“Has Republican Resistance to Trump Collapsed?”

The familiar question, offered up many times and in many variations since 2016, appeared in The New York Times on Tuesday. This time, it served as the headline for an opinion piece by GOP strategist (and Trump critic) Liz Mair. Writing from “inside the belly of the beast,” she stated that President Donald Trump is the king of all he surveys, pointing out that “the NeverTrump movement has disintegrated” and that the president can boast of a “near 90 percent approval rating among Republicans.”

It’s true, Republicans love Trump. They love him as much or more than they’ve loved any president since the party’s founding in 1854.

But there’s more to consider here. The GOP holds the White House and the U.S. Senate, but if current trends continue, it soon might be struggling to maintain its major-party status. Registered Republican voters in the country are on the verge of being overtaken by independent voters, according to data from July 2018. Registered Democrats, meanwhile, outnumber Republicans nationwide by some 12 million.

Part of what’s happening is that younger, urban Americans are trending dramatically toward the Democrats or independent status. Added to that: many old-school conservatives -- particularly Baby Boomers and Gen Xers drawn to the Republican Party in their youth by leaders such as William F. Buckley Jr., Ronald Reagan and Jack Kemp -- have simply walked away from the Grand Old Party.

The latter are the NeverTrumpers Mair says have failed in their efforts to oppose Donald Trump. But as Mair herself acknowledged, she’s looking at the situation from the inside. The trees might be at least partially blocking her view of the forest.

“I think what most of these analyses of ‘Is NeverTrump dead?’ miss is that it was never really a collective political movement, but rather an individual moral decision,” Patrick Chovanec, a one-time policy aide for former GOP House Speaker John Boehner, tweeted this week.

I think what most of these analyses of "Is NeverTrump dead?" miss is that it was never really a collective political movement, but rather an individual moral decision. — Patrick Chovanec (@prchovanec) February 20, 2019

Chovanec, now an adjunct professor at Columbia University, added that building a viable political movement always “was secondary to the immediate purpose of NOT ASSENTING.”

Not assenting, that is, to Trump and, by extension, Trump’s nativist version of the Republican Party.

These GOP refuseniks are having an impact -- just not the one Mair wants.

Forty percent of all party-affiliated voters in the country are Democrats, public-opinion data firm Rasmussen Reports found in 2018 after an examination of state voter registrations. Only 29 percent are Republicans, and 28 percent are independents.

It must be noted that 31 states and the District of Columbia use party affiliations in voter registration. So what about those 19 states -- including GOP-heavy Texas and Georgia -- that don’t register voters by party? If they did, the percentage of Republicans would be expected to tick upward a point or two.

(There are some other, less significant caveats to the data, such as how each state reports “inactive” voters. See the Rasmussen report for more.)

Of course, actual voter registration isn’t the only way to judge the major parties’ popularity. People can change their political attitudes (that’s why we have “swing states”), and when they do so they usually don’t get around to putting in new paperwork with their local election office.

In January of this year, a Gallup poll asked respondents: “In politics, as of today, do you consider yourself a Republican, a Democrat or an independent?”

Thirty-four percent said Democrat, 25 percent said Republican -- and a whopping 39 percent chose independent. That’s a 5 percent drop for the GOP from four years ago.

So, yes, Trump has a strong hold on Republicans, but the party’s adherents are falling away at a significant rate. Democrats have held relatively steady over the past couple of years -- while more and more Americans are calling themselves independent.

And independents right now are more likely to align with Democrats. Asked by Gallup if they “lean” Republican or Democratic, 52 percent of independents said they lean to the Dems and 36 percent said they lean toward the GOP. Four years ago, 44 percent of independents leaned Republican, 43 percent Democratic.

Below are the overall registered-voter numbers from July 2018, according to Rasmussen Reports.

Democrats: 44,242,975

Republicans: 32,570,817

Independents: 31,489,028

Other: 2,640,597

None of this is what traditional conservatives like Mair want to hear. In her New York Times column, Mair said she expected to vote for former Massachusetts Gov. William Weld in the 2020 GOP primaries, assuming Weld officially jumps into the race against Trump and makes it to the voting. Her lonely call in the dead of the Republican night is for anti-Trump conservatives to return to the fold -- that is, to register once again as Republicans. She also has another, even less likely request in her dream to end Trump’s rule of her party:

“The only way to have an impact on the electoral map and ensure NeverTrump exerts serious, quantifiable political power,” she wrote, “is for all of its 2016 members to somehow get on the same page in terms of whom to support, and then collectively move to [important early-primary states] Iowa, New Hampshire and Florida.”

-- Douglas Perry

@douglasmperry

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