MAGA Is Eating Itself
When you're as unpopular as Donald Trump, the only people left to fight are erstwhile allies.
On one hand, it’s frustrating that a political data analyst like Harry Enten would hype a survey finding that Donald Trump has 100 percent approval among people who identify as MAGA. (Not accounting for a significant margin of error.)
Enten surely understood the results were not probative. Unworthy of hype. No different from asking self-identified Bernie Bros whether they approve of Bernie Sanders or Obamaniacs whether they approve of Barack Obama. Surprise! They all do. The difference is that liberals and social democrats aren’t shameless or stupid enough to bandy about such a factoid boastfully. The internal cultures of those two factions discourage bimboism, at least for now.
Trump, by contrast, still advertises this polling tautology several weeks later, as if it’s a seminal finding. And since the world is full of marks, surely some voters have been fooled—if not into liking Trump then into assuming his political standing is stronger than ever. This is how journalism about polls, good and bad, makes polling itself endogenous to politics.
On the other hand, it’s all enjoyable as an indicator of how badly MAGA is floundering. It’s good that Trump and his loyalists have nothing better to work with. And it’s actually heartening for anyone in the Trump opposition who knows how to read polls and is willing to spend some time in the cross tabs.
MAGA remains all-in for Trump. But Trump has become more unpopular over time. Much of that slippage has been among people who never identified as MAGA. But not all of it. MAGA may be all in for Trump, but that’s the nature of an identity. That’s not the interesting finding. The interesting finding is that MAGA, like the larger pro-Trump universe, is shrinking.
In the NBC poll that had Enten frothing, 30 percent of respondents identified as MAGA. In its new survey, with different pollsters, NBC News Decision Desk finds Trump’s overall approval way down, all the way to 37 percent. Only 53 percent of Republican respondents claimed to identify as MAGA, rather than as supporters of the GOP generally, suggesting a pretty big drop in the number of Americans who claim to be MAGA.
But to my eye, the best way to identify the erosion is to monitor the changing composition of Trump’s approval.
A year ago 26 percent of respondents strongly approved of Trump, while 42 percent strongly disapproved. Trump’s always been intensely disliked, so it’s no surprise that so many people felt so negatively about him, even during his brief post-election honeymoon. But look what’s happened since. Today, only 20 percent of respondents are strong approvers—what you might loosely call MAGA. Down almost a quarter. Meanwhile, half of all adults now strongly disapprove.
This can’t really happen without MAGA shrinking. Committed Trump fans still surely support Trump, but millions have softened from strong to weak support. And for every new respondent who only “somewhat approves,” a former “somewhat approver” crosses the fifty-yard line to become a “somewhat disapprover.” And the shift propagates all the way through the spectrum. When you tally it all up, Trump’s strong approval has fallen, and strong disapproval climbed, in basically equal measure.
The erosion has been steady enough to ignore as background noise. But the logic of it all suggests MAGA isn’t just shrinking. It’s devouring itself.
And it couldn’ta happened to a nicer bunch of folks.
MAGA functions much like an invasive species. It works, as movement conservatism worked, by seeking to destroy or discredit rival or independent sources of authority. If there’s a difference, it’s that movement conservatism aimed to discipline Republican officeholders in pursuit of ideological and partisan aims. For MAGA, the litmus test includes obeisance to Trump himself.
But the methods are similar.