Does Trump spell the end of our brief era of ideology? (Conservative column)

[Recursion]

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/does-trump-spell-the-end-of-our-brief-era-of-ideology/article/2583606

(Emphasis mine)

I first met Brenda and Bob Krivanek at a 2008 Democratic Caucus in Council Bluffs, on the Western edge of Iowa. They were Biden supporters. Bob in 2008 thought Biden, with his decades on the Foreign Affairs committee, was the only one who could handle the mess in Iraq. This year, Bob caucused for Trump because he liked Trump's straightforwardness and toughness.

Alexis Chiparo voted for Obama more recently — in 2012. Romney struck her as "totally out of touch" and an "elitist snob" (thanks, in part to his "47 percent" comments). Her husband is a lifetime member of the International Union of Operating Engineers. "I haven't been involved in politics for many years," he told me outside a polling place in Concord, N.H., on the day Trump won the state.

...

She likes that Trump isn't raising money from special interests, because she thinks big money distorts politics. "I do agree with Bernie on that." Trump's strongest group is registered Democrats.

...

In Washington, we assume voters stand somewhere along a political spectrum. Poll questions presume that — and in many polls, Trump ends up as the candidate of the moderates. But most people's politics are neither Left nor Right nor even in-between. They're on a different axis altogether.

[pampango]

1. "Trumpism represents a return to the norm. His rise reflects the revenge of non-ideological, which

again, may be the historic norm in this country."

Maybe it started with LBJ, but by 2010, we had achieved maximum sorting: Obamacare killed off the Blue Dogs, and the Tea Party cleared out the RINOs.

Most voters aren't deeply ideological, most don't have deeply held policy views on more than issue. Politics is about something else to most people. It's largely about identity and personality.

A billion barrels of ink have been spilled by conservatives explaining that Trump is not a conservative. Sure enough, Trump doesn't believe in natural or constitutional limits on government power ... . Trump lacks any clear policy principles and he shows no grasp of most policy areas.

But that just makes him like most Americans. His lack of ideology makes him an odd-ball today, but he fits fine within American history ...

As you point out, this is a conservative piece in a RW paper. To me it seems to lament the decline, if it ever really existed, of popular support for conservative policies and politicians. It avoids discussing a shift to the left, preferring to cast the change as "non-ideological".

Great article - though I hope you don't spend too much time at the Examiner website. 😃

[Recursion]

2. The author's a guy I've known personally for a long time

So he's in my news feed. He's usually at least interesting to read, and generally presents a kind of clear view of the conservative frame of mind.

[muriel_volestrangler]

3. The bolded sentence came from a misleading NY Times headline

To understand what Cohn has found, however, you have to look past the headline I suspect editors imposed on him: "Donald Trump's Strongest Supporter: A Certain Kind of Democrat." In the second paragraph, Cohn does indeed report: "His very best voters are self-identified Republicans who nonetheless are registered as Democrats." But you have to read far, far down into the piece to understand the limited meaning of that startling data point:

Registered Democrats make up just 8 percent of self-identified Republicans in the states with party registration, according to the Civis data. And Mr. Trump still leads, and leads comfortably, among higher-turnout voters and registered Republicans.

So the headline is based on a triple-loaded statistic: Exclude states with no party registration (e.g., much of the South), and focus only on the small minority of self-identified Republicans who are registered as Democrats, and Trump does better (43 percent) than he does among self-identified Republicans who are registered Republican (again, only in states with party registration), who give him 29 percent of his support. The natural inference from the headline — that Trump supporters are typically Democrats — is neither asserted by Cohn nor supported by the Civis data.

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/12/trump-supporters-are-often-irregular-voters.html

So if you're the fairly rare kind of guy who calls himself a Republican, but registers as a Democrat, you're more likely to like Trump.

[Recursion]

4. And that 8% of self-identified Republicans is about a quarter of his support

Which was Carney's point, I think: Trump reaches voters disaffected enough that they don't even bother to switch parties.

[muriel_volestrangler]

6. I don't think your 'about a quarter' figure is right

Such registered Democrats are only 8% of the Republican leaners they're looking at ("Registered Democrats make up just 8 percent of self-identified Republicans in the states with party registration, according to the Civis data&quot ; 43% of them support Trump. So that's 3.44% of Republican leaners. But, in that analysis, 33% of Republican leaners overall support Trump. So that's 10.4% of his support, not 'about a quarter'.

What the analysis showed was that support for Trump was slightly more common (43%, compared to 33% overall) among registered Democrats who are leaning Republican, than among all Republican leaners. But such people are still rare.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/31/upshot/donald-trumps-strongest-supporters-a-certain-kind-of-democrat.html?ref=todayspaper&_r=0

[Maeve]

5. Thank you for doing the math

And of course, "strongest supporters" still only have one vote apiece...