On the surface, after January 20, 2021, Democrats began to fully occupy the majority of the three key power departments of the United States, the House of Representatives and the Senate. It was due to Trump’s series of defeats in the epidemic prevention and election campaign that Democrats were able to occupy the total that they had not held before.
The throne is the majority of the Senate, and the Republican side only has the majority of conservative justices of the Supreme Court. The impact of Trump supporters on Capitol on January 6 has brought an extremely significant public opinion benefit to the Democratic Party.
On the surface, the Democratic Party is in the spotlight for a while, but carefully analyzed, the Democratic Party’s governance is still quite worried, especially the Trump trend has not really dissipated.
How much do you know about the diehard fans of the House of Representatives?
It is well known that among the three institutions of the President of the United States (affected by the electoral college system), the United States Senate (affected by large and small state problems) and the United States House of Representatives, the unit that can reflect the fundamentals of public opinion in the United States is relatively accurate. So, an interesting question is how many of Trump fans in the House of Representatives will probably be after Trump’s curtain call (not necessarily a comeback at some point in the future?
Some people may say that judging from the results of the vote on Trump’s second impeachment case, in the second impeachment, 10 House Republicans defected to the Democratic-sponsored impeachment and 4 House Republicans did not vote, does it mean that the rest voted against impeachment? What about 197 Republican congressmen who are all diehard fans of Trump?
This number is obviously too large and not true. The unwillingness to impeach Trump does not necessarily mean denying the procedural legitimacy and legitimacy of Biden’s new administration. The author believes that the more reliable data is the approved vote for the 2020 presidential election in Congress on January 6. Originally, this kind of approved vote was only a ritual formality, but in the current extremely sharp political polarization and opposition pattern in the United States, it has evolved into a more substantive political declaration. And the vote took place after the violent impact on Congress on January 6. In this case, it is still the dark one way. It is undoubtedly Trump’s core fan to insist that the vote is to overthrow the results of the Electoral College.
Such a vote must be contested by the senators of the Senate willing to participate in the challenge together. If there is no senator, the House of Representatives cannot vote. Only Arizona and Pennsylvania were the only states that successfully entered the voting process (the senators who wanted to question and overthrow the results of the state electoral college in both cases were only single digits). Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin failed to succeed in the proposal because they did not have the support of senators. In the relevant House of Representatives voting process in Arizona, 121 votes were in favor of the result of the overthrow of the state’s electoral college, all from Republicans and 303 against them. In the voting process of the relevant House of Representatives in Pennsylvania, 138 votes in favor of the result of overthrowing the state’s electoral college, all from Republicans. There are 282 votes against them. In terms of Trump’s most staunch fans, the number of opponents should be the relatively small, that is, about 121. Both of these votes took place after the mob attack on Capitol on January 6. Those who still die and persist in the election fraud at this time are naturally Trump’s core fans.
On December 12, 2020, the author once published an analytical article on the official account of “Seeing the World Abroad” in combination with the political situation trend at that time (at that time, the new Congress had not officially performed its duties), pointing out that “the hardcore Sichuan fans in the House of Representatives may remain about 105-116 seats in the future, accounting for the total seats of the House of Representatives. Second 1/4”, now it seems that the forecast data is basically accurate. As many political analysts can see, because the House of Representatives is re-elected every two years, deputies naturally bear more pressure from grassroots voters than senators. The lineup and formation now presented by House Republicans also reflect the attitude of Republicans in the United States at the grassroots voters level.
Therefore, how to deal with the 115-120 Biden-haters, highly ideological Trump core fans who hold a solid place in the House of Representatives and “at the temple” will be a thorny and unavoidable question in the next four-year term. Even as Trump gradually moves away from the core of power and the number slowly declines, it seems unlikely that it will fall below the threshold of 100 people in a short time. In the current House of Representatives (will hold power until January 2023), there are 211 Republicans, which means that at least in the next few months, more than half of them will remain firm supporters of Trump’s line and the most active obstructionists of Biden’s new deal. . Interestingly, the hardcore Trump followers account for about 56% of House Republicans, and a recent poll by Politico pointed out that 56% of Republican voters in the United States believe that Trump should go to war again in 2024, which coincides with the two figures.
Many of these more than 100 people have recently been interviewed by the media. On the one hand, they accept Biden’s current presidency (because the January 6 poll has been decided and Biden has officially taken office), on the other hand, they firmly emphasize that there are all kinds of misconduct in the election process, and claim to take office. During this period of conference members, the institutional root causes of so-called electoral misconduct are essentially removed so that they will not happen again. In other words, these people have not fully recognized (or fundamentally acknowledged) the legitimacy and procedural justice of Biden’s victory until now.
In fact, according to recent reports in the U.S. media, it is also among the more than 100 representatives that it is likely that some of them played the role of insiders and outsiders in the January 6 riots, leading mobs into the palace of Congress. According to U.S. media reports, while mobs hit Capitol, Lauren Boebert, a Republican congressman from Colorado, continued to Twitter to broadcast relevant information in real time, including Capitol police deployment, the location of congressmen, and even House Speaker Democrat Nancy Pelosi has been taken away from the refuge by security personnel.
Will Trump make a comeback?
Two other updates are enough to illustrate Trump’s remaining political influence. On January 26, Republican Senator Rand Paul proposed to question the legality of Trump’s second impeachment.
Although the case failed, only five Republican senators stood with Democrats, that is to say, 45 Republican senators insisted on the second bullet.
Impeaching Trump is not in accordance with the existing provisions of the U.S. constitutional order. In this way, the vote of the future Senate on Trump’s second impeachment is likely to not pass (because at least 67 votes are needed in full attendance). In addition, on January 25, Trump made a high-profile announcement that he would establish an office dedicated to Florida to continue to promote and publicize his various lines of governance, which may play an important role in Trump’s interaction with his grassroots fans in the future.
By the end of Trump’s official departure on January 20, his comprehensive public opinion satisfaction on Fivethirtyeight had dropped to 38.6% and his disapproval rating rose to 57.9%, so Trump can be said to be very depressed when he left office alone.
But we also want to see that compared with his 45.5% support satisfaction when he first took office in January 2017, and his support satisfaction rate that surged to 45.8% in early April 2020, Trump is just losing seven percentage points of public support, and we also need to take this into account. 38.6% of the extremely low satisfaction was made after the impact on Capitol on January 6, which Trump can be said to be pointed out by thousands of people, so there is a possibility that some of the Trump’s hardcore supporters interviewed are afraid to publicly express their affirmations and support.
Another interesting reference indicator is the comprehensive analysis of the polls of Biden’s governance satisfaction by Fivethirtyeight. The latest data is 54.3% satisfaction and 34.6% dissatisfaction. At first glance, Biden’s popularity is 15 percentage points higher than Trump’s. Another comparable data is that when the first poll of Biden’s government’s satisfaction was officially released (January 23), Biden’s satisfaction rate was 53% and 36%. We can compare it with the above 38.6%, that is to say, at least 36 at Trump’s lowest point. % of the grassroots public opinion in the United States firmly supports Biden at all.
These people don’t care about Biden’s specific performance in office and give him a bad review directly from the first place. Compared with this data with the proportion of 115-120 diehard Trump followers among House Republicans (about 27% of the House), it is clear that Trump’s support left in the government is nearly 10 percentage points weaker than his actual support still in the civilian population.
Judging from this logic, before the next midterm elections, Biden still has a lot of room and space to operate. If he is in power properly, it will be possible for Democrats to continue to maintain the majority of both houses of Congress.
From this data comparison, it can also be seen that Trump’s main card is actually rooted in the people, not the influence of his remaining power in Washington. What’s more, as Trump leaves the White House and Biden’s new regime begins to take full power, his influence within politics will slowly decline.
All the progress depends largely on the direction of Trump’s impeachment bill in February. Now it seems that the case may not pass in the Senate, and if the case fails, there will be no next round of votes to ban him from holding federal office in the future. Therefore, in the current situation, it is difficult for Trump to block his path of institutional progress.
We can peek some clues from the past records of American political history. In the political history of the United States, there are only two precedents for a president to make a comeback after leaving office and actually get part of the votes from the electoral college in future elections. The first example is Grover Cleveland, who was defeated by his opponents in 1888, and then re-elected in 1892 and won smoothly.
Another example is the Republican Theodore Roosevelt. ), he left office in 1908 and appointed his accomplice William Howard Taft to continue his policy line, but he was later dissatisfied with Taft’s performance, but the Republican Party was determined to continue to support Taft, so Roosevelt formed a group in 1912.
Establishing a third party to participate in the presidential election directly led to the internal division of the Republican Party, allowing Wilson, a Democrat, to successfully win the presidency. From these two cases, it is clear that for Trump, a better strategic choice is of course to continue to influence the Republican Party, rather than completely breaking with the Republican Party and forming a third party.
And if Trump wants to continue to influence the Republican Party, the fans in the House of Representatives in their early 100s (although many Republican senators may not likely vote for Trump, who has left office twice, no more than 10 Republicans in the Senate will fully support Trump) may be the most powerful. Lever.
So, is it possible for Trump to replicate the Cleveland model in the future? Many scholars in American politics and history tend to think that the political operation mode of the United States since 2015 is very similar to the past that happened in the Gilded Age.
The Gilded Age, between the Civil War and the Progressive Age in American history, was about from the 1870s to 1900. It is generally believed that the representative characteristics of this era are the greedy and political corruption of the U.S. government after the Civil War.
We should note that the Cleveland model happens exactly in this era range, so it seems too early to say that Trump’s political future has completely come to an end. In fact, the Washington Post has sent several articles as early as December 2020 pointing out that if Trump wants to return, he must try to read more about the history of the Cleveland model. But in the same way, we can see from this comparison that if Trump wants to return, the first thing he should do is not to completely fall out with the Republican Party, and must continue to maintain and try to expand his influence in the Republican Washington power circle.
However, another question is that even if Trump successfully copied the Cleveland model in the Republican Party in 2024, how much power he could have in the final presidential election decisive game is worth a big question mark. After all, the latest poll shows that 56% of U.S. respondents support the second impeachment bill launched by the House of Representatives against Trump (even if Trump has stepped down), which is still very high. If Trump’s support ultimately stays at about 40%, it is likely even if he represents the Republican Party in 2024.
A new battle will also usher in another defeat. All of the above analyses do not take into account the possible actions of high-ranking Republican politicians such as Pence, Pompeo and Nikki Haley, who are also politically ambitious. There is also a saying that Trump may package his daughter Ivanka to participate in the war, but in terms of Ivanka’s own accumulated political energy at present, this statement may only be far-fetched and catches the wind.
