Posted on 08/26/2015 8:39:06 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
The big, existential question for Republicans right now is: who are Donald Trumps supporters?
It matters because this will determine the future, and the future prospects, of the party. I heartily agree with Ben Domenech, whose article on this just made it harder for me to fulfill my obligations to his publication, by pre-empting most of what I was planning to write about Trump for The Federalist. Ben argues that Trumpism would turn the Republicans from a classically liberal right to a European-style nationalist party that is xenophobic, anti-capitalist, vaguely militarist, pro-state, and consistently anti-Semitic. If you criticize Donald Trump, it is exactly the sort of hate mail you should expect to receive. If that happens, he writes, we would be losing a rare and precious inheritance that is our only real living link to the Revolutionary era and its truly revolutionary ideas about self-government.
I dont think this is actually going to happen, because the classically liberal wing of the right is too big and too strong. The Republican Party just spent the last six years, during the rise of the Tea Party movement, absorbing a fair portion of the libertarian wing of the right, the Rand Paul wing, which I suspect has little overlap with the Trump phenomenon. More widely, the right has benefited from a long intellectual renaissance focused on the universal ideas on which America was founded, which has no need for what Ben calls identity politics for white people.
But it would help to have some more exact information on the size and composition of Trumps supporters. That Trump will not be the partys nominee is something we can (pretty much) take for granted. Too much of the party hates him, and not just the establishmentwhich critics like myself are somewhat comically assumed to be part ofbut the rank and file and a fair portion of the punditry. Thus, we find that about a third of Republicans say they would never support him, far more than any other candidate.
So that leaves us to contemplate what will happen if Trump doesnt get the nomination. Will he be this cycles Ross Perot, who runs a third-party campaign and scoops up such a large portion of disaffected Republicans and independents that he tips the election to a Democratic candidate who only gets 35% of the vote? Will he be this cycles Ralph Nader, who persists long enough to peel off a few percentage points of the vote, enough to tip the results of a close election? Or will he be this cycles Ron Paul (or Pat Buchanan), who has a loud and fanatical core of supporters and perhaps makes a splash in the early primaries, but is ultimately irrelevant to the outcome?
We can break the question down more exactly, looking at six categories of Trump voters:
1) Low-information voters who dont really know much about Trump or his policies, but hey, hes a celebrity, so they tell pollsters theyre voting for him.
2) Actual conservatives who like Trump because hes a tough-talking fighter and a businessman who gets things done.
3) Disgruntled non-ideological independents who normally dont vote because it never makes any difference.
4) Single-issue anti-immigration fanatics.
5) Archie Bunker types who normally vote Republican because they see it as the party of identity politics for white people, the ones who want the country to be run by and for people like me. These are the folks on Twitter and in the comments fields of my articles who extol the virtue of European immigrants, without realizing that Hispanic derives from the word for Spain, and that Spain is in Europe.
6) Outright racists who dont normally vote because neither party has the guts to embrace White Power.
Obviously, if its mostly 1) and 6), we can expect the Trump phenomenon to flame out quickly. Group 1 is large, but their political interest is fleeting and they dont tend to turn out for actual elections. Group 6 is, thankfully, quite small. And the more Group 1 actually hears about the people in Group 6say, the guys who were inspired by Trumps rhetoric to beat up a Hispanic man in Boston, or the guys shouting White Power at the Trump rally in Alabamathe more they are going to decide they dont want to be on this particular bandwagon.
(VIDEO-AT-LINK)
I think the same also goes for Group 2, the conservatives who want an uncompromising champion. The more his opponents hammer Trump about his ideological flip-flops and history of political cronyism, the more he mouths ill-informed and ungrammatical opinions, the more he becomes a cultural laughingstock, the more they are likely to decide that their ideological cause would be best served by a different standard-bearer. And its not as if this presidential contest provides no other options. Maybe not Scott Walker, who flubbed the Trump test by offering three different opinions on birthright citizenship in the space of a week. But Ted Cruz and Rand Paul are not exactly establishment sellouts.
At the very least, when it eventually becomes clear hes not going to get the nomination, these voters are likely to be persuaded to back another candidate.
Group 3, the disgruntled independents, could cause trouble by encouraging Trump to mount an independent presidential campaign, but theyre not really lost votes for Republicans, because they dont normally vote Republican. In fact, history suggests that third party candidates tend to steal away independent voters in roughly equal numbers from both parties.
So were down to two groups who are the most dangerous to Republicans in 2016: the anti-immigration fanatics and the genteel quasi-racists. There is obviously some overlap here, though its hard to say how much. You dont need to dislike brown-skinned people in order to think Latin American illegal immigrants are the biggest crisis this country is facing, way more important than anything and everything else. But it helps.
The worst possibility is that these two groups turn out to be large and emboldened and unwilling to compromise now that theyve found someone willing to pander to them openly. (I wont give Trump the credit of assuming he sincerely believes his rhetoric on this issue.)
So how many of these people are there, how committed are they, and how bitter will they be if their newfound champion doesnt win?
There dont seem to be many good numbers on this, which is part of the reason the Trump story is so big. There are a lot of candidates who loom large during the primary pre-season precisely because no votes have been cast yet and there is little in the way of detailed and reliable poll data. So a candidate who is the favorite of the media (whether they love him or love to hate him) can be magnified in importance.
The only real hint at good data Ive seen so far is quoted in a New York Times story:
Unlike most public polls, Civiss relied on a list of registered voters that included their voting histories, allowing it to measure Mr. Trumps support among those who regularly cast ballots in primary elections. The survey, which was conducted on landlines Aug. 10 through Wednesday and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus four percentage points, showed Mr. Trumps support at 16 percent among registered voters who identified as Republicans.
The polls that dont control for voting history show Trump with more like 25% of the vote. His 16% in the Civis data is still more than any other single candidate, but thats not really relevant. The non-Trump vote is currently split among more than a dozen people, but it wont always be. As minor candidates drop out and Trump faces the top two or three alternatives, he could easily find himself in the shadow of candidates who command 20 or 30 percent of the vote.
I am assuming that Trumps current numbers are more of a ceiling than a floor. Unlike most other candidates, he is already a thoroughly known quantity. Whereas another candidate could use 16% in the polls as a springboard to introduce himself to voters who dont know him yet, everybody already knows Trump. If they dont like him now, its unlikely he will grow on them.
Heres another interesting item from that poll data: Mr. Trump performed best among less-frequent voters. He had the support of 22 percent of Republican-leaning adults who did not vote in the 2012 general election. This confirms that a fair bit of Trumps support is from those who are swayed by his celebrity, or from the disgruntled independentsvoters that Republicans wont lose if the party dumps Trump, because they didnt have them in the first place.
The final interesting item:
[Trumps] support is not tethered to a single issue or sentiment: immigration, economic anxiety, or an anti-establishment mood. Tellingly, when asked to explain support for Mr. Trump in their own words, voters of varying backgrounds used much the same language, calling him ballsy and saying they admired that he tells it like it is and relished how he isnt politically correct. Trumpism, the data and interviews suggest, is an attitude, not an ideology.
This is encouraging in one respect: it implies that a fair bit of Trumps support is from my Group 2 above, the conservatives who want a tough-talking fighter, rather than the single-issue anti-immigration voters or the Archie Bunker contingent. Those other groups are more likely to be Trump dead-enders who will follow him through an independent challenge. While Trumps appeal is based more on personality than on the issues, his cult of personality is disturbingly strong. The New York Times report observes that many Trump voters dont have a second choice. And a Frank Luntz focus group of Trump supporters found that nothing disqualifies Trump in the eyes of his supporters. They are in it for the Trumpiness and dont really care about anything else.
By contrast, the conservatives looking for a tough guy are going to be more likely to accept a second choice. So by the time we whittle off a little more of Trumps 16 percent, he starts to look less like a new Ross Perot and more like a new Ralph Nader: someone who commands a few percentage points of the vote and can only make a difference if the race is really, really close, as it was when Nader peeled off a few thousand Florida votes from Al Gore in 2000 (though even then, its still not certain whether the Nader Effect tipped the balance).
In short, Trump is likely to be relevant only if the non-Trump Republican nominee ends up being particularly weak and uninspiring.
You dont suppose there are any chances of that happening, do you?
Which is to say that perhaps the wise thing to do is to spend less time focusing on Trump and more time figuring which is the strongest, most principled, and most inspiring of the other nominees.
So you think Trump is anti-semitic?
Since he has all the money he needs to live the rest of his years in grandeur, I don’t think he is in it for fun, or attention. I think it is legacy. To actually make a difference - and if his ego is as large as most claim, legacy will drive him to the end of the earth.
And he is truly patriotic. Tired of seeing this once great nation kissing the a$$es of little two bit nations.
So are the rest of us.
I know I didn’t spend 10 years of my life all over the planet fighting for the nation I see today.
Just releasing one actual white paper on immigration policy is more than any other candidate. Immigration is a great start.
Tax policy has also been more heavily outlined by Trump than anyone else as well. You’d be hard pressed to name the tax policy of any other candidate.
Maybe he should hire some IT folks to do his site instead of just Twitter?
The article was nothing but slander of the riotous right.
His tax policy is just more of the same: A graduated income tax. Straight out of the goals of Marx and Engels.
What nonsense are you going on about now? They still sell those plastic models at Hobby Lobby. Or maybe board games or Magic The Gathering? Knitting or crochet, perhaps?
Do you want to know, or do you want to bitch?
I'm sure Jeb's website has everything laid out just as you'd like it.
How'd you find that out?
I learned it on Free Republic.
Do you have contrary information?
I sure didn't learn it from his website, which is almost substance-free.
If Trump supporters want to have a war with conservatives, this is exactly how to provoke one.
Yes.
http://www.ontheissues.org/Celeb/Donald_Trump_Tax_Reform.htm
Donald Trump on Tax Reform
2000 Reform Primary Challenger for President
4 brackets; 1-5-10-15%; kill death tax & corporate tax
My 5-part tax plan involves reforming the income tax. The government confiscates way too much of your paycheck. The tax code is also a very complicated system that forces Americans to waste 6.1 billion hours a year trying to figure it out.
What does that tell you? It tells me that it’s time we restore simplicity & sanity to the income tax. Here’s my income tax plan:
Up to $30,000, you pay 1%
From $30,000 to $100,000, you pay 5%
From $100,000 to $1 million, you pay 10%
On $1 million or above, you pay 15%
It’s clear and fair. Best of all, it can be filled out on the back of a postcard and will save Americans big bucks on accountants and massive amounts of time wasted attempting to decipher the tax code.
Our country is hungry for real tax reform. That’s why we should implement the 1-5-10-15 income tax plan. And we need to enact [the rest of] my 5-part tax policy: kill the death tax; lower the tax on capital gains & dividends; eliminate corporate taxes; and a 20% import tax.
Source: Time to Get Tough, by Donald Trump, p. 64-65 , Dec 5, 2011
Well?
If "Conservatives" continue to employ snark and passive aggression as their tool of persuasion, I think it will be a short war.
Just waiting for you to demonstrate how difficult it was for you to get the answers you complained about.
Damn! Marx and Engels have a pretty good plan there...
It’s very difficult, actually, to sort out Trump’s positions, from historically left of Obama and Clinton to wherever he’s currently landing on the right in his current incarnation.
Especially when there’s a grand total of ONE position listed on his official campaign website.
You really think so, huh?
You flatter yourself.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.