Three years after the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021, surveys find a large number of people continue to believe that Donald Trump didn't do anything wrong. Many observers say that this reflects the strong hold he has on his followers, or the power of social media and Fox News, or even a change in our relation to reality. Of course, you can't definitively prove or disprove any interpretation, but there is a historical example that sheds some light on the issue.
In April 1973, the Gallup Poll asked people which of these two statements came closer to their views on Watergate: "It is a very serious matter because it reveals corruption in the Nixon administration," or "It's just politics--the kind of thing that both parties engage in." The question was repeated a number of times up until late June 1974 (a couple of months before Nixon resigned).
Gallup asked the question again in 1982, 1992, 2002, and 2014, with slight changes in wording ("is" to "was" and an introduction mentioning how long ago it happened). The results (including the June 1974 survey for reference):
Again, not much change--between 42 and 46 percent said it was "just politics".
Nixon resigned after several leading Congressional Republicans told him that his support had collapsed and he was almost certain to be impeached and removed from office. Virtually all of the mainstream media agreed that it was time for Nixon to go, and there was no Fox News or conservative social media where holdouts could voice their opinion. That is, political and media elites united behind the position that Watergate was a very serious matter, and as later generations came along that presumably was what they were taught in school, but almost half the public continued to say that it was "just politics."
So the important difference between the two cases doesn't involve the public, but elites. 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. In contrast, Trump has had a lot of support from Republican officeholders--according to Ballotpedia, he has 162 "noteworthy" endorsements, compared to 17 for DeSantis, 5 for Haley, and 1 for Ramaswamy (Doug Burgum and Tim Scott got a few before dropping out). That's considerably more lopsided than the distribution of support among likely Republican primary voters.
That leads to the question of why he continues to get so much support among Republican elites. I've had a few posts that touch on the issue (especially this one), but will try a more systematic one in the near future.
[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]
"There was a substantial movement towards seeing it as very serious between April and June 1973" -- are the figure labels reversed, or do you mean "substantial movement away"?
ReplyDeleteThanks, the labels were indeed reversed--I have corrected it.
ReplyDeleteDavid:
ReplyDeleteThis sort of comparison has come up before, and I think the key difference between Watergate and Trump's impeachable offenses is that the Democrats had solid majorities in both houses of Congress. Not enough to be able to automatically impeach and convict, but enough to drive the agenda. In addition, back in the 1970s, both parties were less polarized, so that there would've been a fair number of Democrats willing to take Nixon's side and Republicans willing to oppose him, based on their judgment of the facts and the politics. In particular, swing-district Republicans were at risk from Nixon's unpopularity; see section 2.3 of this paper.