President Donald Trump’s policies, which in some respects have broken from traditional Republican doctrine, have reportedly pushed many Americans to the left — and caused Republicans to become far angrier than other political groups.
This is the conclusion that was reached in a study published by the journal American Politics Research earlier this year and first covered by mainstream media on Tuesday. Noting that Americans often become more liberal during Republican presidencies and more conservative during Democratic presidencies, the researchers found that this trend continued during President Donald Trump’s first term but then persisted during President Joe Biden’s administration.
Additionally, the study found that “the long-term increase in affective partisanship was given a further jolt with Trump’s election and presidency, with Republican in particular showing a noticeable increase in partisan animosity. This further short-term increase in affective partisanship is associated with the increases in partisan differences on some issues.”
“The research was conducted by Alan Yang, a senior lecturer at the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, and Robert Y. Shapiro, a professor in Columbia’s Department of Political Science and School of International and Public Affairs,” reported PsyPost journalist Eric W. Dolan on Tuesday. He added that Yang and Shapiro told him that “we were interested in whether the election of an ‘untraditional’ Republican president in 2016 may have upended or accelerated past patterns of opinion change, partisan divergence, and ‘affective partisanship.’”
Per Dolan, “To explore these questions, the researchers analyzed data from the 2016-2020 American National Election Study (ANES) and the 2016-2020 General Social Survey (GSS). Both datasets are uniquely useful because they use panel designs, meaning they surveyed the exact same individuals at multiple points in time. This setup allows researchers to track whether an individual actually changed their answer from one election year to the next.”
He continued, “The team examined 32 specific policy questions from the ANES and 40 questions from the GSS. These questions covered a wide range of topics, including government spending, racial equality, immigration, foreign affairs, and social issues like abortion and gay rights. The researchers tracked how responses changed between 2016 and 2020 across the entire sample and within specific political groups. To measure affective partisanship, the surveys used a feeling thermometer scale. Respondents were asked to rate their feelings toward Democrats and Republicans on a scale from 0 to 100 degrees, with higher numbers indicating warmer, more positive feelings.”
Dolan also pointed out that the study’s methods, though thorough, were not perfect.
“The relationship between emotional animosity and policy opinions is also highly complex,” Dolan explained. “The data shows an association between the two, but untangling which one causes the other is a challenge. People might develop stronger negative feelings toward the opposing party because they disagree on policy, or they might change their policy views because they want to distance themselves from a party they dislike. Both processes likely happen at the same time.”
Speaking to AlterNet in August, University of Bristol cognitive scientist Stephan Lewandowsky argued that one reason Trump supporters have become so angry is that the president feeds into their various prejudices.
“There’s so much tied up in this,” Lewandowsky told AlterNet. “There’s latent racism. There’s religion. There’s the general conservative idea that poor people are — it’s their fault, they’re just lazy, everybody is responsible for what happens to them… except me, because I’m a farmer, and therefore I’m not lazy, and I’ve tried everything, and I deserve a subsidy.”
Comparing Trump’s movement to a cult, cult expert Steven Hassan told AlterNet in August that people can try to ease them out of their views through compassion and respectful dialogue.
“What works best is a warm, respectful, curious, questioning approach: ‘Help me step into your shoes,’ or ‘I’m really curious what you think about this or that,'” Hassan wrote. “Referencing other cults that the person knows — Trump supporters will listen to conversations about Chinese communist brainwashing, and they’ll be open to learning about Lifton’s model [for helping people reform their ways of thinking]. Many of them who got into Trump through the QAnon psyop are open to hearing about traffickers and pimps, and how they recruit, groom and indoctrinate people to become sex slaves or labor slaves. So what I’m trying to convey is that an indirect approach is the most effective way to help people in the cult of Trump start reality-testing.”