I don’t think so. Many of them cheat too. I’d bet good money that the majority of evangelical “Christian” men who cheat on their wives are cheating with wives of other evangelical men. They don’t give a fuck, they will vote for Trump regardless of what he does. The word “Democrat” is basically like “Devil” to these people.
Do you have a cite for that? Could you quantify “many”?
I agree there are some hardcore supporters who will vote for Trump in 2020. But he needs to get beyond that. At a bare minimum, Trump needs to get everyone who voted for him in 2016 to vote for him again in 2020. Because I have a hard time believing that Trump has converted anyone to his cause. Quite the opposite; I think that some people who were motivated to go out and vote for Trump in 2016 because of his extravagant promises that he would drain the swamp and fix the political system will now see him as a part of that political system. Trump is now going to be a victim of the “It doesn’t matter which one you vote for because they all turn out the same” mentality.
This doesn’t jibe with his approval rating going up recently.
What keeps me slightly optimistic (or at least from drowning in pessimism) is that he didn’t win the popular vote. It came down to so few people in 3 states. Approximately 130k people, iirc. Or thereabouts in the under 200k range.
If Dems come out in 2020 in the numbers they’ve been coming out in in all these special elections, he can’t lose any votes and he’d have to pick up votes. I can see how he’s not really losing a large amount at this time, but he isn’t picking up anyone. There will always be "Never Trump"ers who still will check his name anyway on the ballot, but they would have done so in 2016. The moderates, the people who stayed at home, the Bernie/Jill/Johnson voters? I can’t imagine he’s got many of them outside the margin of error on his side.
Plus I wouldn’t be surprised if a third party conservative ran. I don’t know if there is the money there or Republicans who don’t care about destroying the party to start over as a refreshed conservative party, but it’s a possibility. That’s the only way he might lose voters that have already voted for him.
It’s a dead cat bounce. Sometimes things are so dismal they have to rise; there’s no longer any room for them to fall to. Trump’s approval ratings have consistently been the worst of any President.
Maybe, but they are going up.
Most such cases don’t make the news. Why would you think that they would?
Cases that do make the news tend to be about GOP politicians who’ve been vocal about their supposed pro-life beliefs, and supposed ‘family values,’ and supposed religious opposition to both adultery and to abortion. A quick search using the terms Republican, girlfriend OR mistress, and “an abortion for” turned up a number of such incidents. The first hit was about a Tennessee politician (US Representative) who had pressured a mistress to have an abortion, and an ex-wife to have two.
A fair point was made in one of the articles on that case:
Why This Lawmaker Opposes Abortion For Everyone Except His Own Wife And Mistress – ThinkProgress
So obviously when I state my opinion it’s not based on a publicly-available statistic such as “17% of American white Evangelical men have urged women in their lives to have abortions.” No one but a mentally-challenged person would expect such men to have honestly answered the question “have you urged a woman in your life to have an abortion?” Yet the lack of candor of such men scarcely proves that they don’t exist.
I don’t know about the first two categories, and I don’t know about Bernie and Jill, but I think quite a few of the people who might have identified as Libertarian before, are now on the Trump Train. I remember a lot of Democrats really disparaging Johnson and people who would vote for him, and I think this was probably not a smart move collectively because I think Johnson would have taken more votes away from Trump than from Clinton, so the Democratic organization could have strategically encouraged people to vote for Johnson as a protest vote. However, Johnson made several stupid mistakes during the campaign that probably hurt him more than anything anyone else could have or could not have done.
Insomuch as Libertarians, in my own experience, seem to be some combination of “conservatives who smoke weed and/or are atheists”, and “hippies who own guns and are farmer/survivalist types,” if you think about it, both of these groups seem to have more in common with the general Republican party platform than the Democratic one.
Edit, also many Trump supporters seem to like Rand Paul. I’m not sure how much of an iconoclast against his party Rand is, as opposed to his father, but there is at least a Libertarian connection there.
True, but so have congress’ approval ratings, and it includes members of both parties. We’re in a state of collective cynicism, so everyone’s ratings are in the toilet. Candidates like Trump can be surprisingly successful in this sort of climate. They don’t have to have broad appeal; they just have to have solid appeal among those who are inclined to vote for him or against his opposition.
History suggests that the mid-terms are going to be bad for Trump and the GOP, most likely the result of uninspired or over-confident conservatives and highly-energized progressives. But congressional elections have more to do with what’s going on locally than nationally. And in any case, the Democrats won’t have the kind of majority that can overpower Trump; they’ll just simply keep him from pushing the conservative agenda through, which is a good place to start, I suppose.
I think what a lot of intellectuals (myself included) miss about Trump’s popularity is the emotional appeal of having someone pugnacious represent their interests, even if they don’t necessarily like the person himself. Lyndon B Johnson was famous for this: a notorious US Grade A bully and asshole, and the average voter knew it, but he was seen as the people’s asshole by many. Except for civil rights, the country was more unified and centrist then than now, but the parallels could still carry some significance even in today’s fractious political environment. A lot of Republicans and right-leaning voters don’t like Trump at all, but I feel fairly confident that a lot of left-leaning voters aren’t going to like the Democratic party’s nominee in 2020, no matter who it is. Trump could still capitalize on this splintering of the electorate. He already has.
Yes, Trump might someday reach the kind of approval ratings that Carter and Ford had. But so far he hasn’t. And neither of those guys got a second term.
For all people are weirded out by Trump having approval ratings in the low 40s,
- Is there a lot of statistical correlation between approval rating and votes?
I know that sounds like an odd question, but approval rating polls are not the same as, and don’t ask the same questions as, “would you vote for this person instead of this other specific choice?” Trump having an approval rating of 42% does not mean that if an election were held he would get 42% of the vote. It might mean he gets 51 percent, or 35 percent, and this far in advance of an actual election it very likely means nothing at all.
If one looks at approval ratings of past Presidents in the second year of their term, there is vanishingly little evidence it had anything to do with how they fared in their second kick at the can. At this point in his first term George W. Bush was so popular, comedians were making jokes about the hopelessness of Democrats, while Ronald Reagan’s popularity was dropping like a stone.
- It’s the economy.
The one thing you do notice about approval rating correlation is that it’s very, very tied in to the economy. The examples of both Reagan and Bush 1.0 correlate to economy. Trump’s approval rating refuses to drop below 40 largely, IMHO, because the economy is doing very well; this is the best the world’s economy has done in a very long time, actually. If the economy starts to cough by 2020 - and odds are extremely, extremely likely that it will - we may see some new nadirs in popularity.
This may be true, but it appears that while “Congress as a whole” gets lousy approval ratings, “my Congressperson” is usually more well-liked (hence, most of them get re-elected). A president doesn’t have the advantage of a disliked abstraction not translating to like or dislike of himself.
Good post.
I’d just add that it’s the economy, but more than that, it’s the mood of the country and voters’ perceptions of their own future. In 2004, the economy was still well but many were beginning to doubt Bush’s ability to tackle the problem of international terrorism once their official story about Iraq’s WMD’s began to unravel. Kids from the heartland were dying 8000 miles from home and people were beginning to doubt whether their deaths were necessary. He won but the race was a lot closer than many assumed it would have been in mid 2003.
Carter lost because of the economy but also because of perceptions about the future of America. Iran’s revolution and Russia’s invasion of Afghanistan made Americans feel weak and vulnerable to foreign aggression, particularly coming several years after an embarrassing withdrawal from Saigon.
It’s the economy, but other things can have an impact as well. Usually, though, you’re right: what elections come down to are the perceptions of voters’ economic security.
True enough that Trump capitalized on the splintering of the electorate. But he also capitalized on the large wellspring of “this isn’t working–let’s try something else” sentiment that existed in 2016.
In 2020, he won’t be the “something else”—he’ll be the “this isn’t working.”
Sure, if the economy is crashing and thousands of troops are dying in an overseas war. What if the economy is still thriving and soldiers aren’t dying in a desert shithole?
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Yes: "In the 12 elections from 1948 to 1992, when the party controlling the White House had a July presidential approval rating exceeding 50 percent, it won. When the approval rating was below 50 percent, the “in-party” won only once the much ballyhooed come-from-behind victory of Harry Truman in 1948.” Cite.
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But it’s not July 2018, never mind July 2020. Approval ratings can move around: [INDENT][INDENT][INDENT] …history suggests that presidential approval ratings follow a fairly unpredictable course…
Presidential approval ratings shift by a median of 13 percentage points between this point in their terms [late August of 1st year] and the midterm elections — which means that if he’s at 37 percent now [again, late August of 1st year], Trump could very easily be at 50 percent in November of 2018 — or at 24 percent. [/INDENT][/INDENT][/INDENT] Linear interpolation: we’re about halfway to Nov 2018 from (late) last August, so say the median shift is 7.5 points. 40.2+7.5=47.7, which is enough for Democratic gains in the house, but not the cosmic blowout that I’m hoping for. For that we need a shift downwards. Actually we need more than that.
- 538: There’s a tendency for a President’s approval rating to go down during his term. There’s a tendency for a President’s approval to go up when it’s below 40% and go down when it’s above 50%: it’s called reverting to the mean. That’s a little conflicting for a President as unpopular as Trump.
Well Trump could easily have 38% approval under such circumstances. We now this because he had those figures in Oct-Dec 2017. Today, Trump is stuck where he was in early February 2018.
This is true. And one unusual thing people have commented on is that Trump is getting low approval ratings despite a relatively strong economy, which as you noted is unusual.
So, what would put Trump at the tipping point other than the economy?
It’s not circus stuff. That doesn’t affect his polling. Evangelicals don’t care about the things that they say they care about. Actions speak louder than words.
Unpopular policies hurt, such as the plutocrat tax giveaway that pressed his approvals down in Q4 2017.
Josh Marshall at TPM said the decisive factors would be corruption, Medicare, and Social Security.
Ok, here’s a weak but topical article by Vox: Why Trump’s base probably doesn’t care about corruption. Interview with Jan-Werner Müller, a political theorist at Princeton, author of What is Populism? (2016).
[INDENT][INDENT][INDENT]
This isn’t an empirical finding, so I can’t prove this is the case,[/INDENT][/INDENT][/INDENT] MfM commentary: so take this with a grain of salt, but give kudos to the professor for his candor.
[INDENT][INDENT][INDENT] … but the general idea is that in many populist regimes, what seems so obviously like corruption is, in fact, a strength for these leaders.
… Populist leaders thrive on distinctions between “us” and “them,” between “the people” and “the establishment.”
So when populist or authoritarian leaders like Hungary’s Viktor Orban or Poland’s Andrzej Duda or Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan seem to be violating norms and imposing antidemocratic measures, their supporters interpret these moves as necessary for their survival. It might be illegal or unusual or extreme, but** as long as it’s being done for the in-group, supporters aren’t bothered by it.**[/INDENT][/INDENT][/INDENT]
Emphasis added.
Müller shows decisively that documented corruption isn’t necessarily fatal for practitioners of soft fascism (my terminology). That’s helpful info. But he hasn’t really shown that corruption doesn’t hurt at all. And like all political theorists, he has a problem when outcomes are overdetermined.