After 10 years, just how large is Trump’s actual base?

I admit this is somewhat subjective, depending on the RealClearPolitics average of polling at the time. It was also not obviously a milestone when it occurred. During the 2012 Republican primary fight, America saw a pattern in which individual challengers would surge and fade as the spotlight reached and then blanched them; there was little reason to think that Trump’s arrival would be any different. I mean, a May poll from The Post and ABC News found that nearly 6 in 10 Republicans viewed Trump unfavorably.

By mid-July, that had flipped. Trump’s focus on immigration — and the headline-grabbing furor that resulted — helped him leapfrog former Florida governor Jeb Bush to take a small lead over a crowded pack. Given Trump’s habit of saying inflammatory, false and obnoxious things, that seemed unlikely to last.

Except that it turned out this was precisely what a big chunk of the primary electorate wanted: aggressiveness and unabashed hostility toward the left. By the time the Republican establishment and its more moderate members woke up to the risk that Trump might win the nomination, his momentum already made that outcome inevitable.

Notice, though, that even when he’d locked up the nomination by the spring of 2016, he still had the support of less than half of Republicans. In fact, by the time all of the primary and caucus votes were counted, Trump had earned the nomination despite more primary voters casting ballots for other primary candidates. This outcome has been forgotten in part because of what happened next: Trump got fewer votes than Democrat Hillary Clinton in the general election, but won a majority of electoral votes anyway. He would be inaugurated as president on Jan. 20, 2017.

Partly because he took office having the unusual distinction of being selected by less than half of his party’s voters and less than half of the nation’s voters, there was an immediate and ongoing question about the true scale of his support. It was clear during his first term that he didn’t really represent a “silent majority,” as he often claimed. But how big was his base?

The polling firm YouGov began asking this question explicitly shortly before the 2022 midterms. This was a moment in which Trump’s support seemed at or near a nadir; his reputation had been battered by the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol (including among many Republicans) and if he wasn’t in the political wilderness he certainly wasn’t in whatever the political equivalent of a shiny skyscraper might be.

Yet even immediately after the 2022 midterms, in a moment where the GOP’s poor performance against expectations was often laid directly at Trump’s feet, more than 4 in 10 Republicans self-identified as “MAGA Republicans.”

Once Trump jumped into the 2024 nominating contest (and quickly dispatched his opponents), that self-identification grew. By the 2024 election, half did so. By mid-March, the percentage was up to 56 percent. But that was the high-water mark, at least to date. Both in late April and over the last month, the number of Republicans who call themselves MAGA Republicans waned.

And, again, this is only among Republicans, a group that is a subset of voters, much less the population. When the number of self-identified MAGA Republicans is compared to the population of adult citizens, fewer than 1 in 6 use that term to describe themselves.

There are non-Republican MAGA supporters, of course. YouGov’s question doesn’t account for any MAGA independents out there, however reasonable an identification that might be.

But this fraction comports with other evidence we have for Trump’s support — like actual vote totals.

It is an inevitable fact that no presidential election will ever truly measure the public’s choice for chief executive. Neither children nor noncitizens can vote; lots of Americans who could cast a ballot don’t register or don’t vote. My analysis of data from the Census Bureau and U.S. Election Atlas suggests that less than half of U.S. residents have cast votes for president in each election since 2000, with the major party candidates each time being chosen by less than 1 in 4 of those who live in this country.

That includes Trump. His supporters’ post-election talk about mandates or landslides was belied by the vote totals, which showed he won less than half of those who voted at all. But such proclamations are muted further when one considers the population overall.

None of this detracts from the fact that Trump does have substantial support within his party for his agenda and his presidency. It has repeatedly proven to be more than enough to give squeamish legislators second thoughts about challenging him; it’s probably the case that very few Capitol Hill Republicans give such infidelity even a first thought.

But there is a cloud to this MAGA silver lining for Trump. YouGov’s polling for the Economist shows that self-identified MAGA Republicans are those who view his presidency and policies with the most approval — but that the other half of Republicans, the non-MAGA group, are at times closer to the general public in their views of Trump’s presidency than they are to the more Trump-enthusiastic members of their own party. (Note trade and prices on the chart below.)

It’s also true that self-identification as a MAGA Republican doesn’t fully capture support for Trump. In May, 9 in 10 non-MAGA Republicans expressed support for Trump’s handling of immigration, for example. (Worth noting: The data is limited, but there is a loose correlation between net overall support for Trump’s handling of immigration — as happened in late April and over the last month — and the percentage of Republicans who self-identify as MAGA Republicans.)

All of those caveats notwithstanding, the picture offered by voting results and YouGov’s polling is clear. The percentage of Americans who perfectly align with Trump’s agenda is relatively small. This isn’t unusual for an elected leader, but it does seem at odds with Trump’s frequent public presentations of his overwhelming support.

We can look at this another way. In YouGov’s most recent polling, about 50 percent of Republicans identified as MAGA Republicans. When he won the nomination in early 2016, just under 10 years ago, his support from his party wasn’t that much lower.