Plan B Forum

Liberals and progressives are forever predicting Donald Trump’s political demise.

After each purported outrage – Charlottesville, separating children from their immigrant parents, now Helsinki – they confidently contend that this latest event will finally force Trump’s supporters to abandon him. Yet not only does this not happen, Trump’s support has actually risen by 6% since late 2017. How do they keep getting it so wrong?

To quote Ronald Reagan: “The trouble with our liberal friends is not that they’re ignorant; it’s just that they know so much that isn’t so.” They presume that because Trump is so unconventional in style, his coalition must be equally unconventional. But it’s not. The data clearly shows that Trump’s political coalition is pretty much the traditional Republican coalition. And the often virulent behavior of anti-Trump partisans has made partisan Republicans especially unwilling to abandon their leader even when he stumbles.

The sheer ordinariness of Trump’s coalition is impossible to overstate. Data from the Voter Study Group show that more than 80% of his votes came from men and women who voted for Republican nominee Mitt Romney just four years before. This group contains the usual suspects among American Republicans: tax-cut advocates, religious evangelicals and Catholics, gun rights supporters and business types eager for deregulation. Trump has made sure to give each faction what they most desire just like any good politician would. That keeps them in his camp even as the media flays him with each supposed transgression.


Evangelicals are a case in point. My work on Republican factions, contained in the book I co-authored with Professor Dante Scala, , found that very conservative voters who highly value social issues comprise about 25% of the party. These voters today are very afraid that liberal and progressive judges will slowly circumscribe their ability to practice their religion in their daily lives. They tended not to support Trump during the primaries, instead backing the Texas senator Ted Cruz. Their support for Trump now is highly transactional: so long as he nominates the judges they think will protect their beliefs and way of life, they will overlook virtually anything else he says or does.

The recent nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the supreme court thus solidified their support, as social conservatives believe he is much likelier to back their views than the man he is replacing, Anthony Kennedy. They might be troubled by other things he says or does, but so long as he keeps his end of the bargain on their priority they will swallow hard and stick with their man.

Nor are Trump’s voters united by racism and sexism, as many on the left presume. Analysis by the libertarian Cato Institute’s Emily Ekins found that Trump’s general election support broke into five groups. Only one, the American Preservationists, contained a large number of voters who could be said to be generally hostile to racial and ethnic minorities per se. They were outnumbered by another group, the Free Marketeers, whose attitudes towards racial and ethnic minorities were as or more tolerant than the attitudes of Hillary Clinton supporters. Each faction’s continued support for Trump is based upon how he acts on their priorities, not on one overarching theme.
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Their support for Trump now is highly transactional: so long as he nominates the judges they think will protect their beliefs and way of life, they will overlook virtually anything else he says or does.  The recent nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the supreme court thus solidified their support, as social conservatives believe he is much likelier to back their views than the man he is replacing, Anthony Kennedy.  They might be troubled by other things he says or does, but so long as he keeps his end of the bargain on their priority they will swallow hard and stick with their man.

The Moral Ledger

...So long as short-term rationalizations are possible, decline can proceed unabated and largely unnoticed. This is why But Gorsuch is so insidious. It is the pro that excused so many cons: the growing attacks on the media, the callous border policy, the belittling of the intelligence community. Have no doubt that But Kavanaugh will justify an even more alarming set of behaviors. Should another seat on the Court open, we could find ourselves But Barrett-ing into the abyss.

Trump himself alerted us to this path when he proudly noted, back in January 2016, that his behavior to that point had produced loyalists who’d support him even if he shot someone on Fifth Avenue. What even worse sins, we have to ask ourselves, would his behavior since then compel his supporters to disregard?

Perhaps when dealing with officious neighbors or prickly colleagues, finding silver linings in dark clouds is practical, a kind of survival technique for just making it through the day. When the stakes are low, itemizing and compartmentalizing may be sensible. But given the enormity of the stakes, placing a gold star on the president’s occasional successful assignment is unwarranted and unwise. The road to Hell is paved with a piecemeal, situational approach to morality.