What makes republicans bad

In other words, Mommy! Among the Republicans who seemed to try hardest to take the perspective of sincere and patriotic Democratic voters, the most common attributions were related to immigration — a topic made salient by President Trump in his campaign stops during the last month of the election. The Democratic voters in our sample returned the favor and raised many of the same themes. Many used the question to express their anger and outrage at the other side. Democrats, however, were somewhat more generous in their answers.

Share this link:. Samantha Smith is a former research assistant at Pew Research Center. Facts are more important than ever. Partisans are divided over the fairness of the U. Debate over inequality highlights sharp partisan divisions on the issue. Americans agree inequality has grown, but don't agree on why.

Topics Political Polarization. Are you a Faith and Flag Conservative? Progressive Left? Days later, when asked whether he would support Trump if he was nominated by the G. The most widely debated political question of the moment is: What is happening to the Republicans? He began his campaign by issuing racist and misogynistic salvos, and during his Presidency he gave cover to white supremacists, reactionary militia groups, and QAnon followers.

It is worth remembering that the first candidate to defeat Trump in a Republican primary in was Ted Cruz, who, by , had long set aside his reservations about Trump, and was implicated in spurring the mob that attacked the Capitol. One of the most telling developments of the contest was rarely discussed: in August, the Republican National Convention convened without presenting a new Party platform. The Convention was centered almost solely on Trump; the events, all of which took place at the White House, validated an increasing suspicion that Trump himself was the Republican platform.

Practically speaking, the refusal to articulate concrete positions spared the Party the embarrassment of watching the President contradict them.

Now there would be no distinction between the Republican Party and the mendacity, bigotry, belligerence, misogyny, and narcissism of its singular representative. Or consider the events of the past six months alone: during a Presidential debate, a sitting Commander-in-Chief gave a knowing shout-out to the Proud Boys, a far-right hate group; he also refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power, and subsequently attempted to strong-arm the Georgia secretary of state into falsifying election returns; he and other Republican officials filed more than sixty lawsuits in an effort to overturn the results of the election; he incited the insurrectionists who overran the Capitol and demanded the lynching of, among others, the Republican Vice-President; and he was impeached, for the second time, then acquitted by Senate Republicans fearful of a base that remains in his thrall.

The fact that behavior is commonplace does not mean it should be mistaken for behavior that is normal. But the character of the current Republican Party can hardly be attributed to Trump alone. A hundred and thirty-nine House Republicans and eight senators voted against certifying some of the Electoral College votes, even after being forced to vacate their chambers just hours earlier, on January 6th.

She lost those assignments, but only because the Democrats voted her out. Then, on February 13th, all but seven Republican senators voted to acquit Trump in his impeachment trial. The Trump-era Republican Party does occupy a very different niche from the Party of When Trump was sworn into office, the G.

In , the Democrats won back the House; the Senate is now a fifty-fifty split. But the Party still controls thirty state legislatures and twenty-seven governorships. In November, Trump, facing multiple, overlapping crises, all of them exacerbated by his ineptitude, won seventy-four million votes. Still, the Republican Party confronts a potentially existential crisis. Johnson rightly worried that his embrace of civil rights would lose the South for the Democrats for at least a generation.

By , the G. In addition, the G. The marginalization of moderate Republicans has accelerated in the past decade, since the advent of the Tea Party.

Moderates in Congress recognized that, if they hewed to a centrist position, they would face serious primary challenges.

In theory, that uprising could have spawned a cross-partisan populist alliance of the anti-corporate left and fiscal conservatives, but it was quickly subsumed by paranoid, racist currents. The same year, as debates over the Affordable Care Act came to dominate American politics, Tea Party gatherings began to resemble proto-Trump rallies, at which the first Black President was sometimes lampooned as a monkey.

That blend of populist rage and overt racism was the active ingredient in what eventually became the Trump movement. Last month, Reuters reported that dozens of Republicans who had served in government during the George W. Bush era were abandoning the Party. In states across the country, local Republican officials are working against leaders whom they deem disloyal to the former President.

This is no longer a single social identity. Partisanship can now be thought of as a mega-identity, with all of the psychological and behavioral magnifications that implies.

In other words, if you told someone on the phone whom you had never met before that you are white, that single fact would not tell them much more about you. But if you told them that you are a Republican, they could reasonably assume that you are not black, lesbian, gay, transgender or bisexual, nonreligious or Jewish. And which party people belong to is important because there is some evidence that instead of people choosing their party affiliation based on their political views and changing parties if their views are no longer represented by that party , they shift their views to align with their party identity.

The clearest case of this might be polls showing Republicans with more favorable views of Russia and Vladimir Putin after the election.