Cohn's thesis is that Donald Trump dominates the Republican Party because he has very strong support from two of these groups -- the Right Wing (mostly older Republicans who watch a lot of Fox News) and Blue Collar Populists (mostly Northern white ethnics who have "conservative-populist views on trade and economics and, perhaps most important, on race.... A full 35 percent of this group’s members were willing to explicitly say the declining white share of the population was bad for America, compared with 13 percent of the rest of the party").
You can roll your eyes at this taxonomy -- I'm having a hard time telling these two groups apart, or distinguishing them from Traditional Conservatives -- but Cohn does offer some useful data, although I'm not sure it makes the points he's trying to make. Cohn notes that Trump leads the GOP primary field in all of these groups -- including the Moderate Establishment. He says this group "does not like Mr. Trump" and is "often outright Never Trump" -- yet Trump leads Ron DeSantis in this group 28% to 12% and, sadly, leads Joe Biden in the general election. Cohn says that lead is "a mere 46 percent to 27 percent," but that still seems like a reasonably solid lead for a group of voters who, Cohn says, support abortion rights, immigration reform, and foreign engagement rather than isolationism, and also find Trump distasteful.
On the subject of abortion, it appears that quite a few Republicans oppose the party's extremism:
This is why I'm skeptical when pundits like Simon Rosenberg argue that the lopsided results in last week's Ohio referendum or last year's Kansas referendum mean that Joe Biden and the Democrats are likely to have an excellent 2024. Regrettably, there are millions of voters who support Democratic policies -- on abortion, guns, infrastructure, and many other issues -- but despise Democrats. If Biden and other Democrats were as popular as most of their policies are, they could win landslides.
I've been saying for years that Democrats desperately need to improve the image of their party. Obviously they won't win over the hardcore Republicans in Nate Cohn's taxonomy -- the racists, the immigration obsessives, the Fox News addicts -- but you'd think they could do a better job of picking off voters who are less rooted in the GOP or right-wing politics, and who disagree with many Republican policies. But Democrats allow themselves to be defined in the media by policies most of them have abandoned (defunding the police) or policies that aren't important to the overwhelming majority of Democrats (the use of the word "Latinx"). Or they allow themselves to be defined as the party of the elites (hi, Thomas Edsall and David Brooks!), even though, as Slate's Christina Cauterucci recently reminded us, "In 2020 Trump won voters with an income over $100,000 by a margin of 12 points," while "Biden won those who make less than $50,000 and those who make between $50,000 and $99,000 by similar margins."
Democrats need to put more effort into changing the image of the Republican Party. They need to find a way to get a second look from voters who've rejected the party but aren't happy with the modern GOP. And while it's true that Trump continues to push voters into the Democratic camp, as does GOP extremism on many issues, Democrats can't just wait for voters to drop into the party's lap. They need to work harder to take these voters away from the GOP.
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