Trump and the Silent Majority
Republicans want him but do they really, really want him?
While perusing the front page of the Washington Post website, I saw a sidebar promo for an opinion piece titled “Might a silent GOP majority be ready to move beyond Trump?” Betteridge’s Law of Headlines notwithstanding, I clicked the link to see it was written by E.J. Dionne. Nonetheless, I persisted.
Is the Republican Party irrevocably committed to Donald Trump? GOP voters will begin to answer this consequential question in Iowa on Monday and eight days later in New Hampshire. Believe it or not, there is a chance the verdict will be no.
So you’re saying there’s a chance?
This is not one of those defy-the-conventional-wisdom-for-the-heck-of-it takes. You can’t look at polls outside New Hampshire and pretend the Las Vegas odds-makers are wrong in viewing Trump as the overwhelming favorite to win the Republican nomination.
No. No, you can’t.
But there is a difference between likelihood and inevitability, just as there is a difference between the few Republicans who are firmly anti-Trump and a larger group willing to ponder escorting him off the national stage.
The candidate who has understood these distinctions best is former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley. This is why she is poised to run second to Trump in Iowa and has a real chance of beating him in New Hampshire. Trump’s campaign clearly sees the threat and has moved from attacking Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to assailing her.
While the New Hampshire primary has typically voted for the eventual nominee, there have been notable exceptions. The state went with Henry Cabot Lodge in 1964; eventual nominee Barry Goldwater finished tied for second. Pat Buchanan won in 1996; Bob Dole was the nominee. John McCain won in 2000; George W. Bush eventually won. (It’s been way less predictive on the Democratic side, with Estes Kefauver and Bernie Sanders winning twice and Edmund Muskie, Gary Hart, and Paul Tsongas having their high water marks there.)
Republican pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson offered a shrewd and appropriately tentative reading of the party’s electorate: “There’s not an anti-Trump majority,” she told me. “But it might be possible to build a Beyond Trump Majority.”
I mean . . . I guess. But that’s quite a leap from where we started.
The decisive GOP group, she said, are voters who “say there are things they like about Trump, and things they don’t like about Trump.” Some, maybe many, will vote for him anyway because they “harbor the hope that they can get good Trump and bad Trump will go away.” But others are persuadable because “bad Trump” still troubles them.
Now, that I agree with. While Trump is more genuinely popular with Republicans than I used to think (although, granted, it’s partly because the most virulently anti-Trump Republicans aren’t Republicans anymore), I do think there’s a huge swath of his reporters who would prefer Somebody Else. But I’m highly skeptical that any of the current candidates for the nomination qualify.
The same polling showing Trump with a strong lead in Iowa also offered glimmers of the ambivalence about him. A December CBS News-YouGov poll found that found that 76 percent of likely caucus-goers were considering voting for Trump for a variety of reasons, including — by big margins — that they felt “things were better under Trump” and that “he represents Iowa values.”
But only 54 percent said their support reflected a desire “to show support for his legal fights,” and just 40 percent said they backed him because they “want payback for 2020.” In other words, about half of Trump’s potential voters rejected two of the core rationales he offers for his candidacy.
But that’s just thin gruel. The key is that 76 percent are strongly considering voting for him; that they’re less enthusiastic about certain aspects of his candidacy is, frankly, irrelevant.
Unlike DeSantis, who ran, in the words of Iowa State University political scientist David Peterson, as “diet Trump,” Haley realized there was a market for a Republican candidate who was stylistically different from Trump, could draw more middle-of-the-road voters in November and move the country past the “chaos” of the Trump era.
But unlike former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, whose frontal attacks on Trump endeared him to many Democrats and the relatively small constituency of anti-Trumpers in the party, Haley knew she couldn’t ask Republicans who had voted for Trump twice to admit they were wrong. “She has managed to walk a fine line,” Republican pollster Whit Ayres told me. “She avoided the Chris Christie message that Trump is unfit for office while at the same time making a case that it’s time to move on.”
This is why she has an excellent chance of running second in Iowa and pushing DeSantis into political oblivion.
So . . . that’s probably right. But it still doesn’t establish that Trump’s nomination—barring being banned from the ballot—is other than inevitable.
After several more paragraphs bolstering the case that Haley is likely now the favorite over DeSantis to finish a distance second to Trump, Dionne concludes,
Beyond Iowa and New Hampshire, the road will get tougher for Haley, including in her home state of South Carolina where Trump is very popular. A bitter Christie was caught before he withdrew on a hot mic predicting Haley is “going to get smoked.”
Maybe Christie is right, given that Haley’s exquisite balancing act can smack of unprincipled opportunism and sometimes leads her into gaffes and incoherence.
But if she does win New Hampshire, with the help of Christie’s former supporters, she will give her party’s quiet doubters elsewhere a chance to voice their qualms about Trump — discreetly, in the voting booths. After all, the idea of a “silent majority” was a Republican invention.
Look, I hope this is right. Having the two choices in November both be non-insurrectionist, pro-democracy candidates would be swell. But, right now, Trump is polling over 50% in Haley’s home state, more than doubling her support. (Granted, there is only one truly current poll and only two within the last five weeks. But all of the polls have shown similar numbers.
Let’s say that DeSantis, Ramaswamy, and Hutchinson follow Christie’s lead and drop out before then, leaving us with a head-to-head fight between Trump and Haley. I simply don’t see how she wins if she’s afraid to take him on directly, declaring him unfit for office.
Bush ran for reelection in 1992, when he won the NH primary, and by a fairly solid margin at that, but Buchanan’s getting more than a third of the vote was considered an embarrassment given that Bush was an incumbent.
In 1996 Buchanan did indeed win the NH primary, but it was an open race in which the eventual nominee was Bob Dole.
There isn’t a chance in hell Trump gets defeated in the primaries by a different Republican. In the quantum-impossible scenario that that were to happen, Trump would cry fraud and refuse to endorse the person, pretty much guaranteeing the party’s defeat in November. I think that scenario in itself makes Republicans who would prefer a different nominee than Trump hesitate to vote for one.
I’ll repeat my prediction: Trump will win all 57 states.
“Let’s say that DeSantis, Ramaswamy, and Hutchinson follow Christie’s lead and drop out before then, leaving us with a head-to-head fight between Trump and Haley.”
I suspect DeSantis and Ramaswamy dropping out would increase Trump’s lead over Haley, as the majority of their supporters would swing to Trump. Hutchinson doesn’t have enough support to matter.
@Kylopod: Yes—fixed. I remembered Buchanan giving Bush more of a fight than normal for a sitting Presidnet, so naturally took the 1996 win to have been 1992. New Hampshire was closish, with Bush winning 14 delegates to Buchanan’s 9.
One more example to add to James’ list: Bill Clinton lost the NH primary in 1992 to Paul Tsongas, though he successfully spun the idea that he was the “Comeback Kid” on the premise that he beat expectations after the flurry of scandals he had been hit by the previous week.
I think in both that primary and the Republican one that year (and this isn’t the first time James has incorrectly remembered Buchanan as the winner), there’s a sort of Mandela Effect where a candidate who didn’t outright win a primary was treated as though he did because he exceeded expectations.
The Sounds of Tsongas*…. I remember that song parody which was played on a local talk radio program in 1992. Unfortunately I don’t remember the precise lyrics but the words consisted of Tsongas tax and economics views.
Something shown above stands out. NH has had a tendency in the primaries to support candidates from neighboring states. Tsongas, Dukakis, and Lodge from MA, Muskie from ME, Sanders from VT. This tendency doesn’t always work. Carter defeating Kennedy in 1980 for example.
That no Trump challenger comes from New England doesn’t bode well.
BTW I emailed James about the 1992-1996 stuff.
*Just in case people are forgetting, there was the Simon & Garfunkel song ‘The sounds of silence’.
@Bill Jempty:
The only New England Republican I’m aware of who was even talked about as a potential candidate was Sununu, and that would have been something of a curse in disguise during the NH primary, because he’d almost certainly be trailing Trump in his own home state–the same problem Haley faces in SC and DeSantis in FL.
Home state has declined in importance in general elections, but it’s still pretty paramount in primaries. There are various examples of candidates dropping out because they realize they’re about to lose their home state, or (like Rubio in 2016) dropping out right after losing their home state. I don’t know of any candidate in the modern era who has lost their home state primary/caucus and gone on to win the nomination.
But in the Trump era it’s like the non-Trump Republicans are all being graded on a curve–the one who fares against Trump the least badly will get treated as a “winner” by certain parts of the media. The fact that there are even discussions of Haley being a viable candidate even if she doesn’t outright win SC is a testament to the level of delusion.
Here’s a recent piece in the NYT (no subscription needed) highlighting something I think is crucial to a large subsection of Trump supporters: they view his bullying as a sign of strength and determination, which means no one can push him (or the US) around. And they view his lying, insults and other bad behavior as expressions of that strength and determination. They take it as a given that he is a business genius, i.e. not a politician, and that he should be sweeping aside the spineless bureaucrats, who deserve his contempt and disrespect.
If Biden is going to depress the turnout from this contingent (changing their minds is a non-starter) he needs to attack Trump head on with those issues. He should openly mock Trump’s business acumen and point out that he inherited a fortune and lost it all in a string of bankruptcies and was chased out of the NYC real estate market with his tail between his legs and that he now makes his money with one shady scheme after another. He should also attack him on the tough message, pointing out that he only goes after those that are constrained, but when he faces US enemies like Putin and Baby Kim he caves, and embarrasses himself and the US by fawning over them like a fan girl.
@Kylopod:
Not precisely what you wrote, but I will point out that Al Gore lost Tennessee in the 2000 general election. If he won it, Bush wouldn’t have been President.
@MarkedMan:
Really thoughtful theory of IR Ms. Sharp has, there.
It’s annoying that it never occurs to people that government can’t be run like a business, because it isn’t a business. Nor should it be run like a business or a household.
I’m confused. Aren’t Nutmeggers from Connecticut?
@MarkedMan: Back when airline hijackings were a big deal we arrested the hijackers, tried them on the most serious charges we could, and went for the death penalty. I don’t recall if we executed any. And hijackings continued until we built up enough air marshals and locked cockpit doors, and metal detectors, and TSA baggage checks. I always thought we’d have been better served by finding them innocent by reason of insanity and institutionalizing them. Instead of making them out to be horrible, scary terrorists, point and laugh at them as poor deluded losers.
Absolutely, don’t make Trump out to be a threat to democracy because he’s powerful and evil and scary. Make him out to be a threat because he’s a clown. It’s OK to say we’re afraid of him being elected, but scared like he’s a six year old with a loaded AK-47. He makes it so easy to point and laugh it’s malpractice not to.
@CSK: FWIW, I lived in CT for a few years and the only time I heard “nutmeg”, “nutmegger” or “nutmegged” used was at my kids soccer games, where it was the G rated version of how you describe an offensive player passing the ball between the legs of a defender.
@Bill Jempty:
And Romney lost Massachusetts, and Trump lost New York. That’s why I said, “Home state has declined in importance in general elections, but it’s still pretty paramount in primaries.”
In general elections, the biggest factor in who wins a state is its partisan lean, and in our very polarized era that usually trumps home-state advantage. Bush won Texas and Obama won Illinois, but there was nothing particularly notable about those since they were solidly for their respective parties anyway.
The last time there was a very clear home-state effect in a general election was probably when Clinton won Arkansas. (In 1992 with Perot doing unusually well for an indie, it was the only state where Clinton–or any candidate–exceeded 50% of the vote. And Clinton’s the only Democrat to carry Arkansas since the 1970s.) You can also see the effect with candidates who lost in landslides (Mondale only carrying Minnesota in Reagan’s 49-state sweep; Goldwater’s only win outside the Deep South in 1964 being Arizona). In the 21st century, though, the effect seems to have practically disappeared in general elections.
In primaries when all the candidates are from one party, home-state effect still seems to be pretty important. In fact there are several examples of candidates who only win their home state (John Kasich only winning Ohio in 2016 is one). But it’s also wrapped up in the whole expectations game, so that a candidate winning their home state doesn’t do much for said candidate. One prime example of that is 1992 when Iowa Senator Tom Harkin was considered such a strong favorite in the Iowa caucus that the other candidates didn’t even bother and as a result the caucus was treated as irrelevant during that cycle.
Going back to Nixon’s use of the term, the “silent majority” has always been an irritatingly noisy minority.
@CSK:
You beat me to it. Granite Stater’s prefer hard cider to nutmeg and would never usurp the the nickname of CT’s residents.
@CSK:
@Sleeping Dog:
Yep. Wrong state. Granite Staters would not approve…
On the topic at hand, I think Dionne is just trying to get some click-throughs. If Nikki Haley does manage to eek out an unexpected victory in NH (and that is unlikely though not impossible, as it all depends on what undeclared voters shut out of a meaningful primary on the Democratic side decide to do), it’s a couple of days’ headline at best. Trump is still the overwhelming favorite of base voters, and unless he implodes, he’s the nominee.
@CSK: @Sleeping Dog: @Jen: Yes, I looked it up to make sure my memory wasn’t off (it was) and thought I’d gone back to change it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
We have been subjected to endless “What Do Trumpists Really Think/Want?” stories since 2015 and the answer remains the same.
They are white Christians aggrieved by their loss of stature and dominance and they want a strongman to restore them to where they think they should be, atop the social hierarchy.
@MarkedMan:
I believe the accepted term for this subsection is “a basked of deplorables.”
@Chip Daniels: Look, we can deplore them, but the reality is that throughout history a significant percentage of any population rallies around a perceived strongman, even one who by objective measures is a disaster. The more uncertainty, the higher the percentage. The better leaders we support need to either neutralize those voters or co-opt them.
It’s a weird year because Trump is basically an incumbent. So, he gets most of the benefits of incumbency. Added to that is that he has a lock on the base who aren’t interested in shopping around for an alternative. The marginal GoP voter will probably just bandwagon along.
There probably aren’t enough Democrats who care and anti-Trump independents/GoP to vote for alternatives in the GoP primaries. I will be one of them, as I can choose which primary to participate in as an independent in Colorado, but I doubt it will matter.
About the only chance DeSatanis or Haley have, is a replay of the Clinton Curse of 2016. That’s when a candidate is so obviously going to win, that a large fraction of their supporters doesn’t even bother to vote.
This comes with two problems. One is that primary voters may be more committed to a candidate, and thus less likely to skip their chance to vote. The other is the vast difference in preferences. A “large fraction” here is a relative term, maybe 4-5% maybe lower.
Lastly, the staggered nature of the primaries, means no one is likely to pull off a big surprise win to take the nomination.
@MarkedMan:
I get the longing for a strongman, especially in a time of crisis (or of perceived crisis). What I don’t get is the massive denial of reality and facts, that gets them to support Lardass. He’s weak, stupid, incompetent, and lazy.
They may think they’re getting Putin, but they’re voting for Yeltsin’s SNL parody minus the booze.
@Andy:
I’ve heard this argument before, and I’m not sure I agree–it depends what you mean by it.
It’s hard to draw any historical comparisons given that to have a former president as a candidate is basically unprecedented, at least in a modern context (Grover Cleveland and Teddy Roosevelt being the prime older examples). However, in 1980 former President Ford teased another run for the Republican nomination, and he was included in several polls. In most of them, Reagan was ahead. (That may have been why Ford decided not to enter the race.) So I don’t think we can make any assumption that if a former president runs, they’re like a quasi-incumbent who becomes a front-runner in their party by default. That just happens to be the case with Trump, due to his cultish hold over the party, and indeed due to the stolen-election narrative where a large amount of Republican voters believe he really is the incumbent. (Sometimes in a very literal sense–I’ve seen videos of Trumpists being interviewed who claim Trump is secretly still the president. Sure, it’s good to be cautious about extrapolating from a few random nuts off the street, but I think it says something about the overall mindset of the MAGA crowd.) And in some respects it’s not so much incumbency that motivates his supporters, but revenge–they want to fix the stolen election of 2020 by returning Trump to his rightful place on the throne.
@Kathy:
Unfortunately, I think it makes perfect sense. Since Reagan, I’ve realized that people who crave someone who gives them a feeling of strength and certainty are more drawn to the out and out liars (who are frequently incompetent to boot) then to anyone else. That’s only logical, because a liar never needs to express doubt, never needs to admit error. There is no one more certain or error free than the liar, at least in their words.
@MarkedMan: To the extent policy matters, what do they want? They want healthcare insurance, but not Obamacare. They want SS and Medicare preserved, despite Chuckles Koch’s insistence otherwise. They want help, but they don’t want anything that could be considered welfare. They want each of their small towns to have a manufacturing plant that isn’t coming back. They want all gays and trans out of sight. They want a return to the fifties when Blacks and Hispanics knew their place. And so on. Basically no one except a hugely unprincipled liar can even pretend to promise them what they want.
@Kathy:
Succinct, descriptive, and amusing. Nicely done.
@gVOR10:
All the things you list are details. What they want, what they need, is to put their faith in a strongman.
@MarkedMan:
There’s nothing with which I disagree with in that NYT piece. I would add only that the MAGAs have merged their identities with Trump’s, much as they did with Sarah Palin.
Trump is them, and they are Trump. It’s a bit sad that they don’t realize he despises them.
@Kylopod:
Ford never won an election though. He became President only because Nixon resigned and then lost to Carter.
And yeah, no doubt Trump’s base helps a great deal. But so does the fact that he was already President; everyone already knows who he is, and, despite what Democrats (and me) may wish, a lot of people think he did better than Biden as President.
I saw this ABC polling today, for instance. Trump has a higher retrospective job approval. Less than half of “leans Republicans” think Trump represents their values or understands their problems, but 68% think he has the best chance to win in November.
Why do they think he has the best chance to win in November despite them not thinking he understands their problems? My guess is for largely for similar reasons that Democrats think Biden has the best chance to win in November despite Democrats not liking Biden very much. You don’t leave the horse that’s recently won a championship in the barn.
@CSK: I think the relationship between the bully, Scut Farkus and his wannabe sidekick, Grover Dill in “A Christmas Story” explains the relationship between Trump and his supporters perfectly. It would make no sense asking Grover about his future dreams and plans and whether Scut is the guy who can deliver on those for him, just as it makes no sense to ask trumpers whether Donnie Boy will really help them get what they claim to want. Grover is with Scut because he sees Scut as the toughest guy around and he gets excited watching him bully and pound the weaklings. Similarly, to a trumper, his main appeal is when he does all the ugly things we despise.
It’s why it’s a waste of time trying to have a discussion with our resident trumper. He might bring various things up because he thinks they will somehow resonate with us, but his real love of Trump comes from the big man being willing to but those goddamm _____’s in their place.
@gVOR10: Equally importantly, they don’t want people who are undeserving to get any of the stuff they want for themselves.
@MarkedMan:
And all this because Trump was scorned and excluded by the Manhattan haut monde. That seething resentment has been his motivating factor all along: “I’ll show them.”
There’s a companion piece by McKay Coppins, “You Should Go to a Trump Rally,” today at http://www.theatlantic.com.
@Andy:
He lost 1976 very narrowly. After Carter was president for a few years and grew unpopular, a do-over might have made sense to some people. The energy in the GOP was with Reagan, but that had to do with the direction the party was taking, not necessarily with a need to move on from a candidate who lost (the fact that Reagan came very close to choosing Ford as his running mate proves this).
And really, do you think if Carter had run in 1984 or Bush Sr. in 1996, they’d have become front-runners? No way to know, but I doubt it.
Before leaving this subject, I should note that Herbert Hoover was a sorta marginal candidate in 1940–he skipped the primaries, which candidates could do at the time, but he attended the convention and tried to marshal delegates, of which he got a few.
The most rational basis for former President Trump as a viable candidate in 2024 is that, like Ford, he only lost very narrowly last time (in an electoral-college sense). The real basis, though, is that he’s taken over the entire party with a giant cult of personality, intimidated the minority of Republican non-fans into submission, and constructed a delusion for his followers that 2020 was stolen and that therefore he’s entitled to be reinstated by default. I don’t think it’s something that springs simply from his being a former president.
I think a decent number of Republicans would like someone different. Someone who is different from all the politicians we get as Presidents, in policy, demeanor and style. Maybe with a mustache, just to set him apart, since we haven’t had a President with a mustache in a lifetime. Not a big, ostentatious mustache, but just a little one. A modest mustache.
I saw a brief Fox News clip of Republican caucus goers and who they were voting for and why. One of the panelists was a young African-American woman voting for Trump. the first reason out of her mouth was that she felt young conservatives were treated unfairly on college campuses and she wanted a president who would fix it. really? That’s the issue that is motivating you to brave sub-zero temperatures to go vote for a crook?
These people have nothing but petty grievances and hurt feelings. All other policy preferences are secondary.
@Gustopher: A pencil-thin moustache? The Boston Blackie kind?
James, you’re really grasping at straws here
Do you honestly believe they have qualms about trump? Because if they did they had a million and one chances to voice those qualms in the voting booth and outside of it. They could have stayed home on election day. They could have voted for his GOP opponents on primary day. They didn’t. So either they are just fine with trump and his fascistic fantasies or they are f’n cowards to the core.
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA…. James? Really? I mean, are you being serious? This is your come to Jesus moment, James. Your old party, the one you grew up in and love? It’s dead James. Yeah yeah… Sure, their are a few tired old war horses standing on principle in opposition to trump. Have you noticed how none of them are no longer welcome at GOP functions? Cheney and Kinzinger were the only 2 brave souls willing to stand up against trump and his lowly acolytes in the wake of J6 and they are… What? You can’t call them Republicans, that’s for damned sure.
The Grand Old Party no longer exists. It is now the Brand New Fascist Party. I admit, it doesn’t have the same ring as GOP but at least BNFP isn’t a lie.
eta: and besides James, a woman of color at the top of today’s GOP ticket?
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
I immediately thought of a Hitler mustache.
Joe Tacopina and his firm have dumped Trump as a client.
@Paine:
She’s either a complete moron, or she’s auditioning for The Grift — telling white people what they want to hear. Candace Owens may be getting a little long in the tooth, and there’s an opening in Diamond and Silk, and there are so many right-wing “news” outlets that need a Black White-Whisperer, so I’m going to assume she’s auditioning for The Grift.
She may be right wing, but that’s a “what do white people want to hear” answer.
@CSK: I did too, but when he added that it should be modest, I erased that idea. Hitler’s moustache was modest then, but he’s destroyed its modesty.
@CSK: The check bounced?
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
Probably.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
And a two-tone Ricky Ricardo jacket?
Nikki’s done.