Honey, Trump didn't actually shrink the GOP
Surprising as it may seem, there are as many Republicans now as there were four years ago.
Donald Trump, who is expected (but not guaranteed) to become a one-term president tomorrow, goes into the 2020 election with an approval rating of 44.5 percent, according to FiveFortyEight. That’s pretty low, but it’s higher than the final approval ratings for our last two one-term presidents, George H.W. Bush and Jimmy Carter, who ended at 32.6 percent and 37.9 percent, respectively. It’s also higher than the final approval rating of 38.7 percent for the Great Society architect Lyndon Johnson--who served more than one term but was elected president only once and then didn’t run again because the Vietnam War destroyed him politically.
The lesson would appear to be that unpopularity ain’t what it used to be. That’s probably because increased polarization has boosted support for unpopular presidents. Approval ratings for our last two chief executives didn’t vary nearly so much as for their predecessors because people’s opinions about the president aligned more than previously with party affiliation.
That’s especially shocking in Trump’s case, because he’s engaged in all sorts of outrageous behavior, not to mention violations of conservative principles, that you’d think would have cost him support among Republicans. Yet according to Gallup, Trump’s approval rating among Republicans has for four years held pretty steady in the 80s and 90s. Right now it’s at 95 percent, the highest ever, presumably because the election is tomorrow and Republicans’ blood is up.
Well that’s all right, a lot of commentators have said, because it’s a shrinking Republican party. Trump’s bad behavior has made fewer people want to be Republicans. The shrunken cohort that’s left consists of rabid true believers.
That’s what I’ve been telling myself for four years, because I thought it was true. But it isn’t, really. The shrinking Republican party turns out to be a figment of our collective imagination.
For most of the past 16 years, according to Gallup, the percentage identifying itself as Republican or Democrat has been in the high 20s to low 30s. At the start of the Trump administration, Republican registration dipped into the mid-20s. I guess that’s where I got the idea that the GOP was an incredible shrinking party.
But starting around the 2018 midterms GOP self-identification got back into its more usual range—high 20s, low 30s—and that’s where it’s mostly stayed ever since. Democratic self-identification has stayed at about the same high-20s, low-30s level throughout Trump’s presidency, with the GOP fluctuations appearing to take from or give back to the group that self-identifies as independents (which over the past 16 years has ranged mostly from the high 30s to the low 40s; the country isn’t so polarized that a plurality identifies itself with either party).
When you include “leaners,” i.e., independents who lean toward Republicans or Democrats, more people self-identify with the Democrats right now. But that’s not especially new; it’s been true for the past three decades.
So where is this Republican shrinkage we keep hearing about?
Most obviously, Republicans lost their House majority in 2018, principally because they lost 13 percentage points from independents compared to 2016. Republicans are similarly predicted likely to lose their Senate majority tomorrow. And no Republican has been elected to a first presidential term with a popular-vote majority in nearly 30 years. At the national level, Republicans are having a harder time getting themselves elected, even as the proportion of Republicans stays constant.
But the national level isn’t the only level. Take a look at the 50 states and you’ll see that Republicans control the majority of state legislatures—29 to the Democrats’ 19. (Minnesota is split, and Nebraska is excluded here because its members are elected on a nonpartisan basis.)
Republican dominance of state legislatures is a fairly recent development; until about ten years ago, Democrats controlled the majority of state legislatures, and had done so for decades. The new Republican control is why there’s so much skittishness about whether states will honor the popular vote in assigning this year’s presidential electors. It’s also a significant reason why Republicans have started talking up repeal of the 17th amendment and a return to the days when U.S. senators were chosen by state legislatures. (Which suggests even Republicans think the GOP is shrinking.)
It’s true, of course, that the GOP is shrinking demographically as the population gets younger and less white. According to a Sept. 23 analysis by NBC News and the Cook Political Report, since 2016 the nation’s supply of noncollege whites (who vote Republican) has shrunk from 46 percent of the total to 43 percent, while the supply of nonwhites (who vote Democratic) has risen from 30 to 32 percent. That makes Trump’s job harder this year.
But that’s an incremental change, not a sudden, sweeping one. And especially in the short term, voting blocs are never as predictable as we like to pretend. Especially the men. (Observing the voting behavior of men in recent years—all men—it seems incredible that until 100 years ago men were the only Americans permitted to vote. How did the republic survive?)
Remarkably, Trump got more Latino support in 2016 than Mitt Romney in 2012, even after Trump made outrageous comments about Mexican “rapists” crossing the border, and about Judge Gonzalo Curiel, who was presiding over a lawsuit alleging fraud by Trump University, being unfair to him, Trump, because of his Mexican ancestry. (Trump settled the lawsuit for $25 million after the election.) The reason for the Latino uptick appears to have something to do with (some) Latino men admiring Trump’’s bully-boy swagger.
Trump has even made some inroads with Black men, never mind Charlottesville, never mind “shithole countries,” never mind … everything. Nicholas Lemann reported last week in the New Yorker:
Terrance Woodbury, a leading pollster, said, “This has been pretty concerning to me. Trump is picking up among young voters of color. He has a thirty-three-per-cent approval rating among Black men under fifty. Since Obama left, Black men have dropped in their Democratic support. Why? What is it?” He mentioned the Trump campaign’s Super Bowl ad featuring a Black woman whose prison sentence had been commuted by Trump, and a Trump advertising campaign on Facebook, which aired last December and went unanswered by Biden until August, touting the First Step Act, a criminal-justice measure that he signed in 2018. Woodbury went on, “I asked a focus group, ‘How could you consider supporting Donald Trump, who’s blatantly racist?’ One young man said, ‘I don’t care. They’re all racist. At least he tells me what he is.’ Something about the transparency of the vitriol is trust-inducing to them.”
This last of course called immediately to mind the famous New Yorker cartoon from 2016:
In spite of the GOP not shrinking, it still looks as though Trump is going to lose tomorrow; final polls show Joe Biden up 10 points over Trump. It also looks as though, by embracing Trump and Trumpism, the GOP has marginalized itself nationally for the foreseeable future. I’ve written that it will probably resemble the pathetically diminished California GOP.
But Republicans won’t have shrunken as a proportion of the population. If Trump does lose, it will be wrong to conclude that the country has changed much. The country will be much the same as it was four years ago. The mystery that will linger is why America chose Trump back then.