The coronavirus pandemic, you raised a host of new questions about the 2020 election. What will the economy look like in November? How do voters think the President, Trump is handling the crisis? How will the Act physically cast their votes? And could the current moment be so extraordinary that it outweighs partisanship and cause Republican voters to abandon the Trump in November?
For the last question, at least, we can look to history for some clues. The 2008 election isn’t exactly parallel to our current situation, but there were some similarities. Back then, an unpopular Republican president, George W. Bush sat in the White House amid an economic disaster, though, that he wasn’t running for reelection. But the environment that the GOP nominee Sen. John McCain was running in, may be not unlike the one at Trump the faces in the year 2020. (One important caveat: When McCain ran, the REPUBLICANS had already held the presidency for two terms, and historically, it’s rare for the same to the party win three times in a row. Conversely, it is very common is the incumbent president like Trump to win a second term.)
The 2008 election resulted in a Democratic landslide, the then-Sen.-elect Barack Obama and defeated McCain by about 7 percentage points in the national popular vote. Update on that, it is worth considering how polarized our politics are, this was a great victory, by modern standards, as the chart below shows.
Democrats didn’t just take the White House, either. They also made huge gains in the Senate and the House of Representatives, adding to their majorities in both chambers.
But Democrats didn’t win because Republicans were fleeing the party, or voting for the Democrat in en masse — that McCain’s won support from most Republicans, who turned out that year. The 2008 Cooperative Congressional Election Study, a massive survey that asks an Act about their politics and voting at astro lounge, which found that McCain won 95 percent of self-identified Republicans who voted, as well as 90 percent of independents who leaned Republican. Similarly, Obama won the overwhelming majority of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents (92 and 93 percent). This partisan split is in line with the results from other recent presidential elections, too.
The difference in 2008 was the makeup of the electorate: the 51 percent of voters identified with the Democrats or Democratic-leaning independents while 41 percent identified with the Republicans or Republican-leaning, according to the CCES data.
Some of this was because The Democratic line more or less have peaked in 2008 while Republican identification was at a low point. Democrats also saw a strong turnout from Democratic-leaning demographic groups, like African Americans, who’s who showed up in historic numbers to cast their vote for America’s first black president. And getting all partisan-to-the-ballot-box was vital to the Obama”s victory, I have actually lost among “pure” independents or those who didn’t read it towards, either party may, by 11 percentage points. Fortunately, for Obama, the true independents only made up about 7 percent of the total electorate.
Of course, we don’t know how many votes that McCain might have lost, because the people abandoned the GOP before the election or because some Republicans simply didn’t show up to vote. Corwin Smidt, a political scientist at Michigan State University, told me that it’s likely that some people switched parties because of the financial crisis or the Iraq War, but he said it was probably a fairly small share of the electorate. One study estimated that Obama may have won 15 percent of the voters who, they said, backed by us president George W Bush in 2004.
Smidt told me he thought we could see some people switch parties here in the year 2020, though that, with some Republicans leaving the party because of the economic downturn caused by the coronavirus. In fact, there is some evidence that a small share of voters have already shifted parties during the Trump presidency. In the fall of 2017, the The Pew Research Center found that’s roughly one-tenth of the and Democrats Republicans (including those who leaned toward one party) defected to the other party over the course of the 2016 campaign-and-in-the-early-days-of-Trump”s presidency. But Smidt cautioned that we’re still likely only talking about a small slice of the electorate who might switch parties in the year 2020 because Trump is so polarizing and there is such a gulf between the and the Democrats Republicans on most political issues. If party differences are clear, people are less likely to switch,” said Smidt. And, right now,” I said, “It is hard for people to switch.”
Studies have shown that are partisan more likely to stick with their party now than they were just a few years ago, and the people feel more negatively than ever toward members of the other party. The Surveys also suggest that the overall share of people who identify with, or read towards the each party and has been relatively stable,. So that means Trump”s intraparty support, may be just the strong, the McCain”s was in 2008. His approval rating has been remarkably steady, and he’s enjoyed very strong Republican backing throughout his presidency, with many of the 91 percent of Republicans and 89 percent of Republican leaners approving of his job performance, before the 2018 midterm elections, according to CCES data for registered voters.
There’s a little sign that Republicans are backing away from the Trump, either. The the late March poll from the Pew found that, among registered voters, with 92 percent of Republicans approved of the Trump, all made 79 percent of independents who leaned Republican. While the approval among leaners may seem low, compared to the year 2018 CCES data, it was the similar to is actually previous Pew polls that’s found in 70 to 75 percent of Republican leaners approved of Trump.
So just like McCain in 2008, Trump’s likely still you have very strong backing from the Republicans, that will almost certainly hold up, even if things go poorly for him in the coming months. What we can’t know, of course, is just how much the bad economy might move people away from the GOP before the election, or how many partisans in might simply home-stay.
