The Party Reacts: The Strategic Nature of Endorsements of Donald Trump
| Author | Zachary Albert,David J. Barney |
| DOI | 10.1177/1532673X18808022 |
| Published date | 01 November 2019 |
| Date | 01 November 2019 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
research-article2018
Article
American Politics Research
2019, Vol. 47(6) 1239 –1258
The Party Reacts: The
© The Author(s) 2018
Article reuse guidelines:
Strategic Nature of
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
https://doi.org/10.1177/1532673X18808022
DOI: 10.1177/1532673X18808022
journals.sagepub.com/home/apr
Endorsements of
Donald Trump
Zachary Albert1 and David J. Barney1
Abstract
Many scholars expect that the “party decides” on presidential nominees
who are both electable and willing to pursue an agenda acceptable to the
supporting coalition. By most accounts, the nomination of Donald Trump
does not fit these expectations. Did most party insiders view Trump as
unelectable and unacceptable? If so, how did the Republican Party coalition
react to his unlikely nomination? To address these questions, we content
analyze endorsements of Trump and construct an endorsement network
of the coalition behind Trump’s candidacy. We show that Trump received
little support from party insiders prior to his nomination, and that policy
considerations were relatively unimportant to Trump supporters throughout
the election. Instead, when faced with an undesirable nominee, party insiders
reacted by supporting Trump for electoral reasons. Our results suggest that
party insiders are not immutable arbiters in presidential primaries and that
most will prioritize partisan ambitions over policy goals.
Keywords
presidential nomination, endorsement, party networks, party coalitions,
Donald Trump
1University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA
Corresponding Author:
Zachary Albert, Department of Political Science, University of Massachusetts Amherst, 200
Hicks Way, Amherst, MA 01003, USA.
Email: zalbert@umass.edu
1240
American Politics Research 47(6)
Introduction
Political scientists have long examined the extent to which American politi-
cal parties, for better or for worse, wield influence over which candidate wins
their presidential nomination. In perspectives viewing parties as extended
coalitions of actors (e.g., Cohen, Karol, Noel, & Zaller, 2008; Key, 1947;
McClosky, Hoffmann, & O’Hara, 1960), party insiders are expected to exert
a moderating influence on the field of candidates, screening and selectively
aiding preferred candidates to produce a nominee that is both perceived as
electable, among formal party actors, and ideologically satisfying, among
informal party elites (Bawn et al., 2012; La Raja & Schaffner, 2015). These
twin mandates often explain the success of “establishment” candidates who
appeal to moderates while also catering to more extreme elite policy goals.
Recent cycles have seen both Democratic and Republican nominees with
relatively consensual support from party elites, outside groups, and party vot-
ers (Cohen et al., 2008). But the ascent of Donald Trump from a long-shot
outsider to the Republican nominee seemingly defies these expectations
about the role of parties. Trump’s unconventional and often inconsistent pol-
icy stances, combined with the widespread perception that he was not satisfy-
ing to the median voter and would likely lose in a general election contest,
casts doubt on the view that he was the Republican Party’s preferred
candidate.
With the role of Republican Party elites left ambiguous, an intuitive
accounting might instead consider the 2016 nomination process as candidate
centric (e.g., Aldrich, 1995). Perhaps, as Nelson Polsby (1983) predicted, the
reformed presidential nominating process encouraged Trump to simply “dif-
ferentiate himself from the others in the race” and built up a loyal personal
constituency rather than appeal to a variety of factions within the diverse
Republican Party coalition (p. 67). But although unique personal factors
surely underpinned the rise of Trump, the role of the Republican Party in sup-
porting or opposing his nomination remains less clear. Did party insiders
actually view Trump as unelectable and unacceptable? And, if so, how did the
Republican Party network respond to the nomination of an undesirable can-
didate, and what do these responses reveal about the nature of partisan coali-
tions? Given that parties, as coalitions, have exercised considerable power
over candidate emergence and success in recent elections (e.g., Cohen et al.,
2008; Desmarais, La Raja, & Kowal, 2015; Hassell, 2016), a full accounting
of Trump’s victory requires closer consideration of the intraparty dynamics
of candidate support in the 2016 election.
To this end, extant research has identified factional cleavages within the
Republican Party as facilitating Trump’s nomination. Noel (2016) notes that
Albert and Barney
1241
Trump capitalized on existing cleavages within the Republican Party, cater-
ing to elites with extreme policy commitments—such as economic protec-
tionism and social conservatism—that were previously not well-unified
within the existing extended coalition. In addition, Cohen, Karol, Noel, and
Zaller (2016) highlight that Trump was less inhibited by traditional funding
mechanisms than his competitors early in the campaign. Taken together,
these perspectives understand Trump’s success as a result of a lopsided rela-
tionship with the Republican Party, with Trump’s distance from the party
organization as a comparative advantage. To the extent that Trump did require
party support, he was able to carve out a novel coalition of support among
disparate ideological and policy factions while maintaining some distance
from establishment sources of funding.
The above explanations effectively accommodate Trump’s nomination as a
“low probability event” within a parties-as-coalitions framework (Cohen
et al., 2016, p. 705). But insofar as these studies empirically track Trump’s
relationship to the Republican coalition, they provide the broader contours of
ideological intraparty conflict through the issue positions and DW-NOMINATE
scores of Trump’s supporters. Although comparing the policy preferences and
“ideal points” of supporters highlights whether Trump was compatible with
his elite supporters, this means of analysis obscures the strategic dimension of
candidate support or opposition (Whitby, 2014), especially after Trump
secured the nomination. We believe that a more nuanced accounting of
Trump’s theoretically unlikely success could further our understanding of the
internal dynamics and strategies of the Republican Party network.
To parse out support for Trump within the Republican coalition, we exam-
ine candidate endorsements. As highly visible signals of elite support for a
candidate, endorsements are often considered indicators of coalition forma-
tion within parties during the “invisible primary” (Cohen et al., 2008).1
Because both party “insiders” and “outsiders” announce their preferred can-
didates, endorsements provide unique leverage to understand patterns of sup-
port in the broader extended party coalition, highlighting the pursuit of both
electoral and policy goals (Grossmann & Dominguez, 2009). And, given that
endorsements are conditioned by the particular context of an election cycle
(Whitby, 2014), they generally offer justification for candidate support.
Endorsements are necessarily evaluative of candidates in the context of a
campaign, providing insights into either the sincere or strategic nature of elite
candidate support. In sum, consideration of candidate endorsements provides
insights into intraparty conflict with more granularity, enabling us to identify
not only supporters and opponents but also subcoalitions of actors united by
their shared support of particular aspects of the Trump candidacy.
1242
American Politics Research 47(6)
With this orientation, we examine the relationship of the extended
Republican network to Donald Trump, paying specific attention to the nature
of coalitions that sought to either propel Trump to the nomination, remain at
arm’s length from an unfavorable candidate, or force him out of contention
altogether. By operationalizing these dynamics through candidate endorse-
ments, we are able to better differentiate between Republican subcoalitions
that formed around policy, ideological, personal, or practical aspects of
Trump’s candidacy. Our attention to the potentially strategic nature of
endorsements allows for a more thoughtful consideration of coalition build-
ing within the Republican Party in light of Trump’s successful nomination.
In the remainder of this article, we investigate support for Trump among
the Republican coalition in three different ways. All our analyses are con-
ducted on an original data set—constructed through a content analysis
(Krippendorff, 2012) of news articles covering endorsements of Trump—that
contains detailed information on who endorsed Trump as well as when and
why they did so. First, we examine the overall contours of support and oppo-
sition to Trump, highlighting the controversial nature of his candidacy. We
then analyze support for Trump in the “invisible primary” and compare pat-
terns of support for and opposition to Trump with the expectations laid out by
coalitional theories. We find that a very limited number of party outsiders
supported his candidacy before the Iowa caucus while the vast majority
abstained from endorsing. In short, the Republican network did not align
behind the eventual nominee, suggesting that coalitional theories of candi-
date emergence are of limited value in explaining Trump’s success.
This...
To continue reading
Request your trial