Posted on 02/29/2016 10:27:27 AM PST by Citizen Zed
If Donald Trump wins the Republican presidential nomination, he’ll have undermined a lot of assumptions we once held about the GOP. He’ll have become the nominee despite neither being reliably conservative nor being very electable, supposedly the two things Republicans care most about. He’ll have done it with very little support from “party elites” (although with some recent exceptions like Chris Christie). He’ll have attacked the Republican Party’s three previous candidates — Mitt Romney, John McCain and George W. Bush — without many consequences. If a Trump nomination happens, it will imply that the Republican Party has been weakened and is perhaps even on the brink of failure, unable to coordinate on a plan to stop Trump despite the existential threat he poses to it.
Major partisan realignments do happen in America — on average about once every 40 years. The last one, which involved the unwinding of the New Deal coalition between Northern and Southern Democrats, is variously dated as having occurred in 1968, 1972 and 1980. There are also a lot of false alarms, elections described as realignments that turn out not to be. This time, we really might be in the midst of one. It’s almost impossible to reconcile this year’s Republican nomination contest with anyone’s notion of “politics as usual.”
If a realignment is underway, then it poses a big empirical challenge. Presidential elections already suffer from the problem of small sample sizes — one reason a lot of people, certainly including us, shouldn’t have been so dismissive of Trump’s chances early on. Elections held in the midst of political realignments are even rarer, however. The rules of the old regime — the American political party system circa 1980 through 2012 — might not apply in the new one. And yet, it’s those elections that inform both the conventional wisdom and statistical models of American political behavior.
This doesn’t necessarily mean we’ll be completely in the dark. For one thing, the polls — although there’s reason to be concerned about their condition in the long-term — have been reasonably accurate so far in the primaries. And some of the old rules will still apply. It’s probably fair to guess that Pennsylvania and Ohio will vote similarly, for example.
Still, one should be careful about one’s assumptions. For instance, the assumption that the parties will rally behind their respective nominees may or may not be reliable. True, recent elections have had very little voting across party lines: 93 percent of Republicans who voted in 2012 supported Romney, for example, despite complaints from the base that he was insufficiently conservative. And in November 2008, some 89 percent of Democrats who voted supported Barack Obama after his long battle with Hillary Clinton.
But we may be entering a new era, and through the broader sweep of American history, there’s sometimes been quite a bit of voting across party lines. The table below reflects, in each election since 1952, what share of a party’s voters voted against their party’s presidential candidate (e.g., a Democrat voting Republican or for a third-party ticket). There’s a lot of fascinating political history embedded in the table, but one theme is that divisive nominations have consequences.
In 1972, for instance, about a third of Democrats voted for Richard Nixon rather than George McGovern, who won the Democratic nomination despite getting only about a quarter of the popular vote during the primaries. The Democrats’ tumultuous nomination process in 1968 was nearly as bad, with many defections to both Nixon and George Wallace. The 1964 Republican nomination of Barry Goldwater produced quite a few defections. Primary challenges to Jimmy Carter in 1980 and George H.W. Bush in 1992 presaged high levels of inter-party voting in November.
There are also some exceptions; Republicans remained relatively united behind Gerald Ford in 1976 despite a primary challenge from Ronald Reagan. And there were high levels of Democratic unity behind Obama in 2008, although one can argue that a party having two good choices is a much lesser problem than it having none it can agree upon.
Overall, however, the degree of party unity during the primaries is one of the better historical predictors of the November outcome. That could be a problem for Republicans whether they nominate Trump or turn around and nominate Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz or John Kasich; significant numbers of GOP voters are likely to be angry either way.
It doesn’t necessarily mean that Republicans are bound to lose; I’d agree with David Plouffe’s assessment that a general election with Trump on the ballot is hard to predict and that Trump “could lose in a landslide or win narrowly.” But if I wouldn’t bet on an anti-Trump landslide, I’m also not sure I’d bet against one. The presumption that presidential elections are bound to be close is itself based on an uncomfortably small sample size: While three of the four elections since 2000 have been fairly close, most of them between 1952 and 1996 were not. Furthermore, the closeness of recent elections is partly a consequence of intense partisanship, which Trump’s nomination suggests may be fraying. The last partisan realignment, between about 1968 and 1980, produced both some highly competitive elections (1968, 1976) and some blowouts (1972, 1980).
Although what voters do will ultimately be more important, it will also be worth watching how Republican Party elites behave and how much they unite behind Trump. On Twitter this weekend, there was a lot of activity behind the hashtag #NeverTrump, with various conservative intellectuals and operatives pledging that they’d refuse to support Trump in November. Rubio’s Twitter account employed the hashtag also, although Rubio himself has been ambiguous about whether he’d back Trump.
It’s reasonably safe to say that some of the people in the #NeverTrump movement will, in fact, wind up supporting Trump. Clinton, very likely the Democratic nominee, is a divisive figure, and some anti-Trump conservatives will conclude that Trump is the lesser of two evils. Others will get caught up in the esprit de corps of the election. Some of them might be reassured by how Trump conducts himself during the general election campaign or whom he picks as his running mate.
But I’d be equally surprised if there were total capitulation to Trump. Instead, I’d expect quite a bit of resistance from Republican elites. One thing this election has probably taught us is that there are fewer movement conservatives than those within the conservative movement might want to admit. Rank-and-file Republican voters aren’t necessarily all that ideological, and they might buy into some of the Republican platform while rejecting other parts of it. They might care more about Trump’s personality than his policy views.
But there are certainly some movement conservatives, and they have outsized influence on social media, talk radio, television and in other arenas of political discourse. And if you are a movement conservative, Trump is arguably a pretty terrible choice, taking your conservative party and remaking it in his unpredictable medley of nationalism, populism and big-government Trumpism.
If you’re one of these ideological conservatives, it may even be in your best interest for Trump to lose in November. If Trump loses, especially by a wide margin, his brand of politics will probably be discredited, or his nomination might look like a strange, one-off “black swan” that you’ll be better equipped to prevent the next time around. You’ll have an opportunity to get your party back in 2020, and your nominee might stand a pretty decent chance against Clinton, who could be elected despite being quite unpopular because Trump is even less popular and who would be aiming for the Democratic Party’s fourth straight term in office.
But if Trump wins in November, you might as well relocate the Republican National Committee’s headquarters to Trump Tower. The realignment of the Republican Party will be underway, and you’ll have been left out of it.
The word Conservative does not mean to the people here what it means to Washington.
I read the definition of conservative on the internet, and it is vastly different from what Republican politicians use.
I think the political definition would be “rube with deep pockets, people more concerned about lip-service than results, those who suffer from memory loss”
Ted Cruz, R, TX, A 97% https://www.conservativereview.com/scorecard [#2 behind Mike Lee]
“To put Cruz’s voting record in context . . . Club for Growth says Cruz scored 92 percent in 2014 and 100 percent in 2013 on the Club for Growth scorecard, ranking eighth in 2014 and first in 2013 among senators . . . Cruz scored 95 percent on the National Taxpayers Union’s 2013 scorecard, ranking the Texas senator third out of 100 senators . . . Cruz did even better in the American Conservative Union ratings. Cruz got a perfect score in 2014 and 2013 and has a lifetime rating of 100 percent” http://www.factcheck.org/2016/01/cruzs-conservative-credentials/
Trump and Cruz are very different, but I am disappointed in those on FR who judge Cruz by the dishonest or out of context campaign attacks on him. Taken as a whole and in context, he is far better than any candidate we saw from Reagan in 1984 until the current election. Whether you think Trump is better (I think Trump is less conservative but more electable) or not, Cruz is among the best we have in office today. He’s not a “nasty little piece of tissue” on your shoe, and that sort of unjustified rhetoric is unbecoming to a thoughtful conservative site like FR.
Restroom and I hope someone remembers to flush.
The Establishment is more concerned about losing power over the Party (and patronage within it), than they are about losing the election.
The enthusiasm for Trump currently is all reflected in the primary voters who cast their ballots for him. He will get very few votes beyond that in the general election. What constituency will he have beyond those already raving about him? Its not as if he as an unknown that will grow on people over the summer. He is 100% known right now.
Well, heights doesn’t speak for me. There is a lot of boiling emotions right now.
Hopefully we all can get past this in the future.
Silver is almost 100% data based. Not a whole lot of opinion is his various analyses. He’s also very accurate with his predictions. That being said he’s been on his Twitter feed the last few weeks talking about how a number of statistical precedents have been broken so it’s possible that this election and Trump are a black swan event.
As someone who was involved with data analysis and analytics most of their professional life I have great respect for Nate Silver’s work. Trump is set to shake up the model. No matter what one believes it takes a significant earthquake to actually move reliable models (and the earth). This may be one of those major earthquakes. It may just affect the Republican Party or it may affect the whole electorate.
That is your right. I would not deride you for making it.
I’m one that won’t and I’m certainly not alone.
There actually is leadership, and the leadership is actively opposing the small government agenda of real conservatives. It’s nice to see them fail.
Kind of supports the narrative that the vast majority of Trump supporters are under-educated, i.e. lacking a college degree.
Hoo-boy, am I going to get mauled for this...lol!
To my FRiends who support Trump, I fully acknowledge that tomorrow will likely be a decisive day for the Trump and Cruz camps.
For whichever side wins, may all sides join forces to focus their rancor on Hillary. Bernie's a dead man walking.
sorry, you’re wrong according to polls that have had Cruz beating Hitlery for some time now... are you really unaware of them or just being a typical sTrumpetron ?
ymmv
There is no statistical evidence that Conservatives stayed home in 2012.
Four million “white” voters stayed home in 2012, and many people just assume “white” means Conservative.
In 2012, Romney actually got 1.5 million more “white” votes than McCain got in 2008.
In 2012, Obama lost 5.5 million “white” votes compared to 2008.
Anyone who disputes my statements can do the same basic junior high school math I did.
Wikipedia has the Congressional Certified vote totals for 2012 and 2008:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_2012
The Cornell-Roper Center has the National Exit Pool (NEP) racial and ethnic voting percentages:
http://ropercenter.cornell.edu/polls/us-elections/how-groups-voted/how-groups-voted-2012/
Certainly possible and would be fun to watch from a data perspective (I do forecasting as a profession). “Black swan” events don’t come around often. But 2008 gave us the financial crisis which swept Obama into power. There isn’t one of those “events” going on but Trump might be that type of candidate.
My gut feel is of he wins the nomination it will be an abject disaster for the GOP and will be a total landslide for Hillary and the Dems. But that’s based on logic and “conventional wisdom” which is being thrown out the window right now :-)
I will not vote for Trump.
He is no better, no worse than Hillary.
We will write in Ted Cruz if We have to and there are thousands more of us.
There is a “just in case” write in movement right now.
So I guess that all those votes for Trump in SC were from non-conservatives.
Polls have show roughly 50% of non-Trump Republicans (so 30% or so) state they will not vote for Trump in the general election:
Now, there may be a big change of heart when staring at PIAPS, but probably not.
There are a LOT of Republicans who just can’t support Trump.
I might be able to stuff my nose with cotton and pull the lever for Trump, but it would be very hard to do.
How does one write in on an electronic ballot.
He will thank you for your vote and there will be three others to take your place making calls and walking door-to-door.
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