Why Trump Is Polling Much Better Among Very Conservative Primary Voters Than In 2016 – By Michael Tesler (FiveThirtyEight) / June 1, 2023
Shortly before the 2016 presidential primaries began, the influential conservative outlet the National Review devoted an entire edition of its biweekly magazine to making the ideological case “against Trump.”
The issue featured essays from over 20 prominent conservatives explaining why Donald Trump’s campaign was “a menace to conservatism.” It also included a scathing editorial from the National Review’s editors, which disparaged the Republican Party’s then-presidential frontrunner as “a philosophically unmoored political opportunist who would trash the broad conservative ideological consensus within the GOP in favor of a free-floating populism with strong-man overtones.”
With Trump’s campaign rhetoric rejecting the party’s “broad conservative ideological consensus” in favor of heterodox positions on issues from government spending to restricting free markets to isolationist foreign policies, it’s not surprising that he performed relatively poorly with “very conservative” voters in the 2016 Republican primaries.
But that prior pattern has now completely reversed itself in early polling on the 2024 Republican primaries.
CONTINUE > https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/trump-polls-very-conservative-voters-2016-2024/
