The Republican Party in the Age of Trump

There’s more than one way to think about this story—some see it as a metaphor for the monotheistic religions and God, others simply see it as an illustration of how all of our perspectives are limited—but it works surprisingly well as a political metaphor. The elephant right now is (obviously) the Trump-era GOP, and the blind men are the analysts, reporters, and researchers like myself trying to understand it.

For the last two and a half years, we have tried a variety of tools—polls, analysis of legislation, interviews with everyone from voters to top Republicans, statistical analysis of election results, and combinations of these tools—to get a handle on the GOP and how Trump has and hasn’t changed the party. Each of the approaches is helpful, but none tells the full story. And there are the related questions of who Republicans are, what they believe, and what they do. All together these might give us a better sense of exactly how much the president has changed the party.

The Chicken and the Egg

To see this, we need to rewind to 1992. That year, Bill Clinton won a three-way presidential race against Ross Perot and George H.W. Bush partially by posting a solid showing among blue-collar white voters. According to exit polls, Clinton won among whites without a college degree in 1992 and 1996. But in the elections since, Republicans have steadily gained strength among working-class whites.On the morning after the 2016 election, many Republicans woke up to a political party they didn’t recognize. Traditionally Republican suburbanites had fled, white blue-collar Democrats had hopped aboard, and a former reality-TV star from the party’s populist wing was the most powerful Republican (and person) in the world. It would be easy to look at what happened and conclude that Trump had reshaped the party. But an examination of historical data shows that Trump wasn’t just a cause of the demographic—and by extension, ideological—changes in the party, he was also an effect.

The chart above shows two trends. The blue trend is simply the Republican candidate’s win margin among white voters without a college degree from 1980 to 2016. Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush showed some strength with non-college educated voters in their landslide 1980, 1984, and 1988 victories, but Bill Clinton was able to win some back and edge out both Bush and Bob Dole with that group.

The trend is a bit noisy after that, but when you correct for the national popular vote (that is, subtract out the Republican margin of victory or defeat in the popular vote), it becomes clearer (the orange line). Republicans have been gaining ground with working-class whites for 20 years. Exit polls have their issues, but the academic American National Election Studies (ANES) surveys paint a roughly similar picture.

Put simply, blue-collar whites have been trending towards the GOP for a while, and there’s evidence that some of these key voters for Trump—especially in the Midwest—were trending away from the Democrats during the Obama era.

Let’s take a look at Wisconsin. (See maps, above.)

The story here is pretty simple. Mitt Romney lost Wisconsin in the 2012 presidential election by seven points, and Republican governor Scott Walker won it by six points in 2014. The difference is striking—Walker carried a large, mostly rural swath of the state that Romney did not. And when Trump won the state by less than a point in 2016, he showed strength in those same areas. There are obvious differences between these three cases (e.g., Walker was an incumbent, turnout is different in midterm and presidential elections, Obama was on the ballot in 2012 but not in 2014 or 2016, etc.). But it wouldn’t have been unreasonable to look at those two maps in 2014 and conclude that the Republicans could gain some votes in the rural Midwest in 2016.

We can see a similar phenomenon in Iowa. Romney won only 54 percent of the vote in Iowa’s rural counties in 2012 (which cast about a quarter of the votes for the two major parties in the state). But in 2014, Republican Senate candidate Joni Ernst won 64 percent of the two-party rural vote—foreshadowing Trump’s 67 percent in those same counties in 2016. Ernst and Trump also outperformed Romney in Iowa’s small towns and ended up winning by eight and nine points respectively. (Romney lost Iowa.)

These parallels aren’t perfect. They don’t hold up in every state (e.g., both Trump and Republican governor Rick Snyder won in Michigan, but Trump outperformed Snyder in rural areas while Snyder was stronger than Trump in the key suburban counties), and it’s hard to know how many of these working-class white voters would have crossed over to the GOP if the party had run a different candidate. But Ernst and Walker foreshadowed future Republican strength and suggest that Trump did not have to singlehandedly bring those swing states into the Republican fold.

Blue-collar whites weren’t the only group to switch their vote in 2016. There’s evidence that many college-educated whites moved away from the GOP, and here Trump is likely more responsible. According to ANES data, Republican presidential candidates generally won college-educated white voters by mid-to-high single digits in every election from 1992 through 2012. Pew’s party identification data (which don’t track votes but has the advantage of being taken more frequently than every four years) show some decline in Republican affiliation during the middle of the Aughts, but the trend isn’t nearly as sharp as what we see among white high-school graduates or white voters who have some college education. Yet, according to an analysis of Cooperative Congressional Elections Studies data by the University of Virginia’s Geoffrey Skelley, Clinton won among white college-educated voters.

If we pull all of this data together, we start to see a clear story. As Democratic presidential candidates drifted leftward culturally (compare Bill Clinton to Al Gore, Gore to John Kerry, Kerry to Obama, and Obama to Hillary Clinton), they lost ground with the white working class. Racism and sexism likely played a role for some voters, but it’s not a full explanation, as the trend predates Obama or Hil-lary Clinton leading the Democratic ticket. The 2016 election was another step in that direction, with Trump both making further inroads with the white working class and repelling a number of normally reliable college-educated white voters.

Blue-collar white voters have also begun leaving their mark on the GOP. According to political scientist Lee Drut-man’s calculations for the Voter Study Group, the Obama voters who went for Trump were primarily “populist”—generally liberal on economic issues but more conservative on some combination of social issues, racial attitudes, and immigration. Republican politicians in states that shifted heavily right (Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan, and Minnesota) are feeling some pressure to cater to these new voters and keep them in the fold.

But these new voters are only a small percentage of the GOP. Some of Trump’s natural constituents have been part of the party for much longer. As Sean Trende of Real Clear Politics has argued, Pat Buchanan, Mike Huckabee, and Rick Santorum showed in different ways that there is a real audience within the GOP for hawkish immigration policies, less than free-market positions on the economy, and cultural conservatism in general. Trump won the 2016 presidential nomination in part by winning over voters who felt immigration was the most important issue, and, in 2014, immigration hardliners had fared well in GOP primaries.

Trump can be seen then as both a cause and an effect of the changes in the Republican party. He attracted some new blue-collar voters, but the downscale whites that powered his primary wins were already part of the party. Some of the Obama-voting blue-collar whites who helped him win the Electoral College were headed to the right, as well. Trump pulled the party in his direction by shedding traditionally Republican college-educated whites and grabbing some populist blue-collar whites—but the preexisting political trends are part of that story.

Republicans Trust Trump

The average voter doesn’t have strong, stable preferences on every area of public policy. Most don’t have time to read white papers on Syria or the national debt—they have full-time jobs, kids to raise, friends to visit, hobbies to pursue, and more. So when a politician takes an unorthodox stance (e.g., when Trump has argued for universal healthcare), sometimes the rank and file will just follow the leader. Republicans are no exception to this rule.

More than one survey has shown that when Trump takes a political position, many Republican voters adopt that position. Some of the most striking examples come from Ariel Edwards-Levy of the HuffPost Pollster. Edwards-Levy worked with the polling firm YouGov to measure how much Republicans and Democrats follow their leaders—that is, if voters would suddenly move left or right on policy if they heard that a key politician broke with party orthodoxy. They told part of their sample that Barack Obama supported universal healthcare, told the other part that Donald Trump supported it, and compared the results.

When YouGov told respondents that Obama supported universal healthcare, 82 percent of Democrats and 16 percent of Republicans agreed with him. But when YouGov told the second group of voters that Trump had praised universal healthcare, the results were wildly different—46 percent of Democrats and 44 percent of Republicans agreed with him. Similarly, when YouGov told voters that John Kerry wanted to keep the Iran nuclear deal in place and strictly enforce it, 52 percent of Democrats agreed with Kerry and 20 percent of Republicans did. But when YouGov told the second group that Trump held the same position (he has at some point held all of these positions), 54 percent of Democrats and 53 percent of Republicans agreed with Trump.

The effect of swapping Trump’s name for a Democrat’s isn’t always this strong. When YouGov told Republicans that Hillary Clinton was against cutting social security, 57 percent of the party agreed with her. When Trump’s name was subbed in, that number went up to 74 percent. But the overall point is clear—if Trump moves to the left on policy, many Republicans will follow him. And this follow-the-leader effect isn’t just an oddity confined to clever survey experiments.

According to an April study by Pew Research, Republican views on free trade have shifted hugely in the short Trump era. Prior to Trump’s presidential campaign, Pew found that a majority of Republicans believed free trade was good for the United States—the longtime conservative position. But in late 2016, Pew found that only 29 percent of Republicans said that free-trade agreements were beneficial for the country. Vox’s Dylan Matthews also examined these results and thinks that Republican opinion on free trade has rebounded slightly from that low point, but the basic story is clear: Trump bucked conservative orthodoxy on free trade, and a significant segment of the party followed his lead.

Trump has also led Republicans to change their opinions on the personal character of presidents and the importance of political experience. According to a 2011 survey by the Public Religion Research Institute, only 36 percent of Republicans believed that a politician who had committed immoral acts in his or her personal life could still execute his or her duties ethically while in office. By 2016, that number had shot up to 70 percent. It’s possible that other events between 2011 and 2016 contributed to this movement—Democrats also became more accepting of morally dubious leaders in that same time, moving from 49 percent to 61 percent on the same question). But it’s not hard to draw a dotted line between the rise of Trump (whose personal life is anything but spotless) and the GOP’s changing tune on the personal morality of leaders.

Similarly, Pew found that between March and September 2015 the percentage of Republicans who preferred “new ideas and a different approach” over “experience and a proven record” grew from 36 percent to 65. Trump only announced his run for the Republican nomination in June of that year, so it’s possible that not all of this increase came from his entry onto the political scene. But it provides more evidence that Republicans were willing to change what they expected of political leaders in response to Trump.

Trump has also shifted Republican views of Russia and the FBI. According to YouGov polling data cited by Dylan Matthews, Republicans have become more positive about Vladimir Putin since Trump entered the presidential race.

The chart above shows the net favorability rating of Putin among Republicans over time in YouGov surveys. There’s a significant amount of noise here, but the pattern is simple. As Trump became more politically powerful, Republicans began to view Putin more favorably. The Russian dictator still has a net-negative favorability among the GOP, and there are signs that his rating is dropping. But these polls are part of a broader story. YouGov has also seen a spike in GOP friendliness towards Russia in general—specifically, they measured how many Republican respondents said Russia was an “ally/friendly” or “enemy/unfriendly” and found that GOP’s overall rating assessment of Russia has become less negative in the Trump era.

At the same time, Republicans have soured on the FBI. SurveyMonkey recently found that only 38 percent of Republicans have a favorable view of the FBI. As pollster Will Jordan points out, that’s a significant shift from 2015 when Pew found that 70 percent of Republicans viewed the FBI favorably. The story of Trump and Russia is knotty—it involves a special investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia, Putin’s human rights violations, and a long history of tension between the United States and Russia. But the public opinion story seems simple and troubling: The ostensibly hawkish, law-and-order Republican party is more accepting of Russia and Vladimir Putin now that Donald Trump is its leader.

It’s worth noting that Trump hasn’t changed the GOP’s position on every issue. He hasn’t always been pro-life and has shown his ignorance of traditional conservative policy on the issue (e.g., Trump’s assertion that there should be “some form of punishment” for women who seek abortions is not shared by many pro-lifers). But according to the long-running General Social Survey (a project of NORC at the University of Chicago), Trump-era Republicans are roughly as pro-life as Republicans were in the late 1990s. Michael Barber and Jeremy Pope of BYU (who conducted a survey experiment similar to Edwards-Levy’s) have also seen that Trump is less able to move GOP opinion on gun control than he is on other issues.

And there are issues where the trends predate Trump. Republicans have been softening on LGBTQ issues for decades, and it’s not clear that Trump’s leftward leanings on such issues have moved the needle.

But overall, it seems that there are real differences between what the pre-Trump GOP and the Trump-era party believe. Trump didn’t completely rework conservative ideology or change Republican thinking on every issue. But Republicans have followed his lead on some policy issues (trade) and have accommodated him by changing their views about morality and the world (Russia). Some of these changes might not stick—the GOP might fall back on its instinctual distrust of Russia and trust of the FBI when the Mueller investigation is resolved. But it’s also possible to imagine parts of Trumpism—like the suspicion of trade and tough rhetoric on immigration—calcifying and becoming GOP orthodoxy. It’s too early to say which changes will or won’t stick, but for the time being there are differences between how pre-Trump and Trump-era Republicans think about the world.

The Republicans Strike Back

Trump may have changed the way the GOP thinks, looks, and talks, but as many others have previously argued, Republicans have also changed Trump. Specifically, the policy pushes in Trump’s first year in office were at their core efforts to turn conservative promises into policy. Trump was out of sync with GOP orthodoxy on a number of issues during the campaign—attacking trade deals, calling for vast infrastructure spending and building a “wall,” instituting universal healthcare, and more—yet he’s spent much of his political capital on legislation that a more conventional Republican president might have come up with.

First, there was healthcare. Before the 2016 election, Trump made numerous contradictory statements about healthcare, some of which sounded more like a call for universal healthcare than for a conservative effort to overturn Obamacare. Yet last spring, Trump supported congressional Republicans in their efforts to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. Republicans tried multiple different bills and failed. Throughout the process, Trump (mostly) backed the conservative reforms that House speaker Paul Ryan and Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell championed.Trump may have changed the way the GOP thinks, looks, and talks, but as many others have previously argued, Republicans have also changed Trump. Specifically, the policy pushes in Trump’s first year in office were at their core efforts to turn conservative promises into policy. Trump was out of sync with GOP orthodoxy on a number of issues during the campaign—attacking trade deals, calling for vast infrastructure spending and building a “wall,” instituting universal healthcare, and more—yet he’s spent much of his political capital on legislation that a more conventional Republican president might have come up with.

It’s a similar story on taxes. Before Trump won the 2016 election, many speculated that he would be an economic populist—someone who would move the Republican party leftward on economic issues while pulling it to the right on cultural issues. But in December, Trump signed a traditionally conservative tax-reform bill. It’s hard to tell whether Trump’s core beliefs have changed since 2016, but more traditional Republicans seem to have been able to influence his economic actions.

Trump nominated a staunch conservative for the Supreme Court. Neil Gorsuch is someone almost any Republican president might have placed on the high court. This isn’t as clear-cut a case of conservative influence as taxes or healthcare. But it’s another instance of Trump’s essentially doing what another Republican would have done on policy.

Still, he hasn’t been a predictable Republican president on every issue.

After multiple fights with various courts, Trump successfully instituted restrictions on travel to the United States from eight nations (six of which are predominantly Muslim). There’s room for disagreement within the GOP on foreign policy and immigration, but it is hard to imagine a different Republican president (Marco Rubio, for example, or John Kasich) taking that action.

Trump has also focused much less on the national debt than a more conventional Republican might have. He didn’t mention it in his most recent State of the Union address, and it didn’t seem to be a primary concern during the debate late last year over tax reform. It’s possible to argue that past Republicans have failed to live up to their campaign promises on the deficit, but failing even to talk about the issue (much less try to act on it) is a significant departure from past GOP policy.

The point here isn’t to go through every area of policy and compare Trump’s actions, his prior statements, and traditional GOP orthodoxy. The point is to show that change isn’t a one-way street. While Trump has acted on some of his policy instincts, traditional Republicans have still managed to push (and in some cases successfully enact) their policies during the Trump era.

The traditional GOP’s influence makes sense. Trump is a newcomer to politics, and as political scientists Matt Grossmann and Dave Hopkins showed persuasively in their 2016 book Asymmetric Politics, the GOP is a fundamentally ideological party. Trump may not have had fully fleshed-out view on various policy issues (he contradicted himself many times during the 2016 campaign), but the larger Republican party did. And Republicans have been able to get Trump to move towards them on many policies.

The Opportunity Lost

The question of how Trump changed the Republican party is obviously complicated, and the data and analysis presented here only scratch the surface. I’m ignoring some of the below-the-radar aspects of Trump’s domestic and foreign policies, his tendency to break norms, his relationship to the media and other institutions, and his effect on racial attitudes. In all of these areas and more, I could track ways in which Trump has or hasn’t changed his party (and vice versa). But a pattern is clear, and it’s worth turning our attention instead to a related question: What changes did the Republican party forgo by nominating and electing Donald Trump?

It’s possible to argue, and many have, that Trump won the Republican nomination because the party’s three-legged stool (social conservatism, fiscal conservatism, and a hawkish foreign policy) failed during George W. Bush’s administration and Trump offered something new and different.

The legs of the stool have seen plenty of wins, losses, and draws over the last 35 years. Fiscal conservatism certainly posted wins when Reagan and Bush cut taxes, but it’s also seen some losses—the national debt has increased and the financial crash happened on Bush’s watch. Foreign-policy hawkishness served the Republican party well during the Cold War and after, but that leg of the stool suffered serious injury during the Iraq War. And while religious conservatives can point to public opinion remaining relatively stable on abortion, they lost the battle on same-sex marriage.

But no matter how you tally up the score, you end up with a Republican party that often runs and governs on ideas that have already won or lost the battles they were designed to fight. The social and political problems facing the United States aren’t identical to the problems it faced in the 1980s. Yet Trump’s GOP, which arguably has more power now than any iteration of the party has had since the 1920s, hasn’t come up with anything more creative than another tax bill and a few attempts to overturn Obamacare.

The 2016 election provided Republicans with an opportunity to apply conservative principles to new problems in healthy, innovative, and constructive ways. But the GOP chose Trump. And Trump’s lasting impact on the GOP might in the end not be the policies he enacts, the positions he takes, or the way he changes politics, it may be that he kept the party from renewing itself despite having a real opportunity to do so. ¨

David Byler is a staff writer at The Weekly Standard.