Editor’s Note: Years ago, we started calling them the True Cons. The hallmark of these people is their well known commitment to upholding the truest conservative principles which is why they voted for Joe Biden and write for The Daily Beast and The Washington Post and launched the Lincoln Project and have regular gigs virtue signaling on CNN and MSNBC. Remember, people respect us!
ICYMI: Donald Trump is the reason Republicans couldn’t coherently oppose the $1.9 trillion stimulus bill. pic.twitter.com/Jpwkwpgd74
— Matt Lewis (@mattklewis) March 13, 2021
The new Fabrizio Lee polls tells us a lot about the composition of the post-Trump Republican Party and confirms what we have seen in other recent polls. Republican establishment voters are now the disaffected wing of the party and have declined to 15% of Republican voters.
This poll is specifically about Donald Trump and his current standing in the Republican Party. It doesn’t ask about values and ideology although that is at the core of the divide between these Never Trump voters and the rest of the Republican Party. Specifically, the Never Trumpers or True Cons or Free Marketeers or Business Conservatives or Republican establishment voters, whatever you want to call the people who dominated the party from the 1980s to Trump are out of touch with everyone else.
Donald Trump has a 81% approval rating in the Republican Party.
Interestingly though, Trump has a nearly 100% job approval rating among all factions of the Republican Party except the Never Trumpers. 75% of these people disapprove of his job performance and 100% of them see him in a negative light. Trump gained nothing from pandering to them. This is why lots of Republicans mysteriously ran ahead of Trump in the 2020 election. True Cons split their ballots and either voted for Joe Biden or didn’t vote for Trump while voting for other Republican down ballot.
51% of Republicans would vote for Trump in the 2024 primary. This is a similar number to the 55% who said they would in the CPAC straw poll.
100% of True Cons who are 15% of the Republican Party would vote against Trump in the 2024 primary. 100% of Diehard Trumpers would vote for Trump who are 27% of the Republican Party. 80% of Infowars GOP would vote for Trump who are 10% of the Republican Party.
Interestingly though, 80% of Post-Trump GOP identifies more with the Republican Party than with Donald Trump, which suggests they are not his crowd. Who are these people?
51% of Republicans want a Trump Republican.
37% of Republicans want a Reagan Republican.
12% of Republicans (i.e., True Cons) want a Bush Republican.
We can plainly see in these numbers who is who in the post-Trump Republican Party:
- Never Trumpers are True Cons or Free Marketeers or Business Conservatives or Republican establishment voters.
- Post-Trump GOP are mostly what used to be the Republican base or the Ted Cruz voters or the paleocons or the Country First Conservatives or the Staunch Conservatives.
- Infowars GOP are a swath of the Anti-Elites or the Alt-Lite that can be summarized as rightwing populist/conspiracy voters. These people are Trump voters, not Republican voters.
- Diehard Trumpers are mainstream MAGA or a mix of Anti-Elites and the American Preservationists or the Market Skeptic Republicans also known as the nationalists or populists. There is significant overlap between this group and conservative leaning White Nationalists.
- Trump Boosters are a grab bag of Anti-Elites, American Preservationists and Staunch Conservatives who are pro-Trump although two thirds of them were Republican base voters prior to Trump’s run in 2016.
For the record, this is how they poll on Donald Trump’s standing in the Republican Party. It would be interesting to see how this lines up with values and ideology.
Finally, we see that the strongest Republicans are now the newcomers – Trump voters and Republican base voters – while 82% of True Cons now say that they are not so strong Republican voters.
The demographic breakdown of Republican voters tells us a lot. Never Trumpers or True Cons are overrepresented among the following categories: moderate/liberal, college graduates, suburbanites, +$100K households, pro-choice voters and non-evangelicals.
Diehard Trumpers (the most enthusiastic Trumpers) are overrepresented among the following categories: very conservative and >$50K households. They are underepresented among: somewhat conservative, college graduates and +$100K households. Never Trumpers are more likely to live in wealthy suburbs while Diehard Trumpers are more likely to live in rural areas.
What does the term “conservative” mean though?
This is the key difference. True Cons or Republican establishment voters tend to be college educated, upper middle class suburbanites with modernist and cosmopolitan values. They describe themselves as moderate/liberal in ideology because of their social views. These people are the deficit hawks or diehard neoliberals on economics. In contrast, the Trump voters who used to be Democrats or Indies are populists who are more far more conservative on social issues, but much less so on economics than True Cons. The media calls them the “far right” because of their views purely on social issues.
I guess I fall into the Diehard Trumper camp. I am not into conspiracy theories. And I can’t stand establishment GOP types who want foreign wars, open borders and tax breaks for billionaires. Trump was the only reason I voted in the last 2 elections after sitting out since 2000.
When the war starts opinions will change. Majority of Republicans will revert to warmonger/empire mode. They always do.
The Q thing merged with AF and Wanglin in q4 2020, up to January 6. Wanglin and Swishy Nick pushing everyone to go storm the Capitol with the qfags. The motive is unclear. Following command of handlers, or just being paid?
A few Wangloids on Wanglin’s rapidly shrinking board have begun to actually use the brain that God gave them, and have figured out that the FBI was behind it all on January 6, specifically the same guy that created the hoax kidnapping plot of Witchmer in Michigan.
So far so good. They can count to one. But can they add one plus one?
Didn’t Wanglin do this before once even, in 2017, push people to attend an FBI hoax rally and get arrested? And again in 2020. Now it becomes a pattern.
Can they use their brain a little more? Some already have.
When the war starts we will all be shut down anyway. And the FBI will shut down their Q op. They already netted enough fish, with Wanglin’s help.
When they give full citizenship to 40 million Orc invaders, the daydreams will end. The light will click on in even the dimmest minds. Secession is the ONLY way out.
Many already are in warmonger mode against China. They blame all of the problems caused by our own American elites on China, despite the fact that American elites have been liberal idiots doing all of the same idiotic liberal things for decades before China grew powerful.
Don’t underestimate the establishment / true cons.
There is a certain kind of stereotypical, inflexible establishment / true con / neo-con Republican which was effectively encouraged to self eject from the GOP after 2016.
These people were already a liability by that point, because they were so obviously out of step with what people wanted.
But that didn’t get rid of “the establishment” or people with true con pseudo-libertarian priors, like the Cruz crew.
Anti-establishment / populist / nationalist Republicans believed they were taking over the party in 2015/2016, but something different actually happened.
For a while, the two sides appeared to be competing, but at some point a signal went out to the smarter establishment / true con elements, that Trump was going to govern in a way that was acceptable to them, and that it was time for them to get on board and adopt elements of his talking points and pseudo-populist style.
It look a little while for this to happen but it’s actually somewhat remarkable how quickly people adapted their rhetoric… and how little their actual views had to change.
From that point on, these people instinctively knew that they needed to couch their true con policy preferences in pseudo-populist rhetoric.
In hindsight it’s apparent that Rush Limbaugh etc had been preparing them for this for quite some time, effectively updating True Con pseudo-libertarianism to a more populist rhetorical style.
For the True Con voters, Trump was seen as the personification of this new, Limbaugh-esque, style of edgy, energetic pseudo-libertarianism. They updated their talking points, but didn’t change their views much.
For the establishment politicians, it was long past time to adopt a more effective and flexible style of rhetoric… to mask the same old policies.
GOP populism = Trumpism, Limbaughism not Longism. There is no reason to believe that it will inevitably evolve into Longism.
Agreed. The “establishment Republicans” overwhelmingly do like Trump, as he largely governed in a way acceptable to them.
The poll shows otherwise.
100% of them disapprove of Trump. 25% of them like the way he governed though. 75% don’t like Trump and don’t like the way he governed and probably didn’t vote for him which is why we see the blue shift in wealthy suburbs where they live. This was mostly about COVID though. The way he handled COVID was the dealbreaker.
BS that it was Trump’s COVID response. Absolute bs. Trump didn’t follow through on his promises and he didn’t do what he needed to do against BLM last summer. Most rational people realize that the virus was going to do what a virus is going to do and a president was not going to be able to do anything to stop it.
The people who would support Longism are not Trump voters.
They are disaffected Independent voters whose views on economics put them at odds with True Cons voters. They are adjacent to MAGA voters though. As the True Cons become Red Dog Democrats, the rationale for catering to them evaporates. They are an albatross for the GOP. Currently, Trump voters are about 45% populist on economics. We’re not yet at the tipping point where the exodus of True Cons voters and influx of working class voters tips the internal balance of power within the GOP to the populist camp. It is already there on social issues, not economics.
In my view, it depends largely on what happens in 2024. Does Trump himself run again and win? Does someone else run and win? If so, who? I think highly educated, upper middle class True Cons voters with cosmopolitan and modernist values continue to leave. I think more working class voters with more traditional values continue to come in. This is the overarching trend.
The Republicans will reinvent themselves to be more liberal to compete with the dems.
It’s kind of fascinating how very effective Trump has been at gaslighting his followers into thinking he was actually doing anything apart from sending out an endless stream of tweets which triggered shitlibs and cucks. As the Z-man noted a long time ago, Cheetohead was a typical Repuke in nearly all aspects of actual policy. MAGA was really MIGA. I have to give credit to Ann Barnhardt for calling it before the 2016 election: Trump is nothing but a con-man and a grifter – something he has always been. His entire patriotic, anti-oligarch pose was a lie. All you need to do is look at the judicial appointments – which were really made by the (((Federalist Society))) – and the pardons (nothing but the most odious Jew swindlers and violent negroes). Haxo (who shows up here now and again) apparently caught on to the con fairly soon after Charlottesville.
It’s kind of ironic that the title of this post is The True Con. If we take the “con” to mean con-man or con-artist, the real ‘True Con’ is Donald J. Trump. He conned more chumps than even the loathsome POS Jorge W. Busheron, Caudillo of Crawford and noted Islamic theologian.
We started calling them that before Trump became president. But yes, he is also a con man.
Who in the hell in politics is not a con man. Spergie binary thinkers are the problem here. Trump didn’t deport all illegals on day one or Trump is close to the (((special))) people therefore he must be a total waste of time. I would like to know who the spergie Trump haters on this side, thought would be better? Cruz, Yeb, Marco? Spergs don’t understand that it’s always a relativity contest between politicians , usually bad or worse. However,they can feel clever endlessly calling someone a “grifter”.