Strong feelings, part 3

 In a recent post, I said "Trump doesn't seem to have an exceptionally large number of enthusiastic supporters among the public . . . his continued strength in the party is mostly because of Republican elites' reluctance to challenge him..."  Andrew Gelman pointed to my discussion on his blog, and this post is partly inspired by the comments--not a point-by-point response, but expanding on and clarifying what I was trying to say.  

As of the 2020 election, Trump had a lot of enthusiastic supporters in the public--15.4% of respondents in the American National Election Studies survey rated him at 100 on a 0-100 scale, which is the second-best figure since the question was first asked in 1968.  But in 2016, only 6.4% did, which is below average.  So Trump didn't start with a lot of enthusiastic supporters--he acquired them when he was president.  How did he do that?  Here's a table showing the percent of 100 ratings for presidents in election and re-election campaigns.

                 first       re-election

Nixon              13%           15.5%
Carter              13.7%          7.8%
Reagan             5.5%          12%
GHW Bush    11.7%           4.7%
Clinton             4.9%          10.7%
GW Bush         5%             14.6%
Obama            11.6%          13.9%
Trump               6.4%          15.4%

Nixon and Obama had small gains--the other six had large changes--four up and two down.  Trump had the second biggest increase, behind George W. Bush.  

Here's the same kind of table showing the percent zero ratings.

             first       re-election

Nixon              2.6%            5.2%
Carter              4.8%            7.6%
Reagan             6.2 %           7.8%
GHW Bush      6.9%            7.9%
Clinton             4.9%            8.3%
GW Bush         4.2%          13.2%
Obama             6.7%           14.6%
Trump             31.3%          38.5%

It increased for all of them--Trump's increase was the third largest in absolute terms, behind George W. Bush and Obama.  

So overall, there's a tendency for extreme reactions to become more common during a presidency.     This tendency may have become stronger in the 21st century, which is reasonable given the general increase in polarization--supporters of the president's party rally around, while supporters of the other party rally against him.  

The ANES surveys are taken only once every four years.  Some other organizations ask "feeling thermometer" questions, but their not very common.  But to get a sense of the timing of the increase in strong support for Trump, we can use questions that distinguish between very and somewhat favorable.  The were pretty common during Trump's presidency--in fact, because of limitations of time and energy, I just recorded a selection.  

There's a fairly steady upward trend.  The two lowest values are from Spring 2016, when Trump was about to secure the Republican nomination and many Republicans were trying to make a stand against him.  I may record the rest of the data and try to do a more detailed analysis of the ups and downs later, but at this point the key thing is that it's an upward trend that seemed to last through his presidency. 

My last post showed that there's been a decline in Trump's very positive ratings since his presidency ended, but it's been pretty small.  As I said, I think that's because Republican elites have been reluctant to criticize him--I don't mean to denounce him as a threat to democracy (you couldn't expect that) but to say that he lost an election, and lost by a pretty big margin to an underwhelming opponent.  Why?  One reason is simply the belief that he has an unshakeable base of personal support, so you can't afford to antagonize him.  Another is that his charges of a stolen election, although they didn't convince many people, diverted Republicans into talking about "irregularities"--were the Covid-related changes in election procedures adopted improperly?  Were they intended to help the Democrats?  Were social media companies biased?  On these points, many or most Republicans were inclined to agree with him.  (That seems to be one of Trump's general strengths--the ability to bring something up from out of left field and get people talking about it.)  So the normal debate about the reasons for defeat that usually starts right after the election was delayed, and then delayed again by January 6 and the impeachment.  Since the debate hadn't taken place, Trump's support held up, and since his support held up, people were reluctant to raise the issue.    

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]