Trump's biggest supporters can't be won over by Democrats, researchers say

San Francisco Chronicle​

18-05-2025

During the life of his podcast, California Gov. Gavin Newsom has worried one topic more than others: How can the Democratic Party attract the young men tilting toward President Donald Trump? The query has taken Newsom, an odds-on 2028 presidential contender, into polarizing, even satirized territory, criticizing trans athletes with conservative influencer Charlie Kirk and platforming — rather than challenging — MAGA provocateurs Steve Bannon and Michael Savage.
While a couple of polls — including this month's Berkeley IGS survey showing a majority of Californians think the governor cares more about a presidential run than his current job — suggest 'This Is Gavin Newsom' is hurting its host's popularity, it probably won't win over any Trump fans either, says political sociologist David N. Smith.
In January, Smith and his University of Kansas colleague, associate sociology professor Eric A. Hanley, published a 47-page paper deconstructing the Republican president's appeal. Building on decades of scholarship about the lure of authoritarianism and their own analysis of American voting psychology in 2012 and 2016, the social scientists make an argument that some may find offensive and others unsurprising.
It goes something like this: Trump's biggest supporters are motivated by bigotry and want him to hurt the people they dislike.
'A lot of people find it really hard to believe that people would really want what Trump represents,' said Smith, who began researching authoritarianism as a sociology graduate student more than 40 years ago. 'My experience is the hard core of people who support Trump election after election is they really mean it. They support him because of what he says and does, not in spite of it.'
While this wouldn't be the first time the academic community identified dictatorial red flags in Trump, ascribing them to a significant portion of the U.S. electorate reflects a rarer scholarship. Yet Smith and Hanley don't shy from the implications in 'Authoritarianism From Below: Why and How Donald Trump Follows His Followers,' in which they write that '75% of Trump's voters supported him enthusiastically, mainly because they shared his prejudices, not because they were hurting economically.'
Smith and Hanley built their assessment around surveys into voter behavior by the American National Election Studies, a multi-university project that has employed lengthy questionnaires and follow-up interviews to understand the motivations and demographics of U.S. voters since 1948.
Smith and Hanley convinced ANES to include several items from the Right Wing Authoritarian scale in surveys about the 2012 and 2016 presidential elections. Developed by the late psychologist and author Bob Altemeyer, the scale assesses an individual's inclination toward totalitarianism and replaced an earlier psychological assessment created in California in 1950. While Altemeyer and other researchers used the scale in 'convenience sample' surveys of mostly their students over the decades, this was one of the few times the scale's cornerstone metrics were tested on nationally representative samples of the U.S. electorate.
Respondents were asked to rate their level of agreement or disagreement to two statements: 'Our country would be great if we honor the ways of our forefathers, do what the authorities tell us to do, and get rid of the 'rotten apples' who are ruining everything' and, 'What our country really needs is a strong, determined leader who will crush evil and take us back to our true path.'
Using a statistical method called multiple logistic regression, Smith and Hanley weighed the responses against 17 independent variables to see which ones factored most heavily in the decisions of 1,883 white voters, 979 of whom voted for Trump, 716 who did so enthusiastically. The sociologists discovered that strong support for a domineering leader coincided with a big preference for Trump and big biases against women, immigrants and Black Americans. They also determined that belief mattered much more than demographics.
'If you looked at just demographic variables, then it is true that a higher percentage of people without college degrees were more likely to support Trump,' Smith explained. 'But when you also factored in attitude variables, they completely eliminated the statistical significance of the population variables.'
Smith said these indicators were also present in voters who backed Republican Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney over President Barack Obama in 2012, though to a lesser extent. 'The wish for a domineering leader was a very powerful predictor of support for Donald Trump,' he said.
The conclusion bucks the exit poll-popularized narrative that Vice President Kamala Harris lost to Trump because she spoke less credibly to voters' economic anxiety and — if it pierces the academic conference bubble — could influence a debate by Democrats about whether to try siphoning Trump's support or recapture their own.
A national survey released last month by the Public Religion Research Institute, a Washington D.C. nonprofit, touched similar ground. According to PRRI's Feb. 28-March 20 survey of more than 5,000 U.S. adults, majorities of Americans disapproved of Trump's job performance (54%) and viewed him as a dangerous dictator (52%), yet only a sliver of Trump voters (7%) regretted casting a ballot for him.
Even fewer Harris voters (2%) regretted their vote.
Remorse was expressed more by those who did not vote in the 2024 presidential election (31%) and voters who supported a third-party candidate (14%).
Smith said it's these voters the Democrats should concentrate on, and that his research showed that even 'milder' Trump voters hew 'far closer to MAGA Republicans than they are to Democrats.'
'In my opinion, millions of potential voters stayed away from the polls because they didn't believe that Democratic centrism represents a genuine and progressive alternative,' he said in a follow-up email. 'If that's true, then trying again — with an even more centrist approach — is a recipe for yet another failure.'
Last month, the moderate-controlled San Francisco Democratic County Central Party passed a slate of resolutions intended to reverse flagging interest in the party by advertising 'pragmatism' over progressivism. The package included a proposed age limit for public officials, sober homeless programs and a reemphasis on public safety.
PRRI President Robert P. Jones, an authority on white Christian nationalism, agreed that regretful nonvoters outnumbered regretful Trump voters in his institute's poll. But within the latter group, Jones said there was a significant number of Hispanic voters, particularly Protestant ones, who have soured on Trump and could switch sides, 'especially if the economy continues to sour and if mass deportations ramp up, especially those violating due process.'
Bryan Vega lives in a part of southern California where the political theories overlap.
The 26-year-old clean energy consultant was elected chair of the Imperial County Democratic Party in January, after the southeast border county with a large Hispanic population swung right in the presidential election for the first time in 30 years, by about 460 votes. Trump's success trickled down to dozens of local races that Democrats lost, including Vega's unsuccessful run for his hometown Holtville City Council.
'We had six months to sell a candidate. And we already had a fractured party ecosystem,' Vega said, referring to Harris' elevation in July 2024. 'So we basically left a big vacuum for the Republican Party to make gains with young Latino men. … It's not like Republicans did this phenomenal outreach; it's just that we were dormant.'
The son of farmworkers from Holtville, the self-proclaimed carrot capital of the world, Vega said Imperial County Democrats often feel like an afterthought of party leaders in Sacramento and of legislative representatives more focused on their San Diego and Coachella Valley constituents.
Vega said the local party has been rebuilding through candidate recruitment efforts, monthly town halls and by building power-consolidating alliances with neighboring Democratic committees.
'We used to be reliant on top-down actions and directives. We're no longer waiting for that,' he said. 'We're doing it from the bottom up. Quite literally, because we're all at the bottom of the state.'
In California, sinking voter turnout coincided with Trump flipping 10 counties in November. The state could also provide Democrats a path to reclaim Congress in 2026. With Republicans holding a three-seat majority in the House of Representatives, EMILY's List, a political incubator for pro-choice women, has targeted four of the state's House Republicans as ripe for flipping.
Newsom debated the value of engaging with right-wing influencers with Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz in the March 17 episode of his podcast. Newsom said he thought it was important to try to understand their appeal, while Walz was against lending them credibility.
The California Democratic Party recently announced Walz would be a featured speaker at its annual convention in Anaheim at the end of May.
Smith, who recalled once coming across a poll showing strong support for President Ronald Reagan despite most voters believing he didn't care about them, believes the U.S. audience for domineering leaders is actually getting smaller if louder. He bases that long view on ANES surveys from the 1950s, which included questions from an early authoritarian scale, his work with Hanley and a nationally representative survey Altemeyer did with Monmouth University in 2019 for his book ' Authoritarian Nightmare: Trump and His Followers.'
He said 37% to 41% of U.S. voters were inclined toward authoritarianism a decade ago, but ANES didn't include the authoritarian measurements in successive surveys. Smith and Hanley have proposed reincorporating them in ANES' 2026 survey, and have pitched analogue surveys in other countries.
'So far no biters,' Smith said.