The paradox of Trump’s continued support - Toronto Star

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When Ottawa-based EKOS Research recently polled across the border amid the heat and clamour of the U.S. presidential election, it found that Americans’ trust in their federal government had reached a 65-year low.

Only one in three Americans felt their government was headed in the right direction, and the same assessment was made of President Donald Trump’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic — the election’s dominant issue.

By comparison, 59 per cent of Canadians think their government is moving in the right direction, and 63 per cent think their government has risen to the challenge of handling COVID-19.

Context, however, presents a more complex narrative.

The last time Canadians so forcefully turned their backs on their federal government was in 1993, when the Progressive Conservatives fell from a vote share of 43 per cent to 16 per cent. That year, the PCs went from 167 seats in Parliament to just two.

No one going into that election gave the PCs a hope in hell of holding onto office. And yet on the cusp of the U.S. election, Donald Trump remains vigorously competitive. It’s called “the Trump Paradox.”

The Trump Paradox exists because American politics changed drastically over the last few years.

As Vox editor Ezra Klein wrote in his recent book “Why We’re Polarized,” two or three decades ago, Americans saw themselves as having overlapping and intersecting political identities.

Klein cites statistics showing that now, Americans increasingly see supporters and leaders of the political party other than their own as threats to their country’s well being. Thus, he says, the 2016 presidential election that first brought Trump to power makes more sense if Trump is seen as not the cause of America’s division, but merely the vessel.

The great dividing line is cultural. On the one side it is fear: fear of loss, fear of scarcity, fear of terrorism, fear of cultural challenge and fear of immigrants. On the other side, it is openness to new experiences, optimism and acceptance of the “other.” It is two incommensurable Americas.

One of the most interesting data differences between Americans and Canadians is that the percentage of Americans calling themselves “conservative” (according to Klein) has long overwhelmed the percentage who identify as “liberal” — 35 per cent to 17 per cent, as of January, 2019, with still a large but significantly politically committed chunk in the middle. North of the border, EKOS finds pretty much the reverse: 60 per cent of Canadians identifying as centre-left or liberal and about 35 per cent as conservative, with virtually no one in the middle.

But even more important is the issue of authoritarian — or what we prefer to call “ordered” — populism, the significant political force that has come to replace the traditional left-right political spectrum and is manifest as inelasticity among voters. It emphasizes obedience, hostility toward outgroups, a desire to turn back the clock to a time of greater order in society, and a search for a strongman type to lead the return to a better time.

This “open-ordered” index tightly predicted support for the Conservative Party in the 2019 Canadian election and, similarly, we find a near-perfect linear correlation between ordered outlook and support for Donald Trump.

The concentration of Democratic voters on the open side is much stronger than in 2016, which may suggest offsetting emotional engagement for Democratic voters compared to 2016.

But there is a curious group of mostly open voters who have gone to Trump: disaffected Bernie Sanders/Elizabeth Warren supporters who won’t vote for Biden out of spite, or perhaps prefer populism.

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Finally, for those who think a Biden victory will “solve” the problem of authoritarian populism, remember that the fear and anger of those left behind will still be smouldering without decisive action to create a new economics of hope.

In sum, it’s why Trump is still competitive.

Frank Graves is the president of EKOS Research Associates and an honorary fellow of the University of Calgary’s school of public policy. Michael Valpy is a senior fellow of Massey College and a senior fellow at University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy.

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The paradox of Trump’s continued support - Toronto Star
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