Americas Republicans are not your grandparents conservatives

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THERE IS NO question, said President Joe Biden in a prime-time address earlier this month, that the Republican Party today is dominated, driven and intimidated by Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans. Mr. Biden has a point. Conservatism the ideology traditionally associated with the Republican Party is increasingly identified more with public support for Mr Trump than with support for conventional right-leaning policies. To visualize this trend, a study in the American Political Science Review compares the perception of senators’ ideologies with their actual voting records in Congress (see chart).

The study by Daniel Hopkins, of the University of Pennsylvania, and Hans Noel, of Georgetown University, draws on four surveys of Republican and Democratic activists (defined as those who had recently donated to or volunteered at a political campaign, attended a rally, or worked for a party). The surveys were used to create a rank of the most conservative and liberal senators, based on the activists’ perceptions. To determine whether these perceptions differed from reality the researchers compared them with scores from DW-NOMINATE, a computer program that produces an ideology score based on legislators voting records.

The results from the most recent survey, in 2021, show that the difference between the Republican activists scores for conservative senators and those from DW-NOMINATE was bigger than the corresponding gap for the Democratic activists and liberal senators. The paper suggests this might be because loyalty to Mr. Trump has become a proxy for conservative values, regardless of the policies the senators support.

Take Rick Scott and Ben Sasse. The two Republicans have similar voting records, yet the Republican respondents put Mr. Scott in the 96th percentile (meaning he was perceived to be more conservative than 96% of his peers) while Mr. Sasse was in the 68th percentile. That may be because Mr Scott is an ardent supporter of Mr Trump, while Mr Sasse voted to impeach him in 2021. A simple model shows that those who voted in favor of Mr Trumps second impeachment are significantly less likely to be viewed as conservative, regardless of their DW-NOMINATE score.

This association is not foolproof. The DW-NOMINATE algorithm is an imperfect measure that can obscure extreme views. A very conservative senator might vote against legislation that the Republican Party supports because their views are more conservative, not more moderate, than the consensus. DW-NOMINATE would score them as more moderate. But broadly the results show that Republican activists’ perceptions of conservative lawmakers depend on something other than their voting records. Mr. Trump’s hold on the party is undoubtedly a reason why.

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