Who wanted war?

 A couple of days ago, Christopher Caldwell wrote "Republicans trusted Mr. Trump to take over their stumbling party in large part because he cursed the George W. Bush administration for having led the country into the Iraq war with a bunch of specious talking points about weapons of mass destruction."   Today a New York Times news story said "Mr. Trump won the presidency in 2016 in part by rejecting nation-building and foreign wars."  This seems wrong to me--Trump has always been clear that he has no objection to war as long as it's profitable.  I searched the Trump Twitter Archive through 2016 and found nothing objecting to the original rationales for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but lots of complaints that we were spending money and not getting Iraqi oil.  

A Pew survey in September 2015 asked Republicans about a hypothetical candidate for the party's nomination who "wants to send US ground troops to fight ISIS in Iraq and Syria."  Among people who favored Trump, 56% said they would be more likely to support such a candidate and 26% that they would be more likely to oppose one; among people who favored someone else, it was 52% more likely to support and 26% more likely to oppose (the rest said it wouldn't make much difference to them).  That is, opinions about sending ground troops to fight ISIS were unrelated to Republican candidate preference.  

This question was part of a series.  Two of the other items--"wants to end the nuclear agreement with Iran" and "will compromise with members of the Democratic Party" were also unrelated to the choice between Trump and other candidates.   Three others were related.  One was "wants to deport all immigrants living in the US illegally."   Among Trump supporters, 51% said they would be more likely to support such a candidate and 18% that they'd be more likely to oppose; among supporters of other candidates, it was 36% and 39%.  Another was "wants to end federal funding for Planned Parenthood."  Among Trump supporters, 42% more likely to support and 27% less likely; among supporters of other candidates, it was 57% to 20%.  Finally, on "wants to raise taxes on wealthy Americans," 44% of Trump supporters said they would be more likely to support and 24% to oppose; among supporters of other candidates, it was 30% to support and 39% oppose.  That is, Trump supporters were more in favor of a hard line on immigration, but more moderate on Planned Parenthood and taxes on wealthy people.

It's often said that Trump has achieved a takeover, sometimes even a "hostile takeover," of the Republican party.  But it's actually gone in both directions:  he's moved the party towards his position on some issues (especially immigration and tariffs) but has adopted orthodox Republican positions on others where he once seemed to be more moderate (taxes, abortion, "our always under siege Second Amendment").  Between his first and second terms, Trump also has taken up some previously fringe positions on the right, like unbridled hostility to colleges and universities, and introduced them into the mainstream. 

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research] 

Guilty men (and women)

In 2016, Donald Trump lost the popular vote to a weak candidate, although the mysterious workings of the Electoral College gave him the presidency.  During his first term, he never reached a 50% approval rating.  In the 2020 election, despite having the advantage of incumbency, he lost both the popular and electoral votes to a mediocre candidate.  So why did the Republicans ignore this record of failure and nominate him again in 2024?  Most observers seem to think that the answer is obvious--it was because he had a strong hold on ordinary Republican voters.  

After the 2020 election, there were a number of surveys that asked if you wanted Trump to run again in 2024.  I compared the results for similar surveys about Gore running in 2004 and Kerry running in 2008. 

The years in the x-axis are 1 for the first year after he lost, 2 for the second, etc.  The y-axis is percent saying yes minus percent saying no.  Trump is consistently below Gore, and about the same as Kerry.  That is, he didn't have an especially large base of support among the voters.  

 These figures are based on the whole population, but some surveys limited the question to supporters of  the candidate's party.*  

Compared to Gore and Kerry, Trump looks stronger within his own party.  But another losing Republican candidate, Romney, got about the same results as Trump, suggesting that maybe Republicans generally are more willing to consider second chances.**  In any case, Trump's value of +30 means that about 35% of Republicans didn't want him to run again, and wanting someone to run again doesn't necessarily mean that you will support him.   So there was definitely an opening for other candidates.  

Turning from voters to elites, here are endorsements from Republican senators and governors (data from Ballotpedia).  

Trump announced his candidacy after the 2022 elections, and within a few days picked up his first endorsement (from Tommy Tuberville). Then there was a cluster in early 2023, and some more in April.  By April 17, he had 10.  Then other candidates got some endorsements, and by June 21st the gap had narrowed:  10 for Trump, 6 for others.  After that, Trump pulled ahead:  32 endorsed him before the Iowa caucuses, six more before the New Hampshire primaries, and another 10 before Nikki Haley dropped out.  Out of a total of 76 governors and senators, 44 endorsed Trump and  only 11 endorsed other candidates (four of those endorsed Trump after their first choice dropped out, so 48 endorsed Trump before the race was settled).  

My overall conclusion is that "the base" didn't impose Trump on Republican elites; Republican elites asked for him.  That leads back to my original point about Trump's poor record in general elections--why would professional politicians want a weak candidate at the top of the ticket?  One possibility is that they thought his electoral record was actually a good one--I can imagine an argument along those lines.  Another, and more disturbing, possibility is that they looked at the candidates and thought that Trump would be the best one to lead the country.  

*Partisan breakdowns could be found or calculated for some of the surveys of the general public, but I'll leave that to someone who has a research assistant to do the work.

**This seems plausible to me--my impression is that when Democrats lose, they blame their candidates; when Republicans lose, they blame outside forces (especially the media).

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

Power to the people?

 In 1946, a short-lived survey organization called the Psychological Corporation (which seems to have been connected to the Gallup Poll) asked "Would you agree that everybody would be happier, more secure and more prosperous if working people were given more power and influence in the government, or would you say we would all be better off if the working people had no more power than they have now?" 59% said they should have more power, 29% the same, and 12% less (8% weren't sure).  The question has never been repeated, but in 2017 an AP-NORC survey asked if various groups  had "too much, too little, or neither too much nor too little power and influence in Washington?" and one of those groups was "working people".  69% said too little, 28% neither too much nor too little, and 2% too much.  The questions are similar enough so that I think we can say there's been a real change.  

Breaking it it down by education (% should be more/same/less influence, and omitting "don't knows"):

                                      1946                    2017
HS                               61/28/11              69/28/4
Some college              40/42/18              70/28/2
College grad               32/46/22              73/26/1

A small change among people with only a high school education, and a much larger change among people with a college education.  Another way to look at it is that more educated people were substantially less likely to agree that "working people" should have more power in 1946. but that education made essentially no difference in 2017.

 In 1946 unions were important and there was a good deal of labor conflict, so some respondents may have thought of labor unions when they heard "working people."  That is, to some extent the difference may be a change in the interpretation of "working people" rather than in general beliefs about who should have power and influence.  But I don't think this is the whole story:  the distribution of opinions among union members in 1946 was about the same as the distribution among the general public in 2017.  So the comparison supports a point I've made several times:  that people have become less inclined to assume that the authorities know better than ordinary people do.  Moreover, this change has been stronger among people in higher social positions.  

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

Economics and/or politics?

 In recent decades, there have been a number of cases of "democratic erosion" or "backsliding"--elected leaders changing the rules to make it more difficult to oppose their policies or vote them out of office.  A paper by Eli Rau and Susan Stokes looks at democracies between 1995 and 2020 and finds that economic inequality was associated with a higher risk of backsliding.*  They considered per-capita GDP and the previous duration of democracy, which reduce the risk of other threats to democracy (like military coups and civil war) and find no clear connection to backsliding.  But they didn't consider another factor that I thought was potentially important:  presidential versus parliamentary systems of government.  First, it may be easier for outsiders to attain power in presidential systems, since it's not necessary to recruit and organize candidates for seats in parliament in order to win.  Second, presidential systems create the chance of conflict between the president and the legislature.  Third, it's more difficult to remove unpopular or unfit leaders in a presidential system:  impeachment takes time and requires a supermajority.  As a result, presidential systems may have a higher risk of backsliding.  

I began with a classification of forms of government from Wikipedia and reduced them to three types:  parliamentary, presidential, and an intermediate ("semi-presidential") category.  Semi-presidential systems have both a directly elected president and a prime minister who is responsible to the legislature--France is a prominent example.  There were also three countries in the system that didn't fit into the classification (Switzerland, Liechtenstein, and Micronesia).  The table shows the risk of backsliding by form of government:

                                          Years at risk          episodes         Risk
Parliamentary                      1115                       4                   0.35%
Semi-Presidential                  516                       5                   0.97%
Presidential                            488                     14                   2.89%
                      
Other                                         78                      0                    0

For example, the United States had 22 years of being at risk (1995-2016), and in one of those (2016) began an episode of backsliding.  2017-20 are not considered because we were already in a state of backsliding.  I'll consider the "risk" of emerging from an episode later.  

So there is a substantial association between form of government and the risk of backsliding.  But what if we consider both inequality and form of government?

Constant    -7.52        -8.15          -8.51         -8.37
                   (1.04)     (1.18)          (1.46)       (1.21)

Gini            .078          .063           .081          .078
                   (.024)       (.027)        (.031)        (.026)

Form                            .59            
                                    (.28)         

Semi                                               1.34
                                                       (0.73)

Presidential                                    1.23
                                                       (0.59)

Non-Parliamentary                                             1.26  
                                                                           (0.56)

"Form" defines parliamentary systems as 1, semi-presidential as 2, and presidential as 3.  The third column compares each to the baseline of parliamentary systems.  The estimates for presidential and semi-presidential are similar, so the fourth column combines them into a single "non-parliamentary" group.  Statistical criteria don't permit a choice between the models in columns 2-4, but I think the arguments I gave apply about equally to presidential and semi-presidential forms, so I would go with #4 if I had to choose.  I thought that controlling for form of government might reduce or eliminate the estimated effect of inequality, but that wasn't the case.  

I also estimated models for the chance of leaving a state of backsliding.  Neither inequality nor the form of government had any clear effect, so I don't show the results.  

*The classification is from a working paper by Melis Laebens, who spoke of "executive aggrandizement," and suggested that it was a development of the post-Cold War period.  Until then, "aspiring autocrats would not be as concerned with maintaining a democratic facade."

"When will I get credit....? When will people understand.....? When will Polls reflect the Greatness of America...?"

 During the Biden administration, popular perception of economic conditions was very negative, even though actual conditions weren't bad according to the standard statistics.  Now the Trump administration faces the same problem (my title is a quote from a Trump post on Truth Social).  The Michigan Consumer Surveys report an "Index of Consumer Sentiment" every month, and in the last 20 years or so they have also recorded party identification.  The figure shows the ICS average for supporters of the President's party and the opposition party (omitting the transitional months when party control changes, e. g. Nov 2024-Jan 2025).  

The ups and downs follow a similar pattern, but opposition party perceptions have a downward trend.  The low point for supporters of the president's party was February 2009, when the country was in a severe recession.  For supporters of the opposition party, perceptions have been below the February 2009 levels for most of the past three years.  So to some extent, the negative perceptions just reflect the growth of negative partisanship--supporters of the other party seeing things as very bad rather than pretty bad.  But even today, a lot of people (30%-40%) are not partisans.*  What do they think?  The next figure compares independents' ICS to the average of Democratic and Republican values.

 

The diagonal line means equal values for independents and the average of Democrats and Republicans.  Most points are below the line, meaning that independents are more negative than partisans, presumably because they tend to have more negative views of politics and politicians.  The red dots are the months in the second Trump term:  they tend to be farther below the line, meaning that the gap between independent and partisan perceptions has been consistently larger than average.  The next figure shows changes in the gap over time:

It seemed to bounce around without much pattern until sometime around the middle of 2022--since then, independents have steadily become more negative relative to partisans.  Why?  When economic conditions are ambiguous, independents may be influenced by general impressions about whether the president is paying attention to the economy.  In the last couple of years of his administration, it seemed like Biden was more focused on foreign affairs, and during his second administration the economy hasn't been prominent among Trump's concerns.  There were two earlier months when independent perceptions were unusually negative--April and May 2012.  I don't remember exactly what was in the news then, but I do recall that during the Obama administration there were sometimes complaints that he wasn't focusing on the economy.  Going farther back, in 1992 economic perceptions were more negative than economic statistics suggested they should be.  My hypothesis suggests that tendency should have been particularly strong among independents:  George HW Bush was generally seen as being more interested in foreign affairs than in economics.   

*It drops to about 10%-15% if you ask whether people "lean" towards one party, but the Michigan surveys don't do that.  

It's the same old song

 I recently got an e-mail urging me to contribute a paper to the International Journal of Arts, Humanities & Social Science (IJAHSS).  That name rang a bell--last year I discovered that I was listed as the editor of the EON International Journal of Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences.  Was the similarity in names just a coincidence?  I looked at the website for the IJAHSS and it looked a lot like what I remembered of the EIJAHSS--the major change is that there publication fee is up to $300 (previously $200).   They list an "Advisory Board" and an "Editorial Board" and I was relieved to find that I'm not included on either one.  The editor-in-chief is given as Val Dusek, of the Department of Philosophy at the University of New Hampshire.  I did a search for him and discovered that he died in May of this year.  I recognized one of the names on the editorial board, Ted Jelen of the University of Nevada Las Vegas.  A search revealed that he died in November 2017, several years before the journal started.  I haven't searched for any of the other people listed as members, but I wonder if there's a strategy there--dead people aren't going to find out and object to the misuse of their names.  

For they/them

 For many people, attachment to a party isn't primarily a matter agreement on specific issues, but a general sense that it's concerned with people like you or that you care about.  From time to time, Gallup has asked "which political party--the Republican or Democratic--do you think serves the interests of the following groups the best."  The most recent was in August 2024, when they asked about wealthy people, business and professional people, military veterans, small business people, retired people, recent immigrants who came to the US legally/recent immigrants who came to the US illegally [random half samples], parents of children under 18, black people, poor people, Hispanic people, women, labor union members and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people.  The figure shows breaks opinions down by party.  The horizonal axis shows the percent of Republicans who think that the Republican party best serves the interests of each group:  for example, 57% of Republicans think that the Republicans are best for union members.  The vertical axis gives the percent of Democrats who think that the Democratic party best serves the group:  for example, 88% of Democrats think that the Democrats are best for union members.*

Over 90% of Democrats think that their party is best for LGBT people, women, legal immigrants, Hispanics, retired people, parents, black people, and poor people.  80-90% think that their party is best for small business, veterans, illegal immigrants, and union members.  Then there are two groups that trail:  business and professionals at 56% and wealthy people at 9%.  Among Republicans, only 19% say that their party is best for LGBT people and illegal immigrants; majorities think that the Republicans are best for all other groups, although they're generally not as strong as the majorities among Democrats.  

Eight of these groups were also included in a survey in 1990.  The next two figures show changes in Democratic and Republican perceptions between 1990 and 2024:

The diagonal lines indicate equal values in 1990 and 2024.  Points above the line mean that a higher percentage of partisans saw their party as better for the group in 2024 than in 1990.  For both Democrats and Republicans, seven of the eight are above the line.  This could be interpreted as a general increase in polarization:  strong partisans are more likely to see their party as better for (almost) everyone.  Another potential factor is feelings about the groups:  partisans will want to claim groups that they like and connect the other party to groups that they dislike.  For both Democrats and Republicans, wealthy people are the one exception to the general pattern:  I would interpret this as an example of a general rise of anti-elitist sentiment:  members of both parties are more reluctant to be associated with serving the interests of wealthy people.  A few other cases are notable for large increases between 1990 and 2024:  Republicans became considerably more likely to say that their party was best for black people (33% to 76%) and poor people (39% to 76%).   Again, I would say that this reflects a change in the way that Republicans like to think of themselves.  

*People who say that the parties are equal or who don't know are counted with those who say the other party is better.