As you watch explosive revelations pour forth about Donald Trump and his fellow coup plotters at Tuesday’s congressional hearing on the insurrection, keep this number in mind: 19.
That’s the paltry percentage of GOP voters who believe Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election “threatened American democracy,” according to a new poll from the New York Times and Siena College. The poll surveyed Republicans who plan to vote in 2024 presidential primaries.
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By contrast, this poll finds that 75 percent of GOP primary voters believe Trump was “just exercising his right to contest the election.” Trump employed extraordinary corruption and mob violence in an effort to destroy our political order, and by 75-to-19, GOP voters say this was perfectly within the bounds of democratic conduct.
If the Jan. 6 House select committee hopes to create a kind of breakthrough moment of broad bipartisan consensus — that the conduct of Trump and his coup-plotters was fundamentally unacceptable in a democracy — then that poll finding is a dark reminder that this won’t happen.
And yet, if a sliver of GOP voters out there is persuadable on this point, that might be an opening. It dangles at least the possibility that the pro-democracy majority can be broadened a bit here and there, in strategic ways that could make a difference on the margins.
The revelations at Tuesday’s committee hearing should make it impossible to cling to the lie that in trying to subvert his loss, Trump was merely exercising his legal options. That’s because the hearing will include videotaped testimony given to the committee by Trump’s White House counsel, Pat Cipollone.
We don’t know exactly what Cipollone testified to behind closed doors. But the committee says he provided information that’s “highly relevant” to Trump’s misconduct on nearly every front.
Remember, Cipollone warned against many of Trump’s most corrupt moves. Those include pressure on the Justice Department to manufacture impressions of a fraudulent election, efforts to use fake electors to game the presidential electoral count in Congress, and pressure on his vice president to subvert that count.
Cipollone also reportedly warned that Trump and others in his circle could be legally vulnerable if they joined paramilitary groups Trump mobilized at the Capitol. Tuesday’s hearing will illuminate Trump’s role in animating those groups, and the degree to which he expressly used mob intimidation to pressure reluctant actors to complete his procedural coup.
In short, it’s impossible to square this bottomless corruption and seeming embrace of political violence with the notion that Trump innocently sought to exercise his legal options. Yet only the tiniest slice of GOP voters appears open to that argument.
A useful explanation of all this comes from Sarah Longwell, a Never Trump GOP strategist who conducts focus groups of Republican voters. The Times reports that Longwell’s group, the Republican Accountability PAC, will spend at least $10 million in the midterms to defeat GOP candidates who are essentially running on Trump’s insurrectionist energies.
The few GOP voters receptive to the truth about Trump and Jan. 6 are critical to those efforts, Longwell says. So who are they?
They identify as Republican and have a long relationship with the GOP. Yet Longwell notes they hold a very outdated picture of the GOP as still the party of former president Ronald Reagan.
“They hold on to their Republican identity,” Longwell told me. “But they have what I call a ‘Reagan hangover.’ They think the party still stands for limited governments, free markets and American leadership in the world, which, of course, is not what the Republican Party represents anymore.”
As Longwell notes, that constituency still thinks of Trump’s assault on our political order as cordoned off from the GOP, as a “uniquely Trump phenomenon.”
But of course, many Republicans fully acquiesced in Trump’s plot and have spent the past year trying to cover it up or erase it with propaganda. A handful of Republicans directly participated in it. And now, numerous Republicans are running for office essentially on a vow to help execute a similar coup effort next time the need and opportunity arise.
The complication, Longwell says, is getting that slice of GOP voters to see those Republican candidates as motivated by the same insurrectionist spirit as Trump. The goal is also to disabuse those voters of lingering illusions about what the GOP has become.
That’s the idea behind new ads such as this one targeting Doug Mastriano, the GOP nominee for governor in Pennsylvania — and a full-blown insurrectionist:
The center-right GOP voters these ads cater to must be educated on what candidates such as Mastriano really represent, Longwell says, noting these voters “are not yet completely caught up to how radical the party is.”
So that sliver of voters presents both a challenge and an opportunity for those who hope to build out a pro-democracy majority coalition. But when it comes to democracy’s long-term prognosis, the fact that there are so few of them seems awfully grim.
That’s the paltry percentage of GOP voters who believe Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election “threatened American democracy,” according to a new poll from the New York Times and Siena College. The poll surveyed Republicans who plan to vote in 2024 presidential primaries.
Sign up for a weekly roundup of thought-provoking ideas and debates
By contrast, this poll finds that 75 percent of GOP primary voters believe Trump was “just exercising his right to contest the election.” Trump employed extraordinary corruption and mob violence in an effort to destroy our political order, and by 75-to-19, GOP voters say this was perfectly within the bounds of democratic conduct.
If the Jan. 6 House select committee hopes to create a kind of breakthrough moment of broad bipartisan consensus — that the conduct of Trump and his coup-plotters was fundamentally unacceptable in a democracy — then that poll finding is a dark reminder that this won’t happen.
And yet, if a sliver of GOP voters out there is persuadable on this point, that might be an opening. It dangles at least the possibility that the pro-democracy majority can be broadened a bit here and there, in strategic ways that could make a difference on the margins.
The revelations at Tuesday’s committee hearing should make it impossible to cling to the lie that in trying to subvert his loss, Trump was merely exercising his legal options. That’s because the hearing will include videotaped testimony given to the committee by Trump’s White House counsel, Pat Cipollone.
We don’t know exactly what Cipollone testified to behind closed doors. But the committee says he provided information that’s “highly relevant” to Trump’s misconduct on nearly every front.
Remember, Cipollone warned against many of Trump’s most corrupt moves. Those include pressure on the Justice Department to manufacture impressions of a fraudulent election, efforts to use fake electors to game the presidential electoral count in Congress, and pressure on his vice president to subvert that count.
Cipollone also reportedly warned that Trump and others in his circle could be legally vulnerable if they joined paramilitary groups Trump mobilized at the Capitol. Tuesday’s hearing will illuminate Trump’s role in animating those groups, and the degree to which he expressly used mob intimidation to pressure reluctant actors to complete his procedural coup.
In short, it’s impossible to square this bottomless corruption and seeming embrace of political violence with the notion that Trump innocently sought to exercise his legal options. Yet only the tiniest slice of GOP voters appears open to that argument.
A useful explanation of all this comes from Sarah Longwell, a Never Trump GOP strategist who conducts focus groups of Republican voters. The Times reports that Longwell’s group, the Republican Accountability PAC, will spend at least $10 million in the midterms to defeat GOP candidates who are essentially running on Trump’s insurrectionist energies.
The few GOP voters receptive to the truth about Trump and Jan. 6 are critical to those efforts, Longwell says. So who are they?
They identify as Republican and have a long relationship with the GOP. Yet Longwell notes they hold a very outdated picture of the GOP as still the party of former president Ronald Reagan.
“They hold on to their Republican identity,” Longwell told me. “But they have what I call a ‘Reagan hangover.’ They think the party still stands for limited governments, free markets and American leadership in the world, which, of course, is not what the Republican Party represents anymore.”
As Longwell notes, that constituency still thinks of Trump’s assault on our political order as cordoned off from the GOP, as a “uniquely Trump phenomenon.”
But of course, many Republicans fully acquiesced in Trump’s plot and have spent the past year trying to cover it up or erase it with propaganda. A handful of Republicans directly participated in it. And now, numerous Republicans are running for office essentially on a vow to help execute a similar coup effort next time the need and opportunity arise.
The complication, Longwell says, is getting that slice of GOP voters to see those Republican candidates as motivated by the same insurrectionist spirit as Trump. The goal is also to disabuse those voters of lingering illusions about what the GOP has become.
That’s the idea behind new ads such as this one targeting Doug Mastriano, the GOP nominee for governor in Pennsylvania — and a full-blown insurrectionist:
The center-right GOP voters these ads cater to must be educated on what candidates such as Mastriano really represent, Longwell says, noting these voters “are not yet completely caught up to how radical the party is.”
So that sliver of voters presents both a challenge and an opportunity for those who hope to build out a pro-democracy majority coalition. But when it comes to democracy’s long-term prognosis, the fact that there are so few of them seems awfully grim.
