How Data Explains Extreme Support For Trump
(ANALYSIS) One of the most interesting questions about the Donald Trump presidency is how Republicans place him in ideological space. Not coming from a long career in politics, it’s hard to know what to make of his views. For instance, on gun control he has seemed downright moderate at points, and he also fought hard to get the second round of stimulus payments increased to $2000 per person. But on the other hand Trump has taken an incredibly hardline position on immigration and vetoed the Defense Authorization bill because it would remove the names of Confederate generals from military bases.
Read: The Growing Divide Within American Evangelicalism
As thousands of Trump’s most ardent supporters stormed the Capitol building yesterday, one must wonder how he managed to generate so much devotion from his followers. The answer can be found in the data. Every religious group in the United States sees him as a figure who has become more conservative as each year passes. That has only bolstered his support among the American public.
As can be seen from the graph above - many faith groups saw Trump as being less conservative than the Republican party in 2016, in some cases significantly so. However, while most religious groups see the GOP as staying relatively static in ideological space or maybe moving slightly to the right, they see Trump’s move as much more dramatic. In most cases, the 2019 survey indicated that there was no daylight between the Republican Party and the occupant of the White House.
The distance of those moves reveals a fascinating portrait of how a group’s partisanship can have a big impact on how they see other actors in the political arena. For instance, atheists are the most liberal religious group in the U.S. and they perceived Trump to be the most conservative both in 2016 and in 2019. However, they saw Trump’s move to the right to be more modest than other groups. White evangelicals, on the other hand, saw Trump move even further from 2016 to 2019. It’s notable that a White evangelical saw Trump as more conservative in 2019 than an atheist did just three years earlier. But, it’s clear - the public (regardless of religious tradition) all see Trump as more extreme now than they did when he took the oath four years ago.
In 2016, 42% of atheists believed that the GOP was more conservative than Trump, just 16% believed that Trump was further to the right than the Republican Party, and 40% believed that there was no difference between the two. By 2019, the share that saw no difference between had jumped to 64%, and only 10% thought that Trump was more conservative. The reason for that is quite simple - most atheists rated both groups as “very conservative.”
The story for White evangelicals is much different. Their perception in 2016 looked very similar to the atheists’ view of the political landscape, but the shifts from that point diverge greatly. In 2019, White evangelicals were twice as likely to believe that Trump was more conservative than the Republican Party than the reverse. But, does this more extreme perception of President Trump hurt him when it comes to approval? Absolutely not.
For every single religious group, when they viewed Donald Trump as more conservative than the Republican Party, their job approval of the president was higher. In some instances, the gap is incredibly large. For instance, 70% of White evangelicals who believe that Trump is less conservative than the GOP approved of him in 2019 - but approval shot up to 90% when they saw him to the right of the Republicans. For mainline Protestants, the jump was even larger (from 53% to 78%). For White Catholics, the jump was 22 percentage points.
This data points to a startling conclusion: religious groups did not punish Donald Trump for becoming more ideologically extreme. Just the opposite is the case - they seemed to reward him for it as he continued to move further to the right edge of the political spectrum.
Thus, it makes sense why he continues to stoke the anger, resentment and violence that occurred on Jan. 6. When he went further out of the mainstream, his supporters lauded him for that decision. They got louder at rallies, they got more vocal on social media, and they bought more Trump shirts and flags. It seems to have become a self-reinforcing cycle that ended in a near coup on the floor of the United States Congress.
Ryan Burge is an assistant professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, a pastor in the American Baptist Church and the co-founder and frequent contributor to Religion in Public, a forum for scholars of religion and politics to make their work accessible to a more general audience. His research focuses on the intersection of religiosity and political behavior, especially in the U.S. Follow him on Twitter at @ryanburge.