Your Turn gives Beast Inside members a chance to weigh in with questions and perspectives about what’s happening in the news for a chance to be published on the homepage. Thank you to member Muriel Schuerman for this week’s question on the number and location of President Trump’s most loyal voters.
What is the size and geographical distribution of Trump’s supporters? Don’t tell me about the 2016 election: A lot of voters simply voted against Hillary, but she won’t be on the ticket again... So, realistically what does his “base” really amount to?
So the fastest way to answer this is to look at Trump’s approval rating over time. There are a few poll aggregators out there that pull from different polling sources and average or weight the results—Real Clear Politics, FiveThirtyEight—and the old reliable standard from Gallup.
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Trump has not cracked a net positive approval since around February 2017, shortly after inauguration. His peak around then was 45-46 percent approval, depending on the aggregator or poll, plunging to an all-time low of around 36-37 percent approval in December 2017. Since February, Trump’s approval has tended to hover in the low 40s.
But the people who have at various times approved of Trump’s performance might not fit well in what most consider to be a “base.” Elections are won by cobbling together a coalition of voters, which can include the less-committed and a smaller subset of hard-core supporters. To get closer to measuring the size of that latter group, we can look at the “strongly support” subcomponent of his approval figures. The people who say they “strongly approve” have been fairly consistent in Gallup polling at around 26 percent of respondents—even as Trump’s overall approval rating has waxed and waned.
Within that group, support from Republicans remains similarly consistent. Gallup tracking polls from late August show 68 percent of self-identified Republicans said they “strongly approve” of Trump’s performance. Compare that to the 65 percent of Republicans who said as much in Gallup’s February 2017 poll.
The real reason we’re interested in the size of Trump’s base is because it’s a proxy question for what his 2020 re-election chances are and, to a lesser extent, how his party will fare in the midterms. While the size of your base is important, candidates still have to be able to turn that abstract support into real-world appearances of people at the polling booth.
Because of the Electoral College, it’s not so much the absolute size of your base that matters as its geographic distribution. Hillary Clinton got nearly 3 million more votes than Trump (2,868,691, to be exact) but lost the election because Trump’s voters were spread out across states with more Electoral College votes.
In addition to geography, enthusiasm matters, too.
Just ask Hillary Clinton. She did well with black voters in the Democratic primary, who propelled her to victory over Bernie Sanders. Polls showed black voters had no love for Trump, but on Election Day, it turned out that Hillary just hadn’t appealed to them enough to motivate turnout. She under-performed the historic black voter turnout seen in 2008 and 2012 for Barack Obama and saw the lowest black voter turnout in 20 years. So it’s not enough for people just to like you relative to the other candidate—they have to like you enough to turn out on Election Day.
How is Trump’s support base doing in the states that matter most and are they fired up? It’s hard to pinpoint exactly, but we can look at a few metrics that are sometimes handy stand-ins for what voters are thinking about the president.
We can look at a handful of elections in swing states and districts that Trump won to get a very rough idea of where things stand on the distribution of enthusiasm across key states. There was the November 2017 governor’s election in Virginia that saw record turnout among anti-Trump voters eager to shut down Ed Gillespie, a conventional Republican and former RNC chairman who opted for a Trump-style campaign. And in Pennsylvania, Democrat Conor Lamb won a narrow victory in a rural congressional district that Trump had won by some 20 points. In total, Democrats have flipped somewhere around 43 state legislative seats traditionally held by Republicans since Trump was elected.
In fact, as Axios has reported, some Republicans are nervous that Trump voters’ unwavering faith in their leader’s bombast may actually hurt his party. Trump has constantly been touting a supposed “red wave” of Republican victory that will sweep the midterm elections. His base likely believes it, which may lead them to complacency and staying at home on Election Day.
But these are only approximate metrics. Support for Democratic congressional and statewide office candidates can be imperfect proxies for voters’ feelings about the president himself. The midterm elections are still two months away and the 2020 election is practically an eternity away in the political calendar. And Trump’s surprise victory in 2016 should give us all more than a fair dose of humility about our power to measure and predict his electoral future.
