Donald Trump and the Parties: Impeachment, Pandemic, Protest, and Electoral Politics in 2020

Abstract

Analyses of public opinion data covering every administration from Harry Truman's to Barak Obama's confirm that the public's judgment of the president's character, commitments, and performance have shaped affect toward the president's party and its other leaders, beliefs about where it stands on issues, assessments of its competence in managing domestic and foreign affairs, its drawing power on election day, and its appeal as an object of personal identification in both the short and long runs. The question of whether Donald Trump's bizarrely unorthodox presidency would have the same kind of impact is no longer in doubt: Trump is having a stronger impact on attitudes toward the parties-and that partisan priors are having a stronger impact on opinions of him-than of any of his postwar predecessors. This paper reviews a selection of the evidence for this conclusion and considers why it pertains. It documents how the public has reacted to Trump's performance as president and examines how attitudes toward the president and the parties have shaped and been shaped by reactions to signal events of Trump's presidency: his impeachment and acquittal, the coronavirus crisis, and the protests following the police killing of George Floyd. It also considers Trump's past and prospective influence on the electoral fates of down-ballot Republican candidates and his longer-term impact on the strength and composition of the Republican and Democratic coalitions.

Donald Trump's Big Lie and the Future of the Republican Party

“…As noted earlier, attitudes toward Trump had strongly influenced attitudes toward his party during his presidency (Jacobson 2020), so it is no surprise that when Trump's ratings dropped during the post‐election period and especially after the Capitol riot, so did opinions of the Republican Party (Jones 2021a). The average proportion of respondents with favorable opinions of the party in the 50 weekly Economist /YouGov surveys taken from the beginning of 2020 through January 5, 2021, was 39.1%; in the next six surveys after that date, it was significantly lower at 31.3% ( t = 9.9, p < .001).…”

“…During his presidency, aggregate opinion of Trump's performance was uncommonly stable and extremely polarized, with approval ratings staying in a narrow range of around 40% but with partisan differences typically exceeding 80 percentage points (Jacobson 2021; Jones 2021b). With so little variation in approval and with party polarization so extreme, the aggregate distribution of partisans in the electorate held steady as well (Jacobson 2020).…”

“…The Republican politicians who humored Trump's seditious urgings put protection of their own futures within the party above concern for that party's collective future if devotion to Trump remains its defining feature. Every postwar president has shaped popular assessments of his party, and no previous president has been as powerfully influential in this regard as Donald Trump (Jacobson 2019a; 2020). Prior to the 2020 election, attitudes toward Trump had a significantly stronger effect on opinions of his party generally and of its congressional wing in particular, as well as on down‐ballot voting intentions, than any of his predecessors.…”

Driven to Extremes: Donald Trump's Extraordinary Impact on the 2020 Elections

“…The 2020 elections were dominated at all levels by popular reactions to Donald Trump, which have been deeply divided along party lines from the onset of his 2016 candidacy through his time in office and afterward. Why Democrats and Republicans developed such antithetical and intensely held opinions of Trump is an important topic in its own right, and I have reviewed some explanations elsewhere (Jacobson 2020a, 2020b). I will not repeat that exercise in this article; the focus is rather on showing how profoundly these divergent opinions of Trump, however derived, shaped the 2020 elections.…”

“…Polarized views of Trump bred polarized views of the parties, candidates, and partisans. Opinions of Trump shaped opinions of his party and its rival more strongly than had opinions of any of his recent predecessors (Jacobson 2019a, 2020b), and consequently, partisan differences in evaluations of the parties widened to record levels. For example, the partisan gap in favorable opinions of the congressional parties had averaged 48, 45, and 47 percentage points, respectively, during the Clinton, G. W. Bush, and Obama presidencies; under Trump, the gap grew steadily, from 52 points in 2017 to 72 points in 2020.…”