Trump's Eroding Support And The Tyranny Of The Minority

There seems to be a real disconnect between Trump’s approval rating as a whole, which is abysmal and seems to still be dropping slowly, and the assurances that Trump’s base is still solidly behind him. Even if we assume that is true, it still doesn’t seem to explain the media narrative that Trump is ascendant.

Fox News’s latest poll shows Trump at his lowest approval rating yet, 38%. In Indiana, Trump is underwater, with his approval/disapproval numbers at 41/45. That’s Indiana!! Over at the 538 poll averages, Trump’s approval rating has dropped over 10 points since February. Back in May, Nate Silver pointed out that the level of strong support for Trump had fallen by nearly 10 points. It’s hard to think that anything has happened since then that would change that trajectory.

Yet we keep on seeing polls that show Trump’s support among Republicans is holding steady at around 80%. The aforementioned Fox Poll shows 83% of Republicans still approve of Trump. Yet that same poll shows that support among evangelical Christians has fallen to 66%, a drop of 8 points in one month. More strikingly, Trump’s support among white men without a college degree dropped a whopping 12 points and is now in the mid-50s. Other polls show that Trump’s support is slipping with Republicans who are younger than 50 or who have obtained at least a four-year college degree.

So how can Trump’s support keep slipping both in general and with specific GOP constituencies but his level of Republican support remain constant.  It is certainly possible that self-described independents are responsible for most of Trump’s loss in in his generic approval polls. However, Nate Silver surmises that the reason that Trump’s approval with Republicans stays high is because more and more respondents who disapprove of Trump are no longer willing to self-identify as Republican.

What that means is that the Republican party is actually shrinking. As one GOP pollster pointed out, the party’s base is increasingly older and white, bemoaning “The problem for the party is they have handcuffed themselves to an anchor that is on the wrong side of history.”

But, as Alexander Panetta points out, the problem is that the nominal Republican party controls Congress and the White House. And it is clear that Republicans in Congress are especially fearful of its own base. But that base may, in fact, be shrinking. He cites a Pew poll that breaks the electorate down in to eight groups and among what’s defined as the “Core Conservatives” Trump’s support is an amazing 93%. That group represents just 43% of politically active Republican voters, but a large enough bloc to seemingly intimidate every GOP member of Congress. This is the group that I described as being the slim minority that believes it’s a majority.

All these data points certainly raise the possibility that the current Republican party may be disintegrating. There is certainly an opening for a Republican version of the “Third Way”. In fact, I am surprised that we haven’t seen certain of our favorite pundits (hello David Brooks) talking up the current opening for their long-dreamed of centrist third party. GOP control now largely rests on extreme gerrymandering and, as Ron Reagan aptly described it the other night on Hardball, the fact that “not the American people, the Electoral College vomited this thing up and it landed in the Oval Office”.

Of course, the party will not truly collapse until they lose their Congressional majorities. At that point, the party will really split with establishment types being forced to form a party of their own and a rump Trump party. It will get ugly. But it will require a significant electoral defeat first.

But Panetta makes an even more important point. The 43% of active Republicans only represents 13% of the public. Yet this 13% is responsible for currently controlling virtually the entire government. That 13% is driving the entire policy discussion and therefore the media narrative. What’s even more distressing is that much of that 13% is being continually fed propaganda driven by just three plutocratic billionaires – Robert Mercer and the Koch brothers. And that is a total failure of democracy and truly the tyranny of the minority.