After commanding victories in the Iowa and New Hampshire primary elections, Donald Trump looks almost certain to be the U.S. Republican Party’s nominee for president. Apart from Nikki Haley, Trump’s former ambassador to the United Nations—who’d staked her candidacy on the prospect of beating him in New Hampshire—all other Republican candidates have now dropped out of the race.
Trump’s dominance is in spite of a remarkable 91 felony indictments in four criminal cases, including charges that he conspired to overturn the election he lost in 2020. It’s also in spite of a poor record in elections against Democrats overall: In the 2018 U.S. midterm elections, Democrats gained 41 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, their largest increase in a midterm since 1974. In 2020, the party won not only the presidency but the House and the Senate. It was the first time since the Great Depression that any American president’s party had lost control of all three after one term. In the 2022 midterms, with Trump still effectively the Republicans’ leader—and political conditions favoring them—they captured only a slim majority in the House, while Democrats held the Senate. And yet this year, about two-thirds of Republican voters say they want him as their nominee. Why is their support so unshaken?
Seth Masket is a professor of political science at the University of Denver and the author of three books on American political parties. Since February 2023, Masket has been regularly surveying Republican Party chairs across the U.S. at the county level about where they stand on the party’s presidential candidates. He sees the phenomenon of Trump’s support as representing a transformation in the make-up of the Republican political base. Since the 1950s, the party has had a significant populist faction that’s distrustful, even resentful, of their country’s political and cultural elites. In recent years, that faction has grown. And today, thanks to Trump—who taps directly and deliberately into its concerns and priorities—it’s dominant. He’s the first leader not just to campaign in Republican populists’ terms but actually to govern in those terms once in office.
As his control of the Republican Party consolidates again, Trump’s seeming authenticity in his populist sentiments and fidelity to populist voters have made him their leader in a way no candidate ever has been. It’s a connection so strong that Trump’s criminal indictments and unpopularity outside the party look to Republican populists only like more coordinated, corrupt efforts to keep them down …
Michael Bluhm: How would you put Trump’s current popularity among Republican voters in historical context?
Laura Fuhrman
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