Reminding Them Of Their Patriotism Helped Bolster Their Support For Us Democracy Including The Peaceful Transfer Of Power After An Election
The House committee investigating last years attack on the Capitol started public hearings last week, continuing its inquiry into the facts, circumstances, and causes relating to the January 6, 2021, domestic terrorist attack upon the United States Capitol Complex. Central to this investigation are questions about whether then-President Donald Trump encouraged his supporters to attack and disrupt the certification of the election, potentially overturning the result.
Some might argue that Trumps Jan. 6 speech to his supporters reflects his broader pattern of dismissing presidential norms including the peaceful transfer of power, which is central to democracy. Before the 2016 election, for instance, Trump would not publicly commit to accepting the results as legitimate if he lost. He made before the 2020 election, raising questions about whether he would cede power.
Our research in fall 2020 investigated which factors might affect whether American voters would support or oppose Trump remaining in office if he lost which would violate fundamental democratic principles. Political scientists have long studied public support for democratic norms and procedures, such as allowing disliked groups to hold rallies.
This piece was originally published by Religion News Service.
As a student of American evangelicalism, I am frequently asked how Christians can support Donald Trump. I stop myself from going into lecture mode. Most people want a sound bite, not a disquisition.
The Numbers Are Clear: Its Still Trumps Party
The simplest barometer of whether Trump still dominates the party is the 2024 presidential polls. And by that metric, Trumps grip is pretty hard to question.
The RealClearPolitics poll average has Trump leading the field by an average of 26.2 points. All but one national poll cataloged by FiveThirtyEight in July had Trump beating DeSantis by a similarly large double-digit margin .
Granted, any challenger against an incumbent like Trump probably wouldnt pop up on many voters radars this far ahead of an election. But much of the Trump is slipping coverage skips past all this vital context. For example, the New York Times recently ran a write-up of its poll with Siena College headlined Half of G.O.P. Voters Ready to Leave Trump Behind, Poll Finds. And indeed, the poll did find that 51 percent of Republicans would vote for someone other than Trump if the primary were held today.
Yet the headline is misleading. The Times poll found that Trump still commanded 49 percent support in the party his next closest rival, DeSantis, garnered a mere 25 percent. In the article, reporter Michael Bender notes that the results show that Mr. Trump maintains his primacy in the party, contradicting the pieces headline.
But weve been here before. Remember when Fox famously went to war against Trump during the 2016 primaries, culminating in a fight between Trump and Megyn Kelly? We know how that played out.
Millions Of Americans Support Use Of Force To Restore Trump To White House: Report
An estimated 21 million Americans believe that Joe Biden is an illegitimate president and that former President Donald Trump should be restored to the White House by force.
Thats the disturbing finding of a new report from the University of Chicago that seeks to understand what motivated the insurrectionists who attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.
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Americans Are Starting To Get It: We Cant Let Trump Or Trumpism Back In Office
Republicans have put all their chips on extremism. But voters are sending more and more signals that theyre fed up with it
Polls and election results over the last week reminded Americans that politics seldom moves in a straight line. As in physics, action produces reaction. Overreach invites backlash.
For a long while former President Trump and his cronies seemed to be immune from this rule of political life and from the consequences of even the most outrageous conduct. As Trump himself once famously said, I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldnt lose voters.
And so it seemed. He escaped conviction in not one but two impeachment trials and cowed Republican leaders to fall in line after the January 6 insurrection. He remains the leading contender for the Republican partys 2024 presidential nomination.
Today Republicans are still falling over themselves to prove their loyalty to him by outdoing each other in extremism.
On 19 August, a Republican candidate for Floridas state assembly even took to Twitter to against federal law enforcement officials. Under my plan, Luis Miguel tweeted, all Floridians will have permission to shoot FBI, IRS, ATF and all other ON SIGHT! Let freedom ring!
In Washington, the US supreme court cast aside almost 50 years of settled precedent to overturn Roe v Wade. Republican-dominated state legislatures rushed to enact draconian restrictions on womens reproductive rights.
A Reckoning Over Racial Inequality
Racial tensions were a constant undercurrent during Trumps presidency, often intensified by the public statements he made in response to high-profile incidents.
The death of George Floyd, in particular, brought race to the surface in a way that few other recent events have. The videotaped killing of the unarmed, 46-year-old Black man by a White police officer in Minneapolis was among several police killings that sparked national and international protests in 2020 and led to an outpouring of public support for the Black Lives Matter movement, including from corporations, universities and other institutions. In a survey shortly after Floyds death in May, two-thirds of U.S. adults including majorities across all major racial and ethnic groups voiced support for the movement, and use of the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag surged to a .
Attitudes began to change as the protests wore on and sometimes turned violent, drawing sharp condemnation from Trump. By September, support for the Black Lives Matter movement had slipped to 55% largely due to decreases among White adults and many Americans questioned whether the nations renewed focus on race would lead to changes to address racial inequality or improve the lives of Black people.
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Who Is Following The Jan 6 Hearings
The hearings are unlikely to be a factor in shaping Republican views because most say they are paying little to no attention to the investigation. According to this latest poll, 58 percent of Americans said they were paying at least some attention to the hearings, while another 41 percent said they were paying little to no attention, including 56 percent of Republicans. Democrats are the most reliable audience for the Jan. 6 hearings, with 80 percent following along.
Its almost an article of faith for a Republican to say, Im not paying attention to this stuff, Ayres said.
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No matter how earth-shattering these hearings are, there is also little to suggest they will inform the way people vote during the November midterms. In fact, only 9 percent of U.S. adults said it will be top of mind for them this fall, including 17 percent of Democrats and 2 percent of Republicans. A far larger share of Americans 37 percent said they care most about inflation, including 57 percent of Republicans and 42 percent of independents.
For Democrats, abortion ranked as the top concern. Following the Supreme Courts overturning of Roe v. Wade and the loss of federal protections for the medical procedure in June, 29 percent of Democrats and 18 percent of Americans overall picked abortion as what matters most to them.
Chart by Megan McGrew/PBS NewsHour
Poll: Fewer Than Half Of Republican Primary Voters Would Support Trump In 2024
Just over half of Republicans likely to vote in their party’s 2024 presidential primary say that they would prefer someone other than former President Donald Trump as the party’s presidential candidate, a poll released on Tuesday by The New York Times and Siena College found.
After identifying Republicans likely to vote in the primary, the survey gave respondents a choice between Trump and five other potential GOP nominees. Only 49% of respondents chose Trump, despite the fact that the former president carried 94% of all Republican votes in the 2020 election, which he lost to current President Joe Biden.
Trump’s closest challenger was Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who was chosen by 25% of respondents. Other potential candidates included Texas Senator Ted Cruz Trump’s one-time running mate, former Vice President Mike Pence former South Carolina governor and Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo .
Is Trump vulnerable?
The biggest question raised by the poll is whether it indicates that Trump might be vulnerable to a challenge in the Republican primary elections in 2024. Experts said that the results should be read with caution.
While Trump’s lack of a clear majority in the poll may raise some eyebrows, “He’s still pretty far ahead,” Kyle Kondik, managing editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, told VOA.
Comparison to Biden
Different reactions
Trump’s base
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How Early Trump Supporters Feel Now
The former presidents 2015 backers, in their own words
About the author: Conor Friedersdorf is a California-based staff writer at The Atlantic, where he focuses on politics and national affairs. He is the founding editor of The Best of Journalism, a newsletter devoted to exceptional nonfiction.
Now that Donald Trumps presidency is over, how do the Americans who supported him at the beginning of his political run feel about his performance in the Oval Office? I put that question to 30 men and women who wrote to me in August 2015 to explain their reasons for backing his insurgent candidacy.
Among the eight who replied, all in the second week of January, after the storming of the Capitol, some persist in supporting Trump others have turned against him still others have lost faith in the whole political system. They do not constitute a representative sample of Trump voters. But their views, rendered in their own words, offer more texture than polls that tell us an approval rating.
As I did in 2015, Ill let the Trump voters have their say. But this time Ill conclude with some thoughts of my own, in my capacity as a Trump critic who knows that Americans have no choice but to coexist, as best we can, because our political and ideological differences are never going away.
And now?
The third correspondent told me in 2015 that hed vote for Trump, despite knowing that he would do a terrible job:
His assessment today:
New Poll Asks Americans Whether Trump Should Face Charges Top Midterm Priorities
About half of Americans think former President Donald Trump should face criminal charges for his role in the deadly insurrection that took place at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, according to the latest PBS NewsHour/NPR/Marist poll. But far fewer roughly a quarter think Trump will actually be prosecuted.
Since hearings by the House committee investigating the attack began in June, new evidence and testimony have revealed how much Trump and members of his administration knew about the potential for violence, as well as the former presidents embrace of his armed supporters and his unwillingness to intervene when chaos overwhelmed the Capitol.
While a majority of Americans overall blame Trump for what happened that day, public opinion remains divided down party lines, according to this last poll. Nearly all Democrats 92 percent and a majority of independents but only about one in five Republicans agree.
Chart by Megan McGrew/PBS NewsHour
The final scheduled Jan. 6 hearing is slated to start Thursday at 8 p.m. ET and is expected to offer a minute-by-minute account of what Trump did and didnt do as the Capitol was overrun. In September, the committee is scheduled to release a report of its findings.
Meanwhile, federal prosecutors responsible for charging suspects related to the attack have also been watching the hearings. Unlike Congress, We do not do our investigations in public, Attorney General Merrick Garland said at the Justice Department Wednesday.
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Inside The Echo Chamber
Nothing like this concentrated core of media influence exists on the Democratic side. In polling by the Pew Research Center, the Public Religion Research Institute and others, Democratic partisans express confidence in a broad range of mainstream media outlets. As political analysts and strategists in both parties have come to recognize, that makes it considerably more difficult for Democrats than for Republicans to drive a coherent message to their base voters.
Democrats tend to trust a lot of different news sources, and even if most journalists at those news outlets have liberal perspectives or whatever, it is much easier to get people to believe what I want them to believe if I can funnel all the information through one outlet, like Fox, says Cox.
Dan Pfeiffer, who was the White House communications director for Barack Obama, is the author of Battling the Big Lie, a book released this month that analyzes that imbalance. He argues that, as the reaction to the January 6 committee demonstrates, Republicans are now
Yet even amid all these headwinds, almost all of the strategists and analysts I spoke with said it was premature to conclude that the hearings will have no impact on thinking among conservative and Republican voters. Abramowitz notes that polls already show some slackening in the intensity of Republican support for Trump, even if he remains the partys dominant figure.
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The Baffling Continued Support For Donald Trump Explained
Donald Trump has, by almost any measure, been the worst president in U.S. history, or at least within the memory of people living in 2020. But for some reason, he has remained popular with a sizable segment of Americans. While Joe Biden defeated him in the presidential election, 74 million Americans voted for Trump, and a large percentage of Republicans, like Trump himself, are denying that he actually lost the election. So why do Trumps diehard fans stay that way?
Yes, hes made some people happy with his tax cuts and appointments of right-wing judges, and he is beloved by white supremacists and conspiracy theorists, but he has downplayed a pandemic that has taken the lives of more than 276,000 Americans and caused an economic crash. One would think his personal style, bullying, and insults would alienate many people. Yet his approval ratings have remained stable at around 40 percent for most of his presidency, and the 40 percent cant all be fringe elements. What could possibly account for the continued unwavering support of Trump loyalists?
I think that there are a number of things at play, crosscurrents, if you will, said JoDee Winterhof, senior vice president for policy and political affairs at the Human Rights Campaign.
Winterhof likewise said she observed a decline in enthusiasm among voters who were counting on Trump for positive change and agreed that Biden was better positioned than Clinton among voters overall.
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How Rational Ignorance Shapes Our Politics
To understand why so many voted to re-elect Trump after four years of historic political turmoil featuring a failed pandemic response, a devastating economic shock and a crisis in racial justice its necessary to understand the forces that propelled him to victory in 2016.
In recent publications, Berkeley scholars have suggested that Trump won with an unconventional coalition of white working class and middle-class Americans who were motivated by resentment: The culture and economy gave them no recognition and no respect for their work. Their industries were changing, their jobs were shifting overseas or lost to automation. They perceive that Black, Latinx and Asian people, and immigrants, are advancing at their expense.
Trump supporters massed for a rally in Washington, D.C., days after Democrat Joe Biden emerged as the winner of the U.S. presidential race.
But some Berkeley scholars suggested that for many voters, support for Trump or any leader is a more passive choice that takes shape in a subrational sphere.
Gabriel Lenz, an expert in political psychology, is the author of Follow the Leader? How Voters Respond to Politicians Performance and Policies . He sees political opinion shaped by a force that is almost prosaic: an apathetic lack of awareness.
Gabriel Lenz, UC Berkeley political scientist
Lenz and other political scientists call it rational ignorance.
Views Of Donald Trump Four Ways
Based on a New York Times/Siena College poll of 1,399 registered voters nationwide from Sept. 6 to 14, 2022. Questions regarding Mr. Trumps actions after the election and whether he has committed crimes were each asked of half the sample.
That level of Trump support has effectively been unchanged since the last Times/Siena poll, which was fielded in July amid televised hearings by the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol. It was also fundamentally similar to levels of support Times/Siena polls and other surveys found in recent years.
The publics view of Mr. Trumps fight against the election results also remained largely unchanged, with 54 percent in the most recent survey saying his actions posed a threat to democracy and 38 percent saying he had just exercised his right to contest the election.
And roughly half of voters said they thought Mr. Trump had committed serious federal crimes, while 38 percent thought he had not. That was similar to the responses from July, when respondents were asked more specifically about Mr. Trumps actions in the aftermath of the 2020 election.
Mr. Trump has signaled another run for president. In a hypothetical rematch in 2024 with President Biden, 45 percent said they would support Mr. Biden, while 42 percent said they would support Mr. Trump.
I dont know too much, he said. When the race starts getting closer, Ill start paying attention, but right now hes just at the forefront for me.
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