The road to Mar-a-Lago

Donald Trump now has enough delegates to clinch the Republican nomination for the third time.  How did we get here?  One view is that it came out of the blue--Trump staged a "hostile takeover" of the Republican party by appealing to ordinary voters, and the Republican leadership has gone along because they can't stop it.  Another view, which I think is the correct one, is that it's the culmination of a long development--that by 2016, the party was ready for someone like Trump.  Of course, it's hard to identify a precise starting point for a long-term shift, but some popular choices are Nixon's "Southern strategy" and Reagan's election in 1980.  I want to suggest another possibility-- the 1990 budget agreement, in combination with George H. W. Bush's 1988 "no new taxes" pledge at the Republican convention and his loss in the 1992 election.  The obvious effect of this experience was to strengthen Republican opposition to raising income tax rates, but I think it had a larger effect.

The figure shows net public support (favorable minus unfavorable opinions) for the proposed budget agreement in October and November (the last Congressional vote was October 27, and Bush signed it on November 5).  On the whole, public opinion was negative, but not all that negative--averaging across the ten surveys that asked, 36% were in favor and 41% opposed.  The figures were more negative in the two final surveys, but they just asked about views of the budget agreement with no further detail, while all of the previous surveys said something about bipartisan agreement.  People like bipartisanship, so it's likely that the difference in responses was because of the difference in questions rather than because of a real change in attitudes towards the agreement.  Opinions were also getting more favorable over time until the last two questions, which suggests that people were happy that Congress seemed to be getting things done.*  That is, people didn't like the idea of a tax increase, but liked the idea of parties working together on a plan to reduce the budget deficit.   

 The result of this episode was that the Republicans became less willing to cooperate with Democrats in being "responsible"--doing things which most knowledgeable people say are necessary but which the public is inclined to oppose.  Bush and the Republican leadership in Congress set aside politics (Bush's "read my lips" pledge) to do the "responsible" thing, and it wound up hurting them.  That started a move towards a strategy of uniform opposition--make the Democrats do it and don't give them the cover of bipartisanship.  Of course, this isn't an absolute--there are some cases in which the "responsible" thing is in line with Republican ideology, but they have become less common as the party has increasingly turned against "elites" and experts.  

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

*There were two questions that had more detailed descriptions of what was in the agreement, which are indicated in the figure. The descriptions were different, and the second one sounds more favorable to me than the first, which may explain some of the difference between them.  But the evidence for a time trend is still pretty strong if you set them aside.