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Trump and the “Era of High Anxiety”

If we're in an "era of high anxiety," demagogic candidates will have great success.
donald trump lookin cray

David Brooks seems confident that Trump won’t win the nomination:

All the traits that seem charming will suddenly seem risky. The voters’ hopes for transformation will give way to a fear of chaos. When the polls shift from registered voters to likely voters, cautious party loyalists will make up a greater share of those counted.

The voting booth focuses the mind. The experience is no longer about self-expression and feeling good in the moment. It’s about the finger on the nuclear trigger for the next four years. In an era of high anxiety, I doubt Republican voters will take a flyer on their party’s future — or their country’s future.

That could happen, but this reads more like Brooks’ hope of what he wants to happen. He assumes that all these Trump supporters back him for what are ultimately trivial and superficial reasons (“feeling good in the moment”), and that when they think more carefully about the consequences of voting for him most of them will switch to someone more “prosaic.” That not only misses why so many Republicans are rallying behind Trump (and Cruz), but it misunderstands how people respond politically to anxiety and fear. If we’re in an “era of high anxiety,” that is one reason why demagogic candidates will have much more success than conventional wisdom says that they should. If voters are anxious and fearful, that is exactly when many of them are going to turn to nationalist candidates that stoke and exploit those feelings. Trump and Cruz do that, and so it should be no surprise that they have been gaining in recent weeks.

Brooks might also want to reckon with some of the findings of the latest CNN poll. I found this to be the most interesting finding:

Republican voters are most sharply divided by education. Among those GOP voters who hold college degrees, the race is a close contest between the top four contenders, with Cruz slightly in front at 22%, Carson and Rubio tied at 19% and Trump at 18%. Among those without college degrees, Trump holds a runaway lead: 46% support the businessman, compared with 12% for Cruz, 11% for Carson and just 8% for Rubio.

Trump’s lead among voters without college degrees is striking and very large (and it accounts for much of his overall lead), but the more surprising result is that almost 60% of voters with college degrees back Trump, Carson, and Cruz. More than half of college-educated Republican voters prefer the demagogues and the candidates that know nothing about policy. That suggests that most of these voters are not interested in a “prosaic” conventional candidate who “seems most orderly,” and if these voters aren’t interested in such a candidate then no one else will be. They’re probably not interested because they’ve seen candidates like that lose the last two elections, and they know that their interests aren’t being served by getting behind the candidates preferred by their party elites. The fact that the party elites can’t stand the thought of Trump or Cruz at the top of the ticket just makes their supporters that much more confident that they’re backing the right people.

Trump also leads as the most trusted candidate on a number of major issues:

He holds massive margins over other Republicans as the candidate most trusted to handle the economy (at 55%, Trump stands 46 percentage points over his nearest competitor), the federal budget (51%, up 41 points), illegal immigration (48%, up 34 points), ISIS (46%, up 31 points) and foreign policy (30%, up 13 points).

I don’t think Trump can be trusted on any of these things, but it’s clear that pluralities or majorities of Republicans do trust him, and nothing he says seems to shake or erode that trust. Brooks’ scenario requires that large numbers of Trump supporters lose confidence in him suddenly, and there isn’t any evidence that this is likely to happen. Trump could still be beaten if there were just one or two other candidates in the race instead of a dozen, but it is very unlikely that his supporters will simply desert him.

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