Voters Used To See Moderation In Trump. Not Anymore.

By Harry Enten

Source: fivethirtyeight.com


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Before Trump moved into the White House, he took a mix of liberal and conservative positions. He was, for example, vehemently against illegal immigration but in favor of infrastructure spending. He was against gun control, but he claimed to be stronger than Hillary Clinton on LGBT rights. When you totaled up Trump’s ideological score on economic and social issues from the website OnTheIssues — which assigns an ideological grade to politicians’ statements and votes on a scale that we’ve converted to go from -5 (very liberal) to +5 (very conservative) — he came in at +42.5. His score was closer to 0, perfectly “moderate,” than any incoming president of the past 40 years except George H.W. Bush.

Trump’s stances led voters to believe he was relatively moderate for a Republican — or at least that he was ideologically idiosyncratic. More voters viewed Trump as liberal than any incoming GOP president since at least Ronald Reagan, and fewer voters viewed him as conservative than any Republican since at least Reagan. That stood in stark contrast to Clinton, whom the clear majority of voters saw as liberal. Trump’s ideological positioning relative to Clinton’s may have been one of the reasons he was able to pull off a slim Electoral College victory against her.

Upon entering the White House, however, Trump has taken up a primarily conservative agenda. He’s become hawkish on foreign policy, he stocked the federal courts with conservative judges, and he urged Congressional Republicans to push through a massive tax cut that was seen as mostly helping the well-to-do. He also tried to stop transgender Americans from serving in the military. The national infrastructure project seems to be going nowhere.

Therefore, it’s not surprising that Trump’s White House policies have pushed his OnTheIssues score toward the conservative end of the spectrum. Trump’s score is now a +60, compared to a +42.5 before the election. OnTheIssues now classifies him a “hard-core conservative” and places him just behind Reagan in the pursuit of the title of the most conservative president.

More at https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/voters-think-trump-has-moved-to-the-right/