President Trump has a coherent theory about American politics that can be summed up in one sentence: Republicans will always come home. Despite the craziness coming from the Oval Office on a daily basis, the president’s decisions and rhetoric have been remarkably consistent, tuned to appeal to his supporters.
Until now, that strategy has worked relatively well—allowing him to retain much of his support, even as he has pushed the envelope rhetorically and with policy. Trump has survived a multitude of scandals and crises by holding the support of the congressional majority and much of the Republican electorate. And this weekend, a Wall Street Journal/NBC poll found that Trump’s approval ratings are up to 47 percent—the best of his term.
Although critics like to paint the president as a television-addicted buffoon who acts according to his latest whim, Trump has absorbed the fact that America is a deeply polarized nation. Whereas other presidents, such as Barack Obama, have tried to push back against partisan divisions, Trump relishes them. In some ways, he sees our political world more clearly than the centrists and unifiers who wish it were different.
The president’s method has pretty strong support from social scientists. The overwhelming weight of recent scholarship points to two major trends in American politics over the past three decades to justify his theory. The first is that partisan polarization in Washington has greatly intensified since the 1960s. The distance that separates the parties on most issues has vastly increased. The ideological homogeneity of each party has solidified. In other words, centrists faded as a major force in politics and policy making. The second and related trend is that the phenomenon has been much more pronounced within the Republican Party. The GOP has moved further to the right than Democrats have moved to the left. Republicans are more ideologically cohesive as a party than are Democrats, who still exhibit greater division and fragmentation relative to their counterparts (although not as much as they did in the 1950s and ’60s, when Democrats were fundamentally divided between southern and northern wings).
During the 2016 election, the power of partisanship was the basis of Trump’s victory. As a candidate, Trump dismissed the pundits who predicted that his full-throated partisan appeals threatened a replay of the 1964 election, when Senator Barry Goldwater’s right-wing extremism persuaded some Republicans to vote for Lyndon Johnson.
In the end, Trump was right; the pundits were wrong. There was very little movement in the electoral map. Although a small number of Democrats voted for Trump in states such as Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, the real key to Trump’s Electoral…
