In 2017, shortly after the inauguration of former President Donald Trump, presidential counselor and campaign manager Kellyanne Conway took to the stage at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference and quipped that the event would instead be “T-PAC” that year — a nod to the idea that the gathering was becoming a celebration of an individual more than an ideology.
This development underscored a fundamental truth of politics: Everybody loves a winner. Nothing succeeds like success.
Just one year earlier, Trump had pulled out of attending the conference altogether due to an expected walkout during his speech. Trump’s victory in the Republican primary came despite upending traditional conservative orthodoxy and winning over voters who were less ideologically focused. As Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight put it at the time, “To me, the most surprising part of Trump’s nomination — which is to say, the part I think I got wrongest — is that Trump won the nomination despite having all types of deviations from conservative orthodoxy.”
Since that time, the discussion of the relationship between Trump, the GOP, and the conservative movement has continued. Post-election, there’s been a fresh round of discussion about what is next for conservatism and what conservative voters want. In these discussions, the word “conservatives” is often used interchangeably with “Republicans” or with “Trump supporters.”
But in understanding the future of the ideology, the party, or the political fortunes of Trump himself, it is valuable to understand the extent to which they do, and do not, overlap. To better map out the Right, I took a look at data from the last three months of national surveys that my firm, Echelon Insights, has conducted.
With over 3,000 interviews from a representative sample of registered voters, we found 43% of those polled belong to the political Right, either because they consider themselves Republicans, conservatives, or are very favorable to Trump himself. But only 13% are part of all three of those groups, highlighting interesting differences in the way voters on the Right think of themselves personally.
First, despite the increased ideological sorting that has meant the near-extinction of liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats in federal office, “conservative” is not completely interchangeable with “Republican.” While the overlap between the two labels is substantial, 1 in 5 Republicans do not think of themselves as conservative, and almost a quarter of conservatives do not think of themselves as Republicans.
Even among those who describe themselves as both Republican and conservative, there are varying levels of intensity around that identification. Around one-third of conservative Republicans in our February survey described their Republican identity as “not very strong Republican.” Furthermore, conservative Republicans were split down the middle as to whether they were “very conservative” or “somewhat conservative.”
When you layer in views about Trump, the picture gets even more complicated. It is true that Republicans and conservatives alike are quite favorable to Trump: 83% of conservative Republicans say they view him favorably. However, when we break that out by intensity, “very favorable” versus “somewhat favorable,” we see that conservative Republicans are split roughly down the middle between those who hold a “very favorable” view of the former president and those who are less favorable.
For context, in our February survey, we found 70% of liberal Democrats are “very favorable” to President Biden, a finding that might surprise those who think of Trump as being more beloved by his party’s ideological wing than Biden’s. (Recall that fundamental rule of politics: Everybody loves a winner.)
And as for Trump himself, although his agenda remains largely popular with both Republicans and conservatives, these voters are split on whether Trump himself must be the leader of the party and the ideological movement in the future. In our February survey, 49% of conservative Republicans said consistent support of Trump as president was an absolutely necessary quality for them when evaluating candidates. The rest seemed to allow for at least a little independence — only 12% said they could never support someone who had shown independence from Trump when he was president.
So, Trump remains a major force in both the current Republican Party and in the direction of the conservative movement. A majority of Republicans would like him to run for president in 2024, and no one has yet come close to filling the vacuum created by his post-presidency.
Down in Orlando, last weekend’s newly relocated CPAC continued to be “T-PAC,” with public remarks from Trump and a straw poll that showed him with 97% job approval among attendees — a far cry from his standing at the conference just five years ago.
When we think about the future of the conservative movement, the Republican Party, and Trump, we must keep this in mind: While their fortunes may be bound up in one another, their constituencies are not necessarily identical.
