In Search of the American Center

The New York Times featured Lee Drutman's report for Democracy Fund's Voter Study Group: 

I am not usually fond of the “this one chart explains everything” genre of political analysis, but every rule has exceptions, and I’m going to make one for a chart that accompanies a new survey on the 2016 election. It helps explain why Donald Trump won the presidency and why his administration is such a policy train wreck, why Democrats keep losing even though the country seems to be getting more liberal, and why populist surges are likely to be with us for a while — a trifecta of rather important explanations.

The survey was conducted by the Democracy Fund Voter Study Group, with an accompanying report written by Lee Drutman, and it assesses voter sentiment along two axes: On the horizontal, economic issues, including welfare, entitlements, trade and inequality; on the vertical, moral/identity issues, from abortion and transgender rights to views of race, gender, immigration and Islam.

The resulting chart, Figure 2 of the report, places voters into four quadrants — one consistently conservative, one consistently liberal, and then a more populist quadrant (for cultural conservatives who lean left on economics) and a more consistently libertarian quadrant (for social liberals who are fiscal conservatives).

Three things leap out. The first is the diversity of opinion within the Trump coalition about economics. Americans who voted Republican in 2016 tend to embrace some form of social conservatism, but on economic policy they lean only slightly to the right — spreading out across the economically liberal/socially conservative quadrant as well as the consistently conservative one. Indeed, the typical Republican voter’s views on economics and the safety net are relatively close to the center of public opinion as a whole.