Why Republicans are turning on Trump

Follow Us Get the newsletter Get Jonathan Bernstein's newsletter every morning in your inbox. Click here to subscribe. Republicans have broken with President Donald Trump in the last several days, as Jonathan Chait discusses in an excellent New York Magazine column, more than they have since before he was elected. Elite Republican criticism of Trump has even had the effect of dragging down his approval ratings, perhaps dramatically. FiveThirtyEight estimates that he's down to 40.7% approval, but it sure appears that their methods are producing a polling average that's lagging behind the data, given that almost every poll in the last week has him below 40%, and some of them quite a bit lower. We'll see when more numbers come in, but it certainly looks possible that he'll sink into the mid-30s. That's how it's supposed to work: If a president does something wrong, the opposition party and some elites in his own party criticize him, and voters react by moving away from him. But that's mostly not what's happened with Trump. So why is it different now? Chait gives several plausible reasons, but I would focus on the changed incentives for Republican politicians as soon as the polls closed in the two Georgia Senate runoff elections last Tuesday evening. During times of partisan polarization, party actors have an overwhelming interest in keeping their president as popular as possible. Most people vote based on party, and the president is the most visible part of the party. Therefore, it can be better for individual members of Congress to support their party's president (and therefore prop up his or her popularity) even when doing so requires taking unpopular stances. That's because the president's popularity, and not the individual member's popularity, is critical to election outcomes. But after the Georgia runoffs were over, it was no longer an election year. (Yes, there are elections in 2021, including important ones, but even those are months away, and outside of a few special elections they won't include members of Congress). As was the case after the 2018 midterm elections, that ushered in period where electoral incentives are unusually weak. It's also the case that Trump will soon be out of office, so his ability to reward loyalty and punish disloyalty are weak and getting weaker. But until Jan. 5 and the runoffs in Georgia, Republicans were justifiably worried that if they didn't support his false claims about fraud in the November presidential election, he would undermine them in those contests. That doesn't mean that they necessarily believed that he had massive influence over Republican voters; only that they believed (most likely correctly) that their candidates would have a better chance of winning if Trump was more popular. And while that's true of all presidents and same-party supporters, Trump adds the extra incentive that he could credibly threaten to tell his supporters to stay home. With the Georgia elections expected to be close (and they were decided by small margins, albeit larger than President-election Joe Biden's edge over Trump in that state), even depressing the Republican vote by a percentage point or two might have been decisive. What remains, as far as electoral incentives go, is the fear that opposing Trump could invite a primary challenge. But that's still some time away, and besides: Trump has already threatened so many primary challenges against various Republican elected officials who refused to help him cheat in the election that even that risk is diminished for those who haven't angered him yet. After all, while an organized campaign might be able to target dozens of incumbents, Trump has proven many times that he's incapable of mounting anything resembling an organized campaign.  So even if there had been no mob in the Capitol on Wednesday, I'm fairly certain that Republicans would be even less constrained than usual to pay attention to the outgoing president — and far more likely than they had been to publicly criticize him. 1. Sarah Binder at the Monkey Cage on last week in Congress — and what happens next. 2. Also at the Monkey Cage: Lilliana Mason and Nathan P. Kalmoe on condoning violence. 3. Carolyn Holmes at Mischiefs of Faction on citizenship, exclusion and white nationalism. 4. Rick Hasen on the most urgent legislative democracy agenda. 5. Nathaniel Rakich, Anna Wiederkehr and Meredith Conroy on Biden's history-making cabinet. 6. Excellent Greg Sargent item on impeachment and keeping the Senate at work on the nation's business. 7. And Philip Bobbitt on impeachment and incitement. Get Early Returns every morning in your inbox. Click here to subscribe. Also subscribe to Bloomberg All Access and get much, much more. You'll receive our unmatched global news coverage and two in-depth daily newsletters, the Bloomberg Open and the Bloomberg Close. You received this message because you are subscribed to Bloomberg's Early Returns newsletter. Unsubscribe | Bloomberg.com | Contact Us Bloomberg L.P. 731 Lexington, New York, NY, 10022