By Noah Rothman
Tuesday, December 02, 2025
All the talk about the degree to which Donald Trump’s
presidency was suffering from early onset lame duck syndrome led researchers at the Manhattan Institute to examine the proposition. In a survey
designed to test the tensile strength of Trump’s “multi-ethnic, working-class”
coalition, the think tank polled almost 3,000 voters — oversampling minorities
to avoid the errors that can occur when drawing big conclusions from small
populations.
There is a lot that can be written about this survey, but
it’s worthwhile first to dwell on a distinction its authors regularly make: the
difference between the Republican Party’s stalwarts and its “new entrants.”
Overall, the Manhattan Institute found that the
Republican coalition is still primarily composed of longstanding Republicans
who have consistently backed the party’s nominees even before 2016. But around
30 percent of modern Republican voters are either recent converts or were too
young to vote before 2020. That would be a remarkable feat of electoral
engineering on the part of Donald Trump’s GOP if, à la Ronald Reagan’s
Republican Party, these voters were in the process of being converted into
conservatives. Instead, it seems the Republican Party’s newbies are colonizing
Trump’s GOP.
If the current iteration of the Republican Party seems a
little more paranoid than the one you recall from your youth, there’s a reason
for that. As the Manhattan Institute’s Jesse Arm observed, roughly 18 percent
of Republican voters believe in at least one
of five unproven suppositions of varying degrees of implausibility. Most
“long-standing Republicans” reject those conspiracy theories, including the
notion that 9/11 was an inside job and the Holocaust “did not happen as
historians describe.” But that’s not true of the “new entrants.”
Over one-third of Trump-era converts believe all or most
of those theories — or, at least, they tell pollsters they do. And most of
those paranoiacs were Democratic voters not that long ago. “Put another way,” Arm
wrote, “63% of the highest-conspiracy believers previously voted for Obama,
Clinton, or Biden at least once since 2008.”
Maybe you think the GOP has gotten a little prickly in
the Trump years — exhibiting a touch more racial and creedal anxiety than in
decades past. Well, most old school Republicans reject racist and sectarian
appeals. By a two to one margin, Republicans want the GOP to eject antisemitism
and its promoters from the coalition. That’s particularly true among
Republicans over the age of 50, among whom just 4 percent say they either
express or welcome racist or antisemitic views. That’s not the case among Republicans
under 50, among whom one in three are tolerant of racism and one-quarter
indulge antisemitism. “New Entrant Republicans are far more likely to fall into
the ‘tolerator’ category,” Arm
observed. Nearly one-third of newcomers “say they openly express racist
views,” even though they are “more liberal than non-tolerators on a wide range
of issues — DEI, taxes, traditional values, and transgender surgeries.” Indeed,
a staggering 78 percent of “new entrants” are as wedded to their “liberal
policy positions” as they are to paranoia and ethnic apprehension.
Perhaps you’ve noticed a general air of menace about the
current version of the Republican Party. You would have if you were one of the
Indiana lawmakers who has been inundated with threats after rejecting Donald Trump’s
appeal to redistrict the state ahead of the 2026 midterms, or the members of
Congress who were similarly harassed in the run up to the January 6 riots. Well, it might not
surprise you by now to learn that eight in ten legacy Republican voters reject
political violence outright. By contrast, a majority (57 percent) of new
entrants say political violence has some value. Again, age plays a role. While
just 13 percent of GOP voters over 50 entertain violent remedies to political
challenges, a staggering 57 percent of Republicans under 50 claim they disagree.
You can see where this is going. “One in three in the
Current GOP who believe that political violence can be justified are 2020 Biden
voters (34%),” Arm observed. “And six in ten (60%) supporters of political
violence previously voted for Obama, Clinton, or Biden, compared with 32% who
have never voted for a Democrat.”
Politics is a game of addition. Winning coalitions are,
almost by definition, unwieldy and unstable things. But the goal of any
political party isn’t just to win over new voters. It’s also to mold them into
stalwarts themselves. The Republican Party under Trump has taken a different
approach. It and its proselytizers on the online equivalent of street corners
have spent a decade insisting that the Republican Party’s majority must bend
and flex to accommodate the newcomers’ views. Nothing is expected of the new
entrants; everything is demanded of their hosts, including the command that
they sacrifice their first principles. It is the political equivalent of
implementing bilingual education — an expression of existential insecurity so
deep that it compels stakeholders to give up on assimilation as though it were
an ignoble enterprise.
If the Republican Party insists on being the Republican
Party, it should summon the gumption to persuade the converts to the Trump
movement of the virtues of Republicanism. Instead, an effort is underway to
make the GOP look a lot more like the Obama-era Democratic Party. We can
question the political value of redefining the GOP’s base as composed of
big-government paranoiacs who vote only once every four years. We should not
debate the political merits of implying that George W. Bush is implicated in the
2001 terrorist attacks, that the Jews are exaggerating the Holocaust, and that
one’s accidents of birth determine who is American and who is not.
If Republicans don’t have the stomach to stand up for
themselves and the overwhelming majority of their longtime voters, they don’t
deserve to keep the party they’ve built. Regardless, they are well on their way
to losing it.
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