While many Democrats are eager to deny that Trump is drawing support from their party, the data show a different story. That data also reveals the falsity of the pretense that Republican party leaders could somehow have prevented their party from being largely captured by an ugly populist contingent.
It’s important to remember that both parties have traditionally had their reactionary factions. While the GOP had the John Birchers, the Democrats had their boll weevils—socially conservative and racist southern Democrats, but who often supported populist initiatives, such as rural electrification. Not only did the Democrats have that group, that group was the foundational core of the Democratic Party, with its Jeffersonian origins in anti-nationalism and defense of a racially stratified society.
The boll weevils are mostly forgotten now, but not wholly gone. The South has shifted from being overwhelmingly Democratic to being highly contested territory where Republicans win regularly. In 1960, 100% of the U.S. Senate seats from the Confederate states were held by Democrats. In 1980 they still held 55% of those seats. Today, the Democrats only hold 18%. But Democrats are often more successful on the local level, where politics is more personal and party label less significant…and where people can know that Candidate Smith isn’t a liberal, but an old time Democrat. Many of these voters still identify as Democrat, even as they vote Republican at the state and national levels. Think, for example, of Kim Davis, the Tennessee County Clerk who refused to give out marriage licenses to same sex couple—a Democrat, not a Republican.
And those folks are often Trump supporters. Other than his home state of New York, Trump’s best states are in a bundle of the old South states plus West Virginia, another state where the old southern Dems long dominated. Out west in the intermountain states, which have always been predominantly Republican, )his support fades.
OK, one might say, they’re not real Democrats (although they are what Democrats predominantly once were), because they’re really conservatives. But as reported by RealClearPolitics, 20% of the Trumpenproletariate identify as liberal. True, a strong majority of 65% describe themselves as conservatives, but only 13% say they are very conservative, and less than 1/3 say they are Tea Partiers. Trump’s supporters are not the radical right-wing revanchists liberals claim are taking over the Republican Party.
All of this helps explain why over 2/3 of Trump’s supporters say they would vote for him if he left the GOP. A lot of them aren’t strongly committed to the party—they are in fact not the mythical Republican base.
Liberal and establishment Democrats don’t want to admit that many of these people are still Democrats. But many of them are, or they are about as much Democrats as they are Republican, willing to vote for either party depending on the candidate.
And this is the reason it’s ridiculous to talk about how the GOP establishment should have kept these people from taking over the party. First, they haven’t; that’s largely a different group of people. Second, parties don’t choose their supporters as much as supporters choose the party. If we think in spatial terms, on a left to right continuum, many of these people find themselves to the right of the median Democrat, so they’re going to take a look at the party that’s also to the right of the median Democrat. If they find that they’re also to the right of the median Republican, they’ll be more attracted to the Republican Party, not necessarily because it is welcoming to their extremist views, but because it’s median is less far away from their views than the Democratic median. Those folks will pull the party away from its establishment, but there’s precious little the establishment can do to stop that.
But those aren’t the Trumpa Loompahs (hattip Steve Horwitz). Those folks tend to support Cruz or Rubio, because they recognize the liberal elements in Trump’s message.
So suck it up, Dems. Trump’s your party’s phenomenon, too.
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My wife works at a school in a working-class neighborhood, and when she started there she was surprised to find that while many of her colleagues were Democrats, they were also pretty negative about immigration and foreigners, in a way that she associated with the Right. While they support redistributive policies, they also see immigrants as primarily stealing jobs and lowering wages overall.
I should ask her if there are any Trump supporters among them — seems like anti-immigration Dems would be a likely source of support for him.
I think you undercut your own point James when you, correctly, note that there are plenty of Kim Davis D’s. Very true. As all us lib’s know the D coalition is wide and plenty inside our Geodesic dome are not only not liberal but pretty darn conservative. But the Kim Davis D’s weren’t going to vote D for Prez. They are D at a local level maybe up to Gov in some states. There is a reason why R’s hold just about all the congress seats in the South. A good bunch of the D’s are conservative and vote R for Fed level posts. El Donaldo certainly can gin up support in the reagan D’s but they were lost to the D’s a long time ago. Kim Davis might have been a D but she would be voting R for prez no matter what.
My favorite NPR show, On Point, had one of the most revealing (and artculate) callers I;ve ever heard on the show call in about Trump recently. I believe he was from West Virginia, but in any case it was a coal-belt state that was pretty solid Democrat, or at least swing, through Clinton. This was a working-class caller from a working class background who happened to have a college education (he said). He said just about all his friends and family were “all Trump,” many of them because they couldn’t find jobs. He said a lot of them voted for Clinton because of the good times in those days, but he also said that they have now tuned out the GOP establishment. To me, that suggests they were probably loosely GOP-affiliated in the intervening years. Even in a closed primary state, obviously you can vote Republican while being a registered Democrat. So: what does it mean, definitionally at the individual level, for a candidate running in one party to be drawing support from another party? As greg says, if the supporters in question weren’t going to vote for the second party in any case and haven’t in a number of cycles, are we just being legalistic about it and referring to their registration? What’s the import of that, other than just scoring points (or trying to prevent them being scored)?
So maybe we can say that “Democrats” such as this are partly responsible for Trump’s rise. Cross-party support is always responsible for some percent of any popular candidate’s rise. It’s surely even the case than some genuine Democrats are supporting Trump. But this is necessarily the case just because of size: there are 100 million voters or so. Essentialy every conceivable thing is going on a little bit somewhere. As I tweeted a little while ago, eventually reporters will ferret out Obama-Trump voters, and you will see the profiles.
But these Democrats we’re talking about here – Southern/Appalachian conservative Democrats – are not doing something new in supporting a Republican by supporting Trump. If we say that they are responsible in comparable measure to Republicans for the rise of Trump, then we also have to say that they were responsible for electing and reelecting the last Republican president, and for providing subsequent GOP candidates with the firewall in the Industrial Upper South that guarantees that now basically all presidential elections are close affairs for the GOP at worst. And maybe they were, but that makes what they’re doing re: Trump, I would think, a lot less interesting from the perspective of what it says about Democrats.
I’m perfectly willing to concede that “they are about as much Democrats as they are Republican, willing to vote for either party depending on the candidate.” But that doesn’t really get us to Ttrump drawing support from the Democratic Party, does it? Mostly, these people are operating on the GOP side as they have been for cycles now, and simply prefer Trump because the GOP establishment has lost them just as much as the Dem one did probably eighteen years ago. Again, this is regarding the working-class, largely culturally conservative (Kim Davis; my On Point caller’s family) vote in the Industrial Upper South/Appalachia who happen often still to be registered Democrats.
ALLLL that being said, *I* don’t know who exactly makes up Trump’s support in what numbers right at the moment. As I said, the numbers we’re working with are huge so every kind of weird thing exists somewhere in the mass. But I don’t *know* that a significant number of indisputably “genuine” Democrats (i.e. not the ones who helped elect Bush and went on to vote for McCain or Romney or both, don’t contribute to his support. If 20% of his supporters self-identify as liberal, that seems(!) to say a lot right there. (But of course that’s also a different question from whether they’re Democrats.) I wonder how many of those liberals voted for Obama in 2012.
…Anyway, what exactly is the point being discussed here, again?
http://onpoint.wbur.org/2016/01/07/the-left-right-and-center-of-2016-politics
I think that more exemplifies James’s point than undercuts it, especially since he points out that exact phenomenon of conservative D’s voting for local D’s but voting for R’s statewide and national levels.
If Jim Webb were a credible candidate for the D nomination, I imagine that the hypothetical Kim Davis would be at least willing to consider voting for him. I don’t mean to cast Webb in the same group as Donald, but am just suggesting that he strikes some of the conservative notes that would probably have some appeal to whatever stereotype Ms. Davis is supposed to represent.
Actually, Greg, that made my point perfectly. But as is typical for OT liberals no critique of Dems can really be accepted, except the critique that they’re not liberal enough.
One of the reasons I left OT was because I was tired of butting my head against that wall.
I also object to Democrats on the grounds of their being to illiberal.
Check+
No to besmirch the Immaculate Coalition, but Obama won 45% of the vote in Rowan County. I suspect there is a fair amount of overlap there. I doubt he got there with people whose racial views would actually be embraced by OT.
What worries me most about Trump is the extent to which there may be a coalition that could win. It’s a coalition that excludes a lot of current Republicans… And yeah, includes a fair number of people who put Obama over the top (and may put HRC over the top).
Which year?
It was 49% in 2008.
I can’t speak for Hanley, but it draws on a point that I think gets overlooked, which is that it’s not at all clear that Trump is a Republican problem, because he draws on a pool of voters that are not allegiant to the Republican Party (including some that are allegiant to their adversaries). It is a national problem. And though Hanley didn’t really go in to this, I would further argue that it is not a national problem because Republicans have made it one, but it’s a national problem here for the same reasons it’s a national problem in France, Britain, most of eastern Europe, and over much of the western world that doesn’t even have a Republican Party.
Or to put it another way, if this isn’t a flash-in-the-pan convergence of celebrity and charisma, this is actually something that goes well beyond the Democrats-good-Republicans-bad box that there is an overwhelming insistence at times that everything political is placed.
I’d actually prefer that it were the case, because then it is something that could be made right. Attempts by the party to make it right, though, have demonstrated that attempts to put it in a box and move past it actually end up making things worse. If this isn’t a flash-in-the-pan convergence of charisma and celebrity, it’s indicative of a larger problem. A national one.
Thanks, Will.
…It occurs to me that maybe we can agree on this much and leave it there just for now:
The objective policy problems and social/economic conditions that are pushing Trump to the fore in the Republican primary right now are indisputably national problems.
…That, right now, they are pushing Trump in particular to the fore in the Republican primary in particular… whether that is primarily a national problem could be the subject for another day. I’m inclined to regard very serious problems inside either of the major parties as just ipso facto, because of the structural setup we have where each party is so powerful, also national problems. But I don’t think that’s quite what you mean – or you mean more than just that. So maybe we can explore that further later.
…2012, I see.
So you’re saying you think there is a significant Democrat-Obama voter-Trump support overlap happening. Could be. I suppose that depends a lot on how the Trump polling is being done right now. You’re making a reasonable guess, but we’re really not sure exactly how far that goes, and wouldn’t you agree that turns out to matter quite a bit?
But to know whether it matters we have to know what idea of value we’re even discussing. I’m still not clear exactly what the argument being advanced or resisted really is here.
Ostensibly in this post it’s two things:
1) resisting denial that Trump is drawing support from the Democratic party,
2) resisting the idea that Republican party leaders could somehow have prevented their party from being largely captured by an ugly populist contingent.
Are these really the points that are at stake, or even of most interest, in this discussion? Outright denial of (1) is impossible; it’s there in the numbers. But what’s the import of that? Isn’t that really the question? And doesn’t that depend not on the existence of merely some – any – support for Trump from some nominal or indeed more-than-nominal Democrats? Doesn’t it depend on the extent of, the context of, the reasoning behind such support, etc.?
As far as (2), the idea that “Republican party leaders could somehow have prevented their party from being largely captured by an ugly populist contingent”? I mean, I dunno. That hasn’t really been on my mind. I’m not under the impression that’s how elections work in general, much less that it could or should have happened i this one. I take it that;s a meme out there to be resisted, so okay. But I don’t honestly know that I get what that view really has to do with the rest of all of this. I get that this stuff can speak to that claim, but it just doesn’t really strike me as the core question. Though one thing’s clear: they’ve certainly taken it as their responsibility to try to prevent the Trump outcome.
So… what do you take to be the core question here, Will, and how does the evidence on hand speak to it, if I may ask you that so straightforwardly?
“Are these really the points that are at stake, or even of most interest, in this discussion?”
So you’re taking the classic “the author didn’t write the post I want to see” position?
Well, being that this is an ongoing point of discussion between Will and myself, and being that he has gone a ways down this road separately form this a number of tmes (including on Christmas Day), and being that for him I think there is meaning in this discussion beyond simply whether people admit what appears to be fact (but I could be wrong about that), it’s not so much a position wrt to your post as it is that I am now asking Will about whether he views these questions as the most meaningful ones that are at stake regarding this topic.
So, no problem that you wrote the post you wanted to write. But I wanted to clarify whether Will also thinks the questions you raise are the most interesting and important ones to be discussed and that are at stake with this topic.
“The most interesting”?
Does he have to see them as “the most interesting for them to be worthy of his attention, or is it sufficient that he sees them as “interesting enough”?
This goes back to your argumentative style, which I have critiqued numerous times in the past.
Why do you think you get to infer that I’m poised to declare that whatever answer he would give would be inadequate in any way? Or that I’m asking in order to move on to a critique for publishing your post?
I’m asking because I’m curious to know what he really feels is at stake – most interesting, most important – on this topic. Is it these questions you raise, or for him is it other questions, and if so what? I’m asking because I’m curious about that.
I’m sure you’ll say it’s because of things I’ve done in the past. Which is fine. But I’m asking because I want to know what he regards as at stake here.
Not that he’ll answer anymore. Or that he ever had to.
Also, for his sake, obviously we will declare this little experiment a failure.
So, so long, again.
I say your question is just typical of your tendency to ask questions that try to push people into a corner of your choosing, someplace they never intended to go.
Instead of asking the leading and corner-defining question “do you think this is the most important question,” you could have asked “how important do you think this question is”.
There’s a big difference, and one that you never seem to miss an opportunity to miss.
I don’t understand what corner I’m pushing him into since I’m simply asking him to say, out of the universe of question in all this, what he thinks is most important; why my interest in knowing that is at all inappropriate or unseemly, or how your suggestion is an alternative way for me to ask that.
What I do notice is that your suggestion would keep the discussion trained exactly on your questions to the exculsion of others (“How important, exactly, do you think James’ questions are, Will?” – which does seem more like a corner to me, but that’s me), rather than letting it potentially move on to other questions -though my question could also result in the discussion not moving, if it turns out he feels your questions are the most interesting/important ones.
Your response is, bluntly, rather stupid.
Asking someone “how important do you think this is” is the opposite from corner-drawing or forcing a focus only on my position because it allows the person to say, “not very, I’m really more concerned about this other thing.”
It’s a more open-ended question, whereas your “do you think this is the most important question” is closed-ended (binary, even). If you know anything about survey methodology, you know that people doing surveys prefer closed-ended questions over open-ended questions because it allows them to control the responses. Ask an open-ended question and your damned respondents will go all over the place–it’s like herding cats.
If I’m not mistaken, closed-ended questions are a normal courtroom technique, too, because lawyers generally are trying to lead a witness to a particular point.
Well, I’m sure it pained you to be forced into the corner (by me!) of calling me stupid.
Uh.. but my actual question – which brackets the one you’re focused on, stated both before (“But to know whether it matters we have to know what idea of value we’re even discussing. I’m still not clear exactly what the argument being advanced or resisted really is here.” – yes, that’s a question) and restated after it – was essentially, well it was literally, “What do you take to be the core question here, Will, and how does the evidence on hand speak to it…?” Which is about as open-ended as it gets.
The question about whether your questions were those questions was really just a transition to that question from your post. But you’re focused on what I say specifically about your questions, which is understandable
I bet that felt good. Time for a cigarette?
Cheers. Smoke ’em if you got ’em.
We’ll see if this works.
For me, cig-break time translates to, “Time to eat a mini-quiche.”
I can only wonder if you’re imagining I have some kind of “liberal quiche eater” reaction in mind.
Quiche is like grits; doesn’t appeal to me but tastes are subjective.
Nope. Just literally about to eat a $3 mini-quiche.
They’re fantastic!
“No true Democrat…”
I do think the phenomenon of people remaining more or less loyal to one party, at least when it comes to identifying with said party, even if the party has largely gone a different ideological direction.
I’m thinking of my own reluctance to register as a Democrat. I was raised in a more or less pro-Republican household (well, kind of….my mom’s a Democrat and my dad was an independent, but the “vibes” were mostly Republican). And while I can’t really affiliate with the R’s any more and while at least from a policy perspective I support much of what the Democratic party does, I really really really can’t sign on as a Democrat. I have some weird distaste for that party that transcends reason. Maybe it’s like Grandpa Simpson swearing he’ll never recognize the state of Missouri.
(I’m sorry, your post isn’t “let’s explore Gabriel Conroy’s politics.” But what you describe just seems to ring true for me.)
So… I’m trying to understand the point here.
So let’s say for the sake of argument your “from a policy perspective I support much of what the Democratic party does,” roughly corresponds in mirror image to the political attitudes of the voters we’re thinking about – Kim Davises or folks like my On Point caller (I really recommend that program, btw – the hour I link above, and the program in general.)
Now, let’s say you came from a more explicitly Republican household, and you’ve been a registered Republican since you were eighteen. But let’s say that you haven’t felt invested in Republican politics except in a negative way (being that from a policy perspective you support much of what the Democratic party does) for three, four, or more cycles. You’ve been living in a closed primary state, but you haven’t really cared to vote in primaries. You’ve been voting for Democrats in presidential elections for a number of cycles. You may vote for Republicans in some or even most local races where ideology is not as much a driver of your vote (you may not).
This year a firebrand leftist with open hostility to the First Amendment has caught your attention. The mainstream media is openly fretting about what in their view is a very real threat she poses to free speech. But you happen think what this person has to say about limits on free speech in certain circumstances (Too many, the mainstream media yell!) makes a lot of sense. Pollsters have called your house and you’ve expressed support for this candidate, who is leading the Democratic primary race for president. You’re a [Shudder!] “THAT CANDIDATE supporter.” Part of you can barely bring yourself to admit it to likeminded free-speech-killing leftists. But another part of you gets a secret thrill from IMAGINING shouting “I HATE THE FIRST AMENDMENT!!” from the nearest rooftop. You’v voted for Democrats for president for at least three cycles running.
But you’re a registered Republican. Someone advances this last fact as a “critique” of the Republican Party. What exactly is the substance of this critique? That’s what I’m not clear on.
I absolutely agree with you that a lot of this rings very true. I’m just not clear what the import of the point being made here is – or what the point even is, for that matter.
Inverting your scenario back to my OP, who stands in for your fireball leftist?
Because this isn’t about Cruz and Rubio.
Trump, I guess.
I guess it wouldn’t need to be a firebrand leftist. It would or could be someone spouting a series of very offensive and traditionally or often leftist views (“free speech is a capitalist stalking horse!”) who might have other heterodox views from an overall leftist pov.
But also let’s address my scenario in order to clarify the point. Say it was an across-the-board leftist who happened to be featuring those views ahead of others, but she was in line with leftist dogma on nearly every other point. Would the point you’re making about what the fact of Democrat Trump supporters says about the Democratic Party stand as applied to what support from folks like poor fictional Republican Gabriel for “THAT CANDIDATE” would say about the Republican Party?
And what is it, in the actual case, you’re saying it says, again?
All I’m saying about the Democratic Party is that their are a not inconsiderable number of Democrats who support Trump, no matter how certain Dems try to deny it. No more, no less. No big statement about what it means about the Democratic Party. The big statement is what it means about parties in general, or at least American political parties, which is, you don’t choose your supporters, they choose you, and your party leadership/establishment may not have any control over that.
In your scenario, don’t forget that this person with the offensive and/or leftist views was formerly associated with the Republicans. Because part of what I’m pushing back against is the convenient neatness of the “it’s them, not us” storyline that a lot of folks on the left of the median are pushing.
Oh, okay.
Yeah, the number’s not zero. Hell, the number of registered Democrats with perfect 50-year Democratic voting records is not zero. (In fact I bet it’s higher for that category than it is for independents with a two-cycle record of voting for Barack Obama and before that they were kids.)
But if we’re not saying that means anything, then I guess it’s a short conversation.
I’d be curious to know who’s denying outright the existence of these Democrats. I bet they’re… interesting people.
…Yes, I was thinking about that as well – former Republican, now Dem with out-there leftist views in some areas; moderate or even still Republicanesque in others.
That’s why I chose the speech issue, because that could very easily be a thread through the person’s evolution – flag-burning -> campaign finance -> abortion clinic protection.
But again, there’s not a lot to say if all we’re saying is at stake is simply whether people admit that this person has Republican supporters such as Gabriel Conroy. People should admit he does. It just doesn’t mean anything that he does!
I can’t say I understood your point, Michael, but to this
I realize you’re stating a hypothetical, but I’ll say I’ve voted for the Dem for president only twice. I vote for the R’s in super-local elections mostly because they don’t have a chance at winning and I want to be contrarian. For statewide office, like governor or senator, I usually hold my nose and vote for the Dem because the R, or the consequences of having an R in the senate, is so much worse.
Again, this doesn’t answer your point and I realize you weren’t trying to make claims about what I do, I just thought I’d chime in on that one aspect of your comment.
I get it. Intellectually I dislike the Republicans and Democrats about equally. But the word “Republican” generates a negative visceral response for me that “Democrat” doesn’t. As you say, it transcends reason…or maybe “falls short of” is more appropriate.
Yeah, “falls short” is probably a lot better, because for me it really is a more “visceral” than “transcendent” thing.
Not sure whether this is worth clarifying but… I’m sure some D’s are for Trumpy. However those D’s are most likely to be Reagan D’s who have supported R’s for years, Kim Davis D’s who are only D’s based on heritage but don’t’ support D policies or those who are only D at the local level but not at the Fed level. They are the most conservative D’s who have been leaving the party in droves especially in the south. The D’s who are going to Trump are the D’s who were lost to the national party years ago unless they somehow nominated Jim Webb.
Really, this is still a “no true Democrat” argument. You’re flattening out party politics and creating an incomplete model by focusing on national-level politics. “D policies” and “real Democrats” are limited to a certain set of national level issues.
But that ignores what’s going on below that level in a country that is still federalist rather than unitary, in which the vast majority of elections are at the local and state level, and where parties are actually organized from the county level up, rather than the national level down.
I’m not saying they aren’t D’s just those that have been leaving the party for years and aren’t’ D at the level Trumpy is running at.
As near as i can tell the D’s who may be going for Trumpy were not those who were likely to vote D in almost any case. I’m sure there are a few but not many.
Also at the local level party affiliation matters a lot less.
Again, this boils down to “no true Democrat.”
The possibility that they’re true Democrats and the party label has been taken over by a different group, and that these folks still hold the label because they’d prefer the party come back to them than that they have to leave it doesn’t enter your analysis, because you seem to insist that only the national level matters, not the local level.
I’m sure that idea is comforting to national level–establishment–Republicans; they can comfortably discount the gains of the radical right at the local level because that doesn’t say anything about the party….wait, that’s not what liberals have been saying…
So what happens locally defines Republicans, but doesn’t define Democrats. Well, I’m glad we got that straightened out in a way totally free from partisan bias.
That they don’t vote D at the national level assumes facts not in evidence.
The circularity of it analogous to Chris Hayes saying that the data may Demonstrate that white Republicans and white Democrats have similarly racist views on black intelligence and work ethic, it’s totally different because we know the white Republicans mean it because they vote Republican and the white Democrats don’t because they vote Democrat. (And now if they do mean it they are actually probably Democrats who vote Republican at the national level…)
Did Chris Hayes say that?
Anecdotal, but… These are not all Democrats, or so I’m guessing (since most don’t say), but they are expressing positions that are shared by many Democrats who don’t live in the backwoods of Kentucky. [This list is selective, of course. The letters I didn’t select from are from more conservative people, and obviously there were plenty of them as well.]