I was just listening to MSNBC and there was a comment in passing about Trump about the GOP’s need to keep the ‘new people Trump has brought into the system.’ Here’s the thing: I strongly suspect this premise, indeed, the very statement, is simply false.
To be clear, this isn’t a dig at MSNBC. This is totally conventional wisdom and I’ve heard versions of it from numerous publications. The idea here is that Trump supporters or substantial numbers of them simply were not voting before Trump came along or were not voting for the GOP. I very much doubt that’s true.
Why do I doubt that? Well, a few reasons. First, people who vote and don’t vote tend to be fairly secure blocks. There are shifts. But they’re pretty fixed in place. The other point is that Trump’s support is heavily weighted toward white people and older people. Those groups tend to be more consistent voters than other groups. That’s a big reason why mid-term elections now consistently swing heavily in the Republican direction.
But the big thing is that I’ve simply seen no evidence that this is the case. People always say things like this. But it’s seldom true. For years, part of Republican mythology had it that conservative Christians weren’t part of the political system until they were brought into the GOP. That’s ludicrous. To the extent there was a change it was that people who’d either voted Democrat or voted under different political labels and identities began voting around a cluster of moral traditionalist issues which favored the new GOP coalition.
So part of this post is a request to see if anybody has seen statistical evidence showing that substantial numbers of people who have voted for Trump in the GOP primaries did not vote in the 2012 general election or for that matter didn’t vote in the 2014 mid-term. Until I see that, my very strong assumption is that very few Trump supporters are people who don’t usually vote. Everything I see suggests that the Trump vote is simply a big chunk of the Republican base – not new voters at all.
Clearly, you have higher turnout in the primaries than you did in 2012. But that’s normal for the out-of-power party after two terms. What you have is what amounts to a civil war in GOP. That has substantially upped turnout in the Republican primaries. But my own hunch is that the universe of people in question are overwhelmingly people who regularly vote in our biennial federal elections.
