The turning point? Part 2

 Many accounts of the rise and fall of Senator Joe McCarthy say that his popularity collapsed after a dramatic exchange in a Senate hearing ("have you no sense of decency?").  A few years ago, I had a post that looked at Gallup data on views of McCarthy and found no change after the incident.  But there was a drop in approval between March 2, 1954 and March 24, 1954, which I said might have been the result of a critical TV documentary by Edward R. Murrow that ran on March 9.  

Since that time, I've found more data--Gallup sometimes asked for ratings on a scale of +5 (like very much) to -5 (dislike very much), so you can collapse those into favorable (positive) and unfavorable (negative).  This makes it possible to extend the range of the analysis, looking at approval during and after the Senate investigation and censure vote against McCarthy (December 1954).  I also looked at news stories in the New York Times in March and in the June hearings. 

 It turns out that there was more going on in early March than the Murrow show.  On Sunday the "Week in Review" section had a long story which began "With startling suddenness, there arose in the U. S. last week the question:  has the tide turned against McCarthy?"  It went through events of the week, which started with an broadcast speech by Adlai Stevenson saying that the Republican party was "half Eisenhower and half McCarthy," and in addition to Murrow's program included a Senate speech by (Republican) Senator Ralph Flanders attacking McCarthy, a press conference by Eisenhower in which he made approving comments about Flanders's speech and dismissed Stevenson's claim, and an address by Vice-President Richard Nixon (McCarthy had demanded a chance to respond to Stevenson, but the party chose Nixon for the job) in which he was critical of McCarthy.  The exchange in June got a front-page story, which noted that the spectators burst into applause after Joseph Welch confronted McCarthy.  I was struck by this passage: "Senator Mundt has daily cautioned the audience to refrain from 'audible expressions of approval or disapproval' . . . under pain of being expelled from the room.  But he made no effort to control or admonish the crowd that applauded Mr. Welch's retort to Senator McCarthy."  Mundt, a Republican, was the acting chair of the committee [McCarthy had temporarily stepped aside].  

Now for the survey data:

Vertical lines indicate the "turn of the tide" week, the day of the McCarthy-Welch exchange, and the Senate censure vote against McCarthy. The figures on the vertical axis are percent favorable minus percent unfavorable ratings.   Blue dots represent the collapsed ten-point scale, red are approve/disapprove--there don't seem to be any systematic differences between them, so I'll treat them as equivalent.  

There was a clear drop in March, but nothing that happened after that point seems to have made much difference.  If anything, McCarthy's popularity might have recovered a little after the summer of 1954.  Before the "turn of the tide" his approval rating was generally around +10, and afterwards it was about -10.     

Putting this together, a sustained bipartisan effort had only a moderate impact on McCarthy's popularity.  Moreover, all of the impact came at the beginning--that is, he seemed to have a substantial core of support that stuck with him through everything.  

What does this episode suggest about contemporary support for Donald Trump?  One interpretation would be that even if most Republican elites had turned against him, it wouldn't have made much difference:  public confidence in political leaders and the media was much higher in 1954 then it is today, so any loss of support today would be much smaller than McCarthy's.  Moreover, Trump now seems to have a larger core of enthusiastic supporters than McCarthy did (only about 10% gave him a +5, a number that didn't change much).  However, I think it might have had more impact on the sense of viability:  that is, many of the people who approve of Trump and intend to support him for president in 2024 would approve of him and think he had been treated unfairly by "the elites," but figure he didn't have much chance anymore and look for someone else to vote for.  I don't have any solid evidence, but there are some hints in the surveys on McCarthy.  In December 1953, there was a question on who you would support for the Republican nomination in 1956 if the candidates were Eisenhower and McCarthy--9% said McCarthy and 12% weren't sure.  In March 1955 there were a couple of questions about who should get the nomination if Eisenhower didn't run for re-election:  McCarthy got 2% in one and 6% in the other.  That is, he got more support against a very popular incumbent in 1953 than he got against a collection of less prominent and less popular people in 1955.

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]