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What Explains Trump’s Support?

All of this is depressing, infuriating, and ultimately unsatisfying. Outside interference may help explain why enough votes shifted in the final days to give the Electoral College to Trump. But it doesn’t explain why the race was close to begin with, close enough that late movement in a few states could make the difference. It doesn’t really explain how sixty-two million people—many of whom agreed Trump was unfit for the job—could vote for a man so manifestly unqualified to be President. This may be the more important question for understanding what’s going on in our country right now.

Start with the 13.3 million Republicans who voted for Trump in the primaries. It’s safe to say these are mostly hard-core supporters—the ones Trump was talking about when he said, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.” Thirteen million is a lot of people to strongly support someone most Americans think is unqualified and unfit, but they account for less than half of all Republican primary voters and less than 10 percent of all general election voters. It’s a mistake to give those base voters more political weight than they deserve. More interesting and important is how Trump consolidated support among the much larger pool of voters beyond his base.

Besides antipathy toward me, probably the biggest factor pushing Trump skeptics into his camp was pure partisanship. There’s an old saying that “Democrats fall in love, Republicans fall in line.” That was proven true once again in 2016. I won 89 percent of Democratic voters. Despite the example of a few courageous “Never Trumpers,” Trump won 90 percent of Republican voters. Many of them preferred a different candidate in the primaries. Many were surely disgusted by his outrageous behavior, including his treatment of women. Yet when it came down to it, the R next to his name was more important than anything else. Maybe this was about the Supreme Court, or the assumption that he would end up rubber-stamping the congressional GOP’s agenda, especially big tax cuts for the rich. Maybe it reflects a deeper partisan element in our politics.

Either way, it stands in stark contrast to what happened in the French election in 2017, when conservatives and socialists alike crossed party lines and rallied behind centrist Emmanuel Macron to stop the extremist Marine Le Pen. In France, patriotism trumped partisanship. Some analysts say French voters watched what happened here and acted to stop it there. So did the Dutch in their election, defeating the right-wing nationalist Geert Wilders. Of course, it helps when the candidate who gets the most votes wins the election. What an idea! If our voters had known more about what Putin was doing on Trump’s behalf, would it have made a difference? All I can say is that I believe Americans are just as patriotic as the French and the Dutch.

Partisanship is powerful, but it was far from the only factor fueling Trump’s support. As I noted earlier, a desire for change was also important. Exit polls tell us that 39 percent of voters said the ability to bring change was the most important quality in a candidate, and 82 percent of them supported Trump. By comparison, 22 percent of voters said having the “right experience” was most important, and they went for me 90 to 7. The 20 percent who said “good judgment” was most important supported me 65 to 25. And the 15 percent who wanted a candidate who “cares about me” went 57 to 34 for me. In other words, “change” voters provided the bulk of Trump’s support.

Change can mean different things to different people. But as I’ve noted, this was a challenge I grappled with from the very beginning. History shows how hard it is for a party to hold on to the White House for three terms, even after successful presidencies. I castigated Republican obstruction in Congress and offered lots of solutions to make the economy fairer and politics cleaner, but I never escaped being pigeonholed as the candidate of continuity rather than change. Certainly, if voters wanted to “shake things up” or “burn it all down,” they were more likely to choose Donald Trump over me. They weren’t in any mood to remember that great old Texas saying from Sam Rayburn, the former Speaker of the House: “Any jackass can kick down a barn. It takes a good carpenter to build one.”

In polls throughout the campaign, we asked voters what they thought of President Obama and if they wanted to continue in the same direction or go in a fundamentally different direction. You might expect the answers to be linked. And yet, while voters consistently gave the President high marks—in fact, Obama’s popularity continued to rise throughout 2016, as did economic forecasts—they just as consistently said they were ready for a new direction. That may show the power of the impulse for change, but it also shows how complicated this is. One might also ask: Why were the vast majority of members of Congress reelected? Incumbents have advantages and gerrymandering has given many of them safe seats, but if there was a real “throw the bums out” wave in this election, we would have seen it down ballot as well.

So, yes, a desire for change was an important factor, but to understand what this was really about we have to look deeper.