Conservatism—the ideology traditionally associated with the Republican Party—is increasingly identified more with public support for Donald Trump than with support for conventional right-leaning policies
.” 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 visualise this trend, a study in thecompares the perception of senators’ ideologies with their actual voting records in Congress .
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 . 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, a computer programme 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 fromwas 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 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.