(Archive) Donald Trump speaking with supporters at a campaign rally at the Phoenix Convention Center in Phoenix, Arizona, Oct. 29th, 2016 (Credit: Gage Skidmore/Flickr)

First of the Series “Attitudes, Concerns, and Policy Preferences of Trump Voters”

By Wayne A. Selcher, PhD* [Informe OPEU]

By mid-2024, Donald Trump had solidly firmed up his personalistic command of the Republican Party, at both the leadership and voter levels. He scored overwhelming victories in the early 2024 Republican presidential primary elections, and thus demonstrated dramatically his great support in the Republican voter base. His only two significant rivals, Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida and former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, endorsed him after ending their own campaigns. No Republican official comes anywhere close to matching Trump’s degree of popularity among Republican voters. The previous, more moderate national Republican leadership has been sidelined or swept away, and many pro-Trump officials installed at the state and local levels in recent years, by elections or nominations.

As former U.S. House of Representatives speaker Republican Newt Gingrich explained prior to the early 2024 Republican primary election season, “I keep trying to tell people, he is not a candidate. You can’t think of him as a candidate. He is the leader of a mass movement.” That mass movement identifies emotionally and personally with Trump and shares his every twist and turn. “Never Trump” conservatives have been fully marginalized. The Republican National Committee is now totally controlled by Trump loyalists and Lara Trump, his daughter-in-law, is co-chair of the RNC. His June 13, 2024 meeting with Republican members of Congress, during his first visit to Congress since leaving the presidency in January 2021, successfully marked the clear end of any effective opposition within the Party.

Newt Gingrich about Trump: “a leader of a mass movement” (Credit: Gage Skidmore/Flickr)

To most of his followers, Trump has become a symbol of the fight against the “deep state” (the permanent federal bureaucracy), the overly powerful and intrusive federal government, social decay, and widespread corruption. Even after having had one term as president. he is still seen by them as a combative political “outsider,” a disruptor, a non-politician, and a defender of traditional values against the essentially liberal Washington, DC establishment, a stark and welcome contrast to the usual, compromised politician comfortable with the status quo. His personal flaws, character issues, mental fitness, and legal troubles are considered totally irrelevant by his believers, in the crucial drive to “clean up the mess in Washington” and set the nation on a “proper” path, at home and abroad.

As does Trump, his followers dismiss his legal issues as “just the Democrats” and unfair “election interference” by “weaponization” of the investigative and court processes in a phony “witch hunt” by an entrenched liberal establishment that “hates Trump.” As a consequence, “true believer” Trump voters are more enthusiastic about their presidential candidate than are the great majority of Biden voters about theirs. Much of the American political dialogue now revolves intensely around the figure of Donald Trump, pro and con, creating a high level of public attention that he seems to enjoy immensely.

Widespread Dissatisfaction

In the broader electorate, however, a major April 2024 poll by Pew Research highlighted that a majority of voters were dissatisfied with the return of the Trump-Biden choice in 2024: “Reflecting their dissatisfaction with the Biden-Trump matchup, nearly half of registered voters (49%) say that, if they had the ability to decide the major party candidates for the 2024 election, they would replace both Biden and Trump on the ballot.” Further, “A defining characteristic of the contest is that voters overall have little confidence in either candidate across a range of key traits, including fitness for office, personal ethics and respect for democratic values.”

Along the same lines, a June 2024 Pew Research poll noted that “a quarter of Americans hold unfavorable views of both major party candidates – President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump,” which is the highest dual rejection rate in at least three decades. But, forced to make a choice in reality, according to that April 2024 poll, “Among validated 2020 voters, overwhelming majorities of those who cast ballots for Biden (91%) and Trump (94%) support the same candidate this year. Registered voters who did not vote in 2020 are about evenly divided: 48% back Trump, while 46% support Biden.”

Neither, say a quarter of Americans (Credit: Elvert Barnes/Flickr)

Among Republican identifiers, strong party loyalty makes the likelihood of defection by doubters to vote for Biden unlikely, even among the Never Trumpers and many of those former allies and officials who earlier publicly criticized Trump’s fitness for public office. Trump absolutely dominates the Republican voter base and the Republican National Committee in an energetic way, so other party leaders will defer to him on a consistent basis. Over time since 2016, the Republican Party and its voters have twisted themselves into odd shapes (relative to their pre-2016 style) as they continue to ignore, deny, explain away, or find justifications (and often praise) for Trump’s age, mental acuity, narcissism, bullying, angry outbursts, frequent lies, apocalyptic rhetoric, legal problems (including two convictions), ill-informed spontaneous policy ideas, reversals of position, rambling and grievance-filled speeches, weak grasp of many issues, and lack of endorsement by most of his former cabinet officials. (One such impractical idea, among many, was Trump’s suggestion in June 2024 to Republican lawmakers in Washington that the federal income tax could be abolished if replaced by high enough tariffs on imports.)

Nor do the Party or Trump voters seem uneasy that “America First” Trump consistently shows obvious admiration for “strongman” leaders, including those of US rivals Russia, China, and North Korea, often proudly referring to his good personal relationship with each one when he was president. With his personalistic style and demands for absolute loyalty and obedience to him, and plans to centralize federal power in the presidency, apparently more so than in 2016 and 2020, Trump has thoroughly transformed the Republican Party and the conservative movement, including the evangelical community, not the other way around.

Double Standard

Many who identify as basically Republican are willing to make exceptions to their previous, more general ethical principles to favor the particular situation of Trump, as in the question of presidential immunity from criminal prosecution for acts performed while president, relevant to a case concerning Trump on that very matter then before the U.S. Supreme Court. A June 2024 CBS poll showed that “Two-thirds of Republicans think Trump should have immunity from prosecution, but that number drops to just 45% when they’re asked more generally whether “U.S. presidents” should have the same immunity. In fact, more than half of Republicans think presidents generally should not.”

According to YouGov polls, in April 2024, 58 percent of Republicans said they did not believe that a convicted felon should be president, but after Trump’s May 30, 2024 felony conviction on 34 counts in a New York City jury trial for falsifying business records for election purposes, only 17 percent still held that opinion. Many Republican leaders and members of the rank and file “delegitimized” the whole trial and the verdict as merely an inappropriate and unfair political maneuver by Democrats, a “weaponization” of the justice system, echoing Trump’s claim that it was deliberate “election interference.”

Facilitating this willingness to make such exceptions are automatic opposition to the stances of the “other side” and acceptance of Trump’s ongoing implicit contention that all of government is partisan, including the legal institutions; that is, there is no objective Rule of Law when Trump loses. Consequently, Trump’s support and fundraising efforts have benefited immensely from his May 2024 criminal conviction and other ongoing legal issues, with a remarkable surge in post-conviction campaign contributions.

Political polarization and inter-party animosity in the United States began in the mid-1990s, and was well advanced by 2014, before Trump came onto the national political stage to use it as the driving force in his political career, as Pew Research documents. Partisan policy preferences and relative priorities remain very stable in 2024, and highly polarized, usually producing mutually antagonistic interpretations of the other party, candidates, trends, and events. Views of Trump and Biden, for example, vary sharply along party lines. As described by a February 2024 YouGov poll, “While some Democrats and Republicans acknowledge potential flaws in their own party’s candidate, few identify positives in the presumptive candidate from the opposing party.”

Americans generally are experiencing a high level of social stress when they think about politics and government and how their democracy is actually working. A spring 2023 survey by Pew Research concluded that “More than 80% of Americans believe elected officials don’t care what people like them think.” In mid-2023 surveys, Pew Research found that “Americans have long been critical of politicians and skeptical of the federal government… But today, Americans’ views of politics and elected officials are unrelentingly negative, with little hope of improvement on the horizon. Majorities say the political process is dominated by special interests, flooded with campaign cash and mired in partisan warfare. Elected officials are widely viewed as self-serving and ineffective… A little more than a year before the presidential election, nearly two-thirds of Americans (65%) say they always or often feel exhausted when thinking about politics, while 55% feel angry. By contrast, just 10% say they always or often feel hopeful about politics, and even fewer (4%) are excited.”

The foregoing characteristics of the election campaign and public opinion, even before either Trump or Biden are formally nominated at their party’s convention, promise dramatic and tense exchanges over the next several months and will challenge American institutions and commitment to democratic procedures.

***

In future articles in this series during this 2024 election season, we will explore more specifics about the widespread dissatisfaction behind these negative public attitudes and their relationship to sharply contrasting policy differences and divisions, and to the values and demographic characteristics of Trump voters. For a broader background analysis on attitudes and opinions among the public, consult my “American Political Culture in Transition: The Erosion of Consensus and Democratic Norms” (OPEU, 2024). Also useful may be my “Tips for Following the American Presidential Election in 2024” (Latino Observatory, 2024).

More from this author at OPEU

Book review “Eric Hoffer’s ‘The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements’”, 3/11/24 [Portuguese version available here, translated by Andressa Mendes, PhD candidate at San Tiago Dantas International Relations Program (Unesp, Unicamp, PUC-SP), Brazil]

Estudos e Análises “Is the United States ‘Exceptional’?”, 8/3/21 [Portuguese version coming soon]

Publicity “Virtual Library: The Ultimate Online Research Guide”, 4/26/21

Informe OPEU “Suggested Cost-Free Online Sources for U.S. Politics and Foreign Policy”, 6/2/21

* Wayne A. Selcher, PhD, is Professor of International Studies Emeritus, Department of Political Science, Elizabethtown College, PA, USA, and a regular contributor to OPEU. His major academic interests are Comparative Politics, American society and politics in comparative context, American Foreign Policy, Latin American Politics and Foreign Policy (especially Brazil), and Internet use in international studies teaching and research. He is the creator and editor of the WWW Virtual Library: International Affairs Resources, a web guide for online international studies research in many topics. E-mail: wayneselcher@comcast.net.

** Final review and edit: Tatiana Teixeira. First version received in June 22^nd, 2024. This Informe OPEU does not necessarily reflect the opinion of OPEU, or INCT-INEU.

*** About OPEU, or to contribute articles, contact editor Tatiana Teixeira. E-mail: tatianat19@hotmail.com. About our Newsletters, for press service, or other matters, contact Tatiana Carlotti. E-mail: tcarlotti@gmail.com.

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