Testing Republican resolve.

• Author: Olsen, Henry
• Position: Political Landscape

OBSERVERS of the Republican presidential nomination contest have moved from laughter and dismissal of Donald Trump to wary acceptance of the mogul as the GOP front-runner. How solid is Trump's lead? One method of assessing his lead is to gauge his ability to build a coalition among the differing groups that comprise the Republican Party electorate.

Exit and entrance polls of primaries and caucuses going back to 2000 show that the Republican presidential electorate is remarkably stable. It does not divide neatly along establishment-versus-outsider lines. Rather, the GOP contains four factions that are based primarily on ideology, with elements of class and religious background tempering that focus. Open nomination contests during this period are resolved first by how candidates become favorites of each of these factions, and then by how they are positioned to absorb the voting blocs of the other factions as their favorites drop out.

Republican voters fall into four rough camps: moderate or liberal; somewhat conservative; very conservative, evangelical; and very conservative, secular. Each of these groups supports extremely different types of candidates, while also demonstrating stable preferences over the past 15 years.

Moderate and liberal voters are surprisingly strong in Republican presidential primaries and caucuses, comprising the second-largest voting bloc, with approximately 25% to 30% of all GOP voters nationwide. They prefer someone who is both more secular and less fiscally conservative than their somewhat conservative cousins. The moderate or liberal voter seems motivated by a candidate's secularism above all else. They always will vote for the Republican candidate who seems least overtly religious and will oppose the candidate who is most overtly religious. This makes them a secure bank of votes for a somewhat conservative candidate who emerges from the early stages of the primary season in a battle with a religious conservative, as occurred in 1996, 2008, and 2012.

The most important of these four camps is the one most journalists do not understand and therefore ignore: the somewhat conservative voters. This group is the most numerous, comprising 35% to 40% of the national GOP electorate. While the numbers of liberal and moderate, very conservative, and evangelical voters vary significantly by state, somewhat conservative voters are found in similar proportions in every state. They are not very vocal, but they form the bedrock...