A new silent majority?

It’s not much more than a feeling at this point, but I’m beginning to see if not a shift in support for Donald Trump and the Republican Party, at least a squiggle here and there.

Cracks are beginning to show in the wall of support he has enjoyed in the Congress.  The dust-up with South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham over the weekend about Trump’s promise to pardon 1/6 insurrectionists is one example.  Graham’s willingness to take on Trump’s dangling pardons for those convicted on various charges of assaulting the Capitol is the first time the long-whispered-about true feelings of Republicans on Capitol Hill has leaked out.  You hear it all the time in interviews with reporters, that Republican representatives and senators will tell them privately what they won’t say out loud.  They were shocked at the violence of the attack on 1/6 and they think the perpetrators should face the legal consequences, but they can’t come out and say it because the Trump base will punish them at the polls.  The number of reporters saying this on MSNBC and CNN has increased over the last year.  At this point, I’d even go so far as to say it has become A Thing.

Now it may turn out that Graham’s little flash of independence from Trump on the subject of the Capitol assault will turn out to be yet another twirl and dip in the dance the two have been doing since Graham labeled him “a kook,” “crazy,” “unfit for office,” “a jackass,” “un-American” and “a race-baiting xenophobic religious bigot” during the 2016 campaign, only to turn around and embrace him once Trump was in the White House. 

But maybe it’s the other thing -- Graham revealing feelings about Trump he’s had all along but had to tuck under his chins in order to get re-elected last year.  Graham is 66 and doesn’t have to run again until 2026.  Maybe, just maybe, he’s making a calculation that the political winds are shifting, even down there in deep-red South Carolina.  And if they’re shifting there, they’re shifting elsewhere.

A Washington Post/University of Maryland poll released last week indicated as much.  The poll, taken in January, showed that 56 percent of Republicans say they are more supporters of the party than they are of Trump, while only 36 percent claim they support Trump more than the party.  That is nearly a complete reversal of a poll taken in October of 2020, just before the presidential election.  At that time, 54 percent of Republicans and Independents who lean Republican said they supported Trump more than the party, while 38 percent considered themselves more supporters of the party than Trump.

“Some of the shifts are striking,” the Post reported last week.  “Since October 2020, he [Trump] has lost 26 points among White Republicans without college degrees and 21 points among conservative Republicans. He has lost 18 points among Republican men and 17 points among Republican women. He has lost 23 points among Republicans ages 65 and older and 19 points among White evangelical Republicans.”

A new poll by Marquette University Law School showed Trump with a 73 percent approval rating among Republicans.  A poll taken by the Economist a year ago had Trump with an 82 percent approval rating.  What’s interesting in the Marquette poll is that only 63 percent of Republicans and 51 percent of Independents who lean Republican say they want Trump to run again in 2024.  That’s a ten point drop in 12 months.

Polls this far out from presidential races are notoriously unreliable.  A lot can happen over the next three years.

You can depend on one thing, however:  Trump follows political polls the way he followed the ratings when he was on “The Apprentice” on television.  He’s obsessed with them.  And it was after the Washington Post poll was released that Trump held his Texas rally.  By most counts his rhetoric was the most extreme it’s been since he left office, and much was made of the fact that he read nearly everything off a teleprompter, showing that his turn towards increased extremism was prepared in advance and was part of a new political strategy he’s taking on the road.

That would indicate that he’s seeing the slippage among his base and looking for a way to shore it up.  That slippage had to come from somewhere, and I think it’s at least worth looking at the thousands of Republican office holders who won their elections in 2020 and the voters who voted for them.  Republicans won all over the country at the level of state representatives and senators, mayors of small towns, city council members, county supervisors, and other elective offices in those states that hold elections for sheriffs, judges, county and municipal clerks, and various local boards that oversee schools, state colleges, and even jobs like repairing roads and bridges.  The voters didn’t just vote for Donald Trump, they voted for the local office holders, and they won.  In the cases of offices down at the really local level, some of those candidates know the names of the people who voted for them, and the voters know them personally.

Little by little I think some of these folks are learning about the moves Trump made after losing the election and seeing it for what it was:  the flailing of a losing candidate who could not accept his defeat.  And they’ve watched his continuing campaign of lies and are finally beginning to see it for what it is:  the obsession of someone who has lost touch with the reality of politics the way all the other Republicans holding elective office have known it throughout their entire political lives.  In politics, somebody had to lose and accept their loss for them to have won and to have been sworn into the offices they now hold.

This sort of thing has happened before in American politics.  There have been other times when it seemed like an entire political party had lost its mind – the days of HUAC and Joseph McCarthy and the Red Scare come to mind.  The Republican Party was in lockstep sticking by McCarthy…until they weren’t.  It’s common to attribute McCarthy’s loss of support to the moment during the so-called Army-McCarthy hearings when the Army’s chief counsel, Joseph Welch, famously asked McCarthy, “Have you no sense of decency, Sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?"  It was a dramatic moment that caused the gallery to erupt in applause when the committee chairman cut-off McCarthy and called the next witness, but it took a loss of support among his own colleagues in his own party for the Senate to censure him.  I don’t want to be too optimistic, but it’s at least worth considering if something of the same thing isn’t beginning to happen in Congress and if it won’t spread from there to the electorate at large.

There isn’t a stampede for the exits among Trump’s base voters, but polls are beginning to show a leakage, and I think it’s coming from somewhere we haven’t heard much from yet.  I think there are ordinary Republicans out there who run for local offices, and ordinary Republicans who vote for them, and at least some of them are beginning to inch away.  

They know their elections at the state and local level are fair because they’re the beneficiaries of that system.  They’re not talking about it yet, but they are part of a silent majority who still believe the system works because in many cases, they are the system.

It just may be that Donald Trump is becoming more and more apart from this group of our fellow citizens, because he is isolating himself with his obsession and resentment and anger over one thing:  losing.  He lost in 2020.  Many office holders in his party didn’t. They won.  There’s a gap there, and it’s beginning to show, and I think it’s exploitable if Democrats will recognize it.