Trump's lock on the GOP matters less and less - By Jennifer Rubin

By Jennifer Rubin
Opinion writer
January 7 at 2:04 PM

President Trump takes solace from his high approval rating among Republicans. That, however, has come at the expense of support among women, the college-educated, nonwhites, independents, the young, etc. And that dichotomy will increasingly put him at risk for a simple reason: The GOP isn’t what it once was.

Gallup reports:

Significantly more U.S. adults continued to identify as political independents (42%) in 2018 than as either Democrats (30%) or Republicans (26%). At least four in 10 Americans have been political independents in seven of the past eight years, including a record-high 43% in 2014. ...

In just the past decade, an increasing proportion of adults have identified as independents, reaching 40% for the first time in 2011 and generally maintaining or exceeding that level since then. As a result, since 2011, the percentage of independents has exceeded the percentage identifying with the Democratic Party by 11 points on average, and the percentage identifying as Republicans by 14 points.

“Eighty percent of Republicans” may sound good, but if the GOP is only 26 percent of the electorate, that gives Trump just under 21 percent of the entire pie. That’s awful, to put it mildly.

Well, you say, independents aren’t truly independent; they tend to lean toward one party or the other. That’s accurate — and unhelpful for Republicans. (“47% of Americans on average in 2018 were Democratic identifiers or Democratic-leaning independents, and 41% were Republicans or Republican-leaning independents.”) Republicans win only when they can turn out a disproportionately high percentage of their side and/or Democrats fail to do the same. That’s the formula that allowed President Trump to win in 2016. Two years later, however, his pool of Republican voters has shrunk, and independents in poll after poll overwhelmingly disapprove of his performance. If Republicans run Trump or another candidate equally dependent on a shrinking share of the electorate, a good Democratic turnout is likely to produce a Democratic president. That’s what happened on a congressional level in 2018.

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/01/07/why-trumps-lock-gop-matters-less-less/