By Robert VerBruggen
November 27, 2020 6:30 AM
President Trump waves to supporters at a rally in Murphysboro, Ill., October 27, 2018. (Al Drago/Reuters)
Has he remade the party in his image?
Let’s be frank: Over the past 30 years, Republicans have not fared well in presidential elections. Since 1992, Democrats have won five times and carried the popular vote all but once. Republicans won three times, but lost the popular vote in two of those. The 2000 win relied on a very narrow victory in Florida; the 2016 one came at the hand of Donald Trump, a very unconventional Republican by any measure, and relied on thin margins in Rust Belt states where his particular message resonated.
Dubya’s 2004 reelection aside, either we’re getting our butts kicked, or we’re barely scraping the votes together to pull off wins that leverage the peculiarities of the Electoral College. Going forward, the question is how to put together a better winning coalition — and how much that coalition will look like and build on you-know-who’s.
No one, including yours truly, really knows where this battered ship is headed. But here are five key questions that should frame this debate heading into 2024.
- How unusual was Trump’s coalition, really? And should we be satisfied with an “Electoral College hack”?
When thinking about presidential coalitions, it helps to look at the data at three different levels: states, which of course decide the Electoral College; smaller geographical units, especially the gaps between rural, suburban, and urban areas; and individual demographics.
At the state level, things actually haven’t looked that unusual in the Trump era. Red states are still red, blue states are still blue, and purple states still hover around the 50 percent mark — with states across the country tending to shift toward the Republicans or the Democrats together. To illustrate this, I grabbed some data on the two-party vote share in 48 states in 2012, 2016, and 2020. (I left out D.C., California, and New York: D.C. is an outlier with next to no Republican presence; the other two, as of this writing, are still taking their sweet time counting their 2020 ballots and are not in play for the GOP anyway.)
Here’s how things shifted between Romney’s loss in 2012 and Trump’s victory in 2016, with a diagonal line indicating where states would fall if both candidates did equally well. Dots above the line indicate states where Trump did better than Romney had.
Despite the huge differences in these contests — the nation’s first black president up for reelection against a Mormon, as compared with . . . well, Hillary Clinton versus Donald Trump — the overall pattern is pretty simple and boring. Trump outperformed Romney in the vast majority of states, yet the vote shares in the two races are very strongly correlated.
Trump’s 2020 performance maps onto his 2016 performance even more directly. If you take his 2016 vote share from a given state and knock two points off, you’ll probably end up pretty close to his share in 2020.
These data make clear that presidential contests are fought between the 40-yard lines. Trump didn’t redesign the field and restart the game; he kept most of what Romney had, gained enough new ground to beat Clinton, and then lost enough ground to lose to Biden. And the shifts in vote shares are not limited to a handful of important states, but broadly distributed.
Nonetheless, it remains true that Trump had to do well specifically in Rust Belt swing states to win the Electoral College, and that his strategy paid off especially well there. Nationwide, he barely surpassed Romney’s share of the two-party vote (about 49 percent vs. 48 percent), and yet he beat Romney’s electoral-vote count by half. RealClearPolitics election guru Sean Trende thinks it unlikely that another Republican could have won in 2016:
Rubio et al. might have amassed similar — or better — popular vote counts, but they wouldn’t have been as efficiently distributed as Trump’s and still would have lost. Remember, in 2012 the Electoral College actually had a Democratic bias to it, in part because Romney famously failed to connect with blue-collar voters because of his stance on fiscal issues and his culturally upscale persona.
Rubio would have done little to fix that. Yes, he would have run better in the suburbs and probably among Hispanics. He might have carried Nevada, and we would probably not be talking about blue (or purple) Arizona or Texas today. At the same time, it is hard to see him appealing to out-of-work steelworkers in western Pennsylvania in the same way that Trump did. With massive support from rural and small-town voters, Trump barely carried Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. Rubio wouldn’t have gotten that turnout, or made up for it in the suburbs given his social conservatism.
When you break voters down into rural, suburban, and urban categories this way, however, you also see how Trump’s appeal balanced on a razor’s edge. In 2016, it won him the election even though more people voted for Clinton, because his rural supporters lived in the right states and just barely canceled out his losses in urban areas. By 2020, he had antagonized the Democratic base and alienated the suburbs enough that his rural support was no longer sufficient. A candidate who could appeal to rural areas without proving toxic to suburbanites would of course be a welcome development. So would a candidate who’s simply likable and popular in general.
Lastly, let’s look at the individual-level characteristics of Trump’s supporters these past four years. In a piece over at Economics 21, Chris Pope argues that Trump’s populist coalition is largely a myth. At most, it amounts to an “Electoral College hack” that boosted just the right voting blocs, concentrated in just the right places, to achieve an unlikely victory four years ago. Some Republicans are claiming the party has become “working-class” and “multiracial” thanks to Trump, but that overstates recent developments, at least going by the exit polls:
The 54% share of Americans with household incomes exceeding $100,000 that supported Trump in 2020 was the same as that which supported Romney in [2012]. The proportion of Americans with incomes below $50,000 who supported Trump (42%) was only slightly greater than that which supported Romney (38%), while the share of the electorate in that lower-income group fell from 41% to 35%. Trump’s 49% share of voters without a college education was only a touch more than the 47% that supported Romney.
The conventional wisdom is also mistaken on race. Trump’s 57% level of support among white voters in 2020 was lower than the 59% share Romney received. With Obama and his legacy off the ballot, the GOP share of black voters surged from 6% in 2012 to 12% in 2020, while that among Hispanics ticked up from 27% to 32%. Due to the fact that white voters make up a larger share of the electorate, the net impact of these shifts roughly cancelled out. Nor has Trump done much to inflate the gender gap. In fact, the difference between Trump’s 2020 share of male and female voters (49% to 43%) was smaller than that for Romney in 2012 (52% to 44%).
Combining Pope’s observations about the Trump coalition with Trende’s conjectures about how a standard Republican might have fared in 2016, one might ask: Is an “Electoral College hack” all we can hope for? It’s more than John McCain or Mitt Romney had, obviously, but it’s not exactly a satisfying way to win.
Given shifting national demographics, the Trump coalition at minimum feels awfully tenuous. To win going forward with the Trump approach, we’ll need to push the modest progress Trump made among minorities and the working class further, ideally while regaining support among the groups he sacrificed.
And to win another way, we’d need to, uh, figure out another way.
- What to make of the fact that GOP Senate candidates ran ahead of Trump in both 2016 and 2020?
As John McCormack pointed out four years ago,
In almost every state with a competitive Senate or presidential race, the Republican Senate candidate ran ahead of Trump — sometimes by a wide margin — regardless of whether or not the candidate stood by Trump. . . . There aren’t any Senate races in which GOP candidates rejected Trump and performed worse than him, but there are examples of Republican candidates who rejected Trump and did much better than him.
The same thing happened this year. As Aaron Blake of the Washington Post noted the day after the election, “Nine competitive Senate races were held in states that were also in play at the presidential level. In seven of them, Trump is running behind the GOP Senate candidate’s margin. He even ran behind challengers to incumbent Democrats in two key states.”
So perhaps the normal Republican approach isn’t so dead after all?
- How much of all this was about Trump himself, and how much is it about the people he was up against?
As Trende notes, Trump explicitly and deliberately appealed to the white working class. But his opponents also played a role in his coalition-building. Hillary Clinton was a weak candidate who ran her campaign poorly. And while Joe Biden presented himself as a moderate, many believe he was dragged down among minority groups, Hispanics in particular, by his fellow Democrats’ cries of “socialism” and “defund the police.” (Hopefully we’ll have better polling data on these issues soon.)
Trende has forgotten more about the nitty-gritty of election data than I could ever hope to learn, and we were colleagues a few years back, when I ran the policy vertical over at RealClear. But between the GOP’s Senate performances and the weaknesses of Trump’s opponents, I’m not entirely convinced that these factors couldn’t have propelled a different Republican to victory.
On a more pessimistic note, future Republican candidates can’t necessarily count on future Democrats to screw up so badly.
- To the extent this is about Trump, to what degree is it about his policies as opposed to his celebrity and rhetoric?
If “Trumpism” is the solution, what is Trumpism exactly?
The Donald came into the 2016 race with sky-high name recognition thanks to decades in the media spotlight, first as a real-estate mogul and then as a reality-TV star. He masterfully exploited the media’s hunger for ratings and clicks, letting loose a steady stream of ridiculous and offensive comments that the networks and newspapers ate up. I don’t want any future Republican candidate to follow in those footsteps, but I can’t say it didn’t work.
I’d ask what Ted Nugent is up to these days, but I probably shouldn’t even joke about that.
Trump’s actual policies, meanwhile, were somewhere in between the populism he proclaimed and the standard Republican platform. Immigration and trade restrictions, yes, but also tax cuts, deregulation, a business-friendly labor board, and three solid originalist Supreme Court picks.
As I’ve put it in the past, Trump nailed down the GOP base by adopting the usual positions on “dealbreaker” issues such as guns and abortion, but beyond that took license to appeal to other constituencies with unorthodox positions: trade restrictions for the Rust Belt, Social Security for seniors, etc. This is probably fertile ground for a future candidate.
- How does Trump plan to occupy himself these next four years?
As you may have noticed, to this point I’ve taken little note of the diarrhea storm raining down on us at present. Trump seems unwilling to admit his clear loss and is filling the courts with embarrassingly weak legal challenges.
He’s not going to ride off into the sunset, his orange hair waving in the breeze. He could start a TV network, try to make himself a kingmaker in GOP politics in the coming years, or even run again in 2024. If he’s successful at any of those things, Trumpism will continue to have force even if another strategy could work just as well politically.
About half of Republicans think the election was stolen, so this strategy hasn’t backfired, at least not yet.
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