The Manhattan Institute carried out a poll that dissects the current Republican coalition. It’s not a particularly trustworthy think-tank — Christopher Rufo is a senior fellow, and it publishes the City Journal, a magazine that only catches my eye because it is egregiously racist and pro-eugenics — so don’t accept its conclusions without question. A major result of the poll is that it detects two broad categories within the party that are somewhat in conflict, but also have much in common with each other.
- Core Republicans (65%)—longstanding GOP voters who have consistently backed Republican presidential nominees since 2016 or earlier; and
- New Entrant Republicans (29%)—recent first-time GOP presidential voters, including those who supported Democrats in 2016 or 2020 or were too young to vote in cycles before 2020.
I don’t like either group. The Core Republicans are boringly familiar, they fit the old stereotype of Republicans. The New Entrant Republicans are much more interesting and unexpected (to me), and have a more complex perspective. They’re a mess, and I don’t understand how they’ve aligned themselves to Republicans — they mainly look a bunch of flighty and weird people who bumble about looking for self-justification of their views, some of which I might agree with, except they somehow end up supporting Trump.
This description starts out positively, and ends up horrifically.
But a sizeable minority—new entrants to the GOP coalition over the past two presidential cycles—look markedly different. Younger, more racially diverse, and more likely to have voted for Democratic candidates in the recent past, this group diverges sharply from the party’s core. They are more likely, often substantially more likely, to hold progressive views across nearly every major policy domain. They are more supportive of left-leaning economic policies, more favorable toward China, more critical of Israel, and more liberal on issues ranging from migration to DEI initiatives. A significant share also report openly racist or antisemitic views and express potential support for political violence. Yet they overwhelmingly identify as Republicans today and voted for Donald Trump in 2024.
Yikes. “A significant share also report openly racist or antisemitic views and express potential support for political violence” — I think that alone is enough to explain why they ended up in the Trump camp. That’s the glue that is holding the coalition together.
With one other feature: they’re crackpots. This is the lunatic party.
Over a third of the Republican party thinks vaccines cause autism, that NASA faked the moon landing, that the Holocaust was exaggerated, that 9/11 was engineered by the US government. Over half believe Trump’s claim that his election losses were criminally engineered, and that the pandemic was produced by China. They’re nuts. This party is not salvaged by the fact that most might disagree with these conspiracy theories, it contains a substantial number of loons.
This explains a lot about the Republican party.
Although I’d like to see a similar analysis of Democratic voters — I’m lacking too much context here.
Conspiracism and related anti-intellectualism seem to be common factors here and a driving force in the steep and growing steeper all the time decline of the USoA.
That and the horribly human tendancy toseek scapegaots and demonise other öut-groups rtaher than take responsibilityand graps complex, difficult answers has a lot to do with esp the New Entrant Republicans group I reckon.
PS.
Might also worth be looking at & comparing with the anti-Science Greens party considering e.g. noted Putin shill and anti-vaxxer Stein. There’s a lot of conspiracism and anti-intellectualism there too. Of course, they are a very tiny 1% ~ish minority anyhow but even when you take so-called Independents into acount here – too many USAicans just don’t believe in scientifically demonstrated reality and do believe in too much that really isn’t true and cannot seem to do critical thinking.
Younger, more racially diverse, and more likely to have voted for Democratic candidates in the recent past, this group diverges sharply from the party’s core. They are more likely, often substantially more likely, to hold progressive views across nearly every major policy domain…
I suspect most of them have switched to the right because the Democrats have simply failed, or refused, to reach out to them, speak to them in language they can relate to, and show they’re really willing and committed to fight for those progressive values they’ve claimed to be for. The original German Nazis had similar success among a similar demographic in the last century.
“New Entrant Republicans (29%)—recent first-time GOP presidential voters, including those who supported Democrats in 2016 or 2020 or were too young to vote in cycles before 2020.”
The other side of the “Deep Rifts”, among others.
You know, the bigoted atheists and secularists who hates being called out. They went somewhere.