1971, but now I discovered that it was also asked in 1973, 1976 and 1979.  The percent choosing each response:

The earlier numbers are from a question that had the same statement for option b, but somewhat different statements for a and c (see the linked post for complete wording). Over the long term, opinions shifted away from "no change" and towards the middle option, but between 1971-3 and 1976-9 there was a move towards "no change."  I can think of two possible reasons:  first, the celebration of the bicentennial in 1976 brought a lot of mostly favorable attention to the founders and second, after the Watergate scandal concluded with Nixon's resignation there was a widespread feeling that "the system worked."  

As far as group differences in opinions, liberals were more likely to favor revising the Constitution, but it was only a small difference.  The Democratic/Republican difference was even smaller.  Two larger differences were that younger people and blacks were more likely to favor revision or replacement.  Education also mattered:

Not HS grad:    36%     35%    28%

HS:                   44%     43%    13%

College:            63%     33%      4%

College graduates were substantially more likely to favor "no fundamental changes," and much less likely to favor "sooner or later we will have to change."  In my earlier post, I found the same general pattern in the 1971 data, and remarked that it could be regarded as surprising because more educated people are usually less attached to tradition.   I think this example shows something important about the effect of education on political views.  There's a tradition, going from Joseph Schumpeter through Rob Henderson's "luxury beliefs," that educated people are attracted to oppositional or edgy views.  But in some cases, like this one, educated people are more strongly attached to what you could regard as the core beliefs of a society.  

Hopefully someone will repeat the question in connection with the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.  I think that the connection with ideology and party would be considerably stronger today, since the idea of constitutional originalism has become a central part of conservative thought. 

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research] 

The root of all evil?, part 2

People are more optimistic about the future when their party is in power.  This isn't surprising--in fact, it would be surprising if this wasn't the case--but you'd expect the effect to fade as they look farther into the future.  There's a question that I've written about several times, "In America, each generation has tried to have a better life than their parents, with a better living standard, better homes, a better education, etc. How likely do you think it is that today's youth will have a better life than their parents--very likely, somewhat likely, somewhat unlikely, or very unlikely?"   The average (higher numbers mean more optimistic) for Democrats and Republicans:

Both Democrats and Republicans are more optimistic when a President of their own party is in office, but the gap is much bigger for Republicans:  70-46 vs. 62-59.  Although it's hard to be sure because of the small number of cases, this gap doesn't seem to have existed in the 20th century:  it emerged in the GW Bush or Obama administrations.  

This question focuses on economic prospects.  There's also a broader question:  "Looking ahead to the next 10 years in the United States, would you describe yourself as optimistic or pessimistic about the future of the country?"  followed by wheter that is very or only somewhat optimistic/pessimistic.  Unfortunately it hasn't been asked since 2014, and I could only get party breakdowns for a few cases, but here are the means for those:

The percent "very pessimistic":

In the first two surveys (under Clinton and GW Bush) there were only a small number of "very pessimistic" responses among both Democrats and Republicans; then there was a surge among Republicans in 2011 and 2014.  

Why has the effect of partisanship grown?   I think it is because of a change among Republican opinion leaders:  rather than just saying that liberals/progressives have bad ideas, they increasingly say that they are evil people (or the tools of evil people) who are trying to destroy America.  Of course, there's always been some of this, but it was mostly confined to the fringes:  the mainstream leaders would make some effort to show respect and give their opponents credit for good intentions.    

Finally, to return to the subject of my previous post, progressives in general support the proposition that people are created equal and endowed with unalienable rights, but what about Wilson?  Thomas is not the only one to claim that Wilson rejected it.  Glenn Beck, and on a more respectable level, Christopher Cox (a long-time member of Congress and later a chair of the SEC) also make that claim and offer quotes from his work to support it.  However, they are very selective quotes:  Beck says that "To Wilson, the 'question is not whether men are born free and equal or not,' because we all 'know they are not.'"  He omits a crucial part "Suppose they were born so.  You know they are not .  They may have been born free and equal, but they are neither free nor equal if things of this sort can go on...."   So Wilson was appealing to the principles of freedom and equality, and saying it was not realized in contemporary society.  Of course, Wilson didn't always live up to those principles, especially when it came to race.  But his racism wasn't an expression of the progressive philosophy--it was in conflict with it.*

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

*W. E. B. Du Bois supported Wilson for president in 1912.    He was disappointed, but said that was because Wilson was "overwhelmed by a sudden and vicious onslaught on the part of his Southern supporters. Hungry for office they poured into Washington and regarded the election of a Democrat as a signal for a host of anti-Negro measures."

The root of all evil?

Clarence Thomas recently gave a speech at the University of Texas--Austin that's attracted a lot of attention.  Thomas said that a new philosophy of "progressivism," which rejected the principles of the Declaration of Independence, emerged in the early 20th century and "has made many inroads into our system of government and our way of life."    In his account, progressives don't believe in "universal, unalienable natural rights"; they believe "that our rights and our dignities come . . . from government."  Of course, it's unusual for a Supreme Court justice to make such an explicitly political statement.  But another noteworthy point is that his characterization of progressivism is not just wrong, but the direct opposite of the truth.  The early 20th century progressives saw the American Revolution as having two sides:  the spirit of democracy and the interests of the propertied classes (including slaveowners).  They held that the Declaration of Independence represented the first and the Constitution (mostly) represented the second.  The implication was that when considering proposed reforms, the focus should be on whether they helped to secure the rights of the people rather than on whether they followed tradition or were explicitly authorized by the Constitution.  That is, progressives didn't reject the idea of individual rights existing prior to government, they put them at the center of their philosophy.

Thomas is correct in saying that the progressives saw rights as "historically conditioned," but that didn't mean that they thought rights were determined by governments.  Rather, it meant that new social conditions could give rise to new rights, which governments should then recognize:  for example, when education becomes necessary in order to get ahead, then people have a right to education, and the government has an obligation to see that people get an education.  

One of his examples of the evils of progressivism is a 1927 Supreme Court decision upholding a state law mandating involuntary sterilization of "feebleminded" people:  "Progressives believed that Darwinian science, the idea of ever-advancing progress written into biology itself, had proven the inherent superiority and inferiority of the races. It was only a small step for Wilson to resegregate the federal workforce. It was only another step for the government to launch sterilization programs on those deemed by the experts of the day to be unfit to reproduce, upheld by my court in Buck v. Bell in an opinion written by no less a figure than Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes."  But that case didn't produce a progressive/conservative split:  it was 8-1, and the dissenter didn't write an opinion.  Also, the state in question was Virginia, which was not exactly a hotbed of progressivism.  The decision was never overturned, but a 1942 Supreme Court decision largely ended involuntary sterilization:  that was unanimous, with the opinion written by William O. Douglas, a progressive.  This example illustrates two points.  First, there are general currents of opinion that apply to progressives, moderates, and conservatives.    Second, the general movement is towards a more expansive view of natural rights:  today virtually everyone would say that that the law in Buck v. Bell violated individual rights and that the court should have struck it down.  

In a recent post, I said that American conservatism has an oppositional tradition.  Thomas's speech illustrates what I mean by that.  He sees himself as defending American ideas, but as doing so in opposition to contemporary American institutions.  He concludes with an exhortation to "find in ourselves that same level of courage that the signers of the Declaration had, so that we can do for our future what they did for theirs."  This isn't just a general call for everyone to speak up for what they think is right, but a for the people who share his views to stand up against the oppressors.  For example, "it may mean running for your school board when you see that they are teaching your children to hate your values and our country."  

Beyond the fringe?

 A few weeks ago the New York Times published a story on people who think that women should not have the right to vote, and more recently they featured it in an e-mail to subscribers.  The story says "if a decade ago the idea was just another extreme provocation, today it is gaining adherents beyond the fringe."  Most of the evidence is just assertions from the pastor of a church that opposes women's suffrage, It's not a big church:  "more than 100 parishioners attending every Sunday, with five to 10 new families joining every year."  The nature of the story says something about changes in the media:  in the print age, the New York Times might have published a story about this, but I think it would have presented it as involving a small group of people with eccentric beliefs.  But today, there's a focus on engagement, so there's a temptation to build it up to get a rise out of people (which seems to have worked--there are over 900 comments).  

I didn't expect to find any survey questions about whether women should have the right to vote, but I looked and found one.  In September 2019, an Ipsos survey asked people if they agreed or disagreed that "The 19th Amendment, which guarantees women the right to vote, should be repealed."  3% agreed:  breaking it down by party, that was 3% of Republicans, 4% of Democrats, and 4% of independents.  10% chose "neither agree nor disagree" which is more than I would have guessed.  Another intriguing point is that Republicans were most likely to "strongly disagree" (90%, vs 80%% among Democrats and 85% among independents.

Moving on to issues on which there are serious differences of opinion, in 2017 an AP-NORC survey asked if various organizations and groups had "too much, too little, or neither too much nor too little power and influence in Washington?"  One of the groups was women.  The figure shows percent too much minus too little by party:

For the groups above the diagonal line, Democrats are more likely to say that they have goo much power; for those below, Republicans are.  Women are substantially below the line, but even Republicans are more likely to say that they have too little power than too much.  Men are another one of the groups:  Democrats overwhelmingly say that they have too much influence, while Republicans are pretty evenly divided, slightly on the side of "too much."  So there are substantial partisan differences:  the gap for women is fourth largest out of 18 groups (behing LGBT people, minorities, and whites), and the gap for men is eight (just behind poor people and ahead of the media).  The smallest gaps are for political lobbyists, small business, people like you, and working people (who are also discussed in this post).  The general pattern isn't surprising, but it's notable that Democrats are a lot more likely to think that "scientific and policy experts" have too little power--that was the fifth largest partisan gap, just behind women.  Republicans leaned slightly towards "too much power."  I will look for comparable questions to see if we can say anything about changes in the partisan division on this point.

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research[

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]