The post-policy era?

Jake Grumbach notes that Republicans are able to win elections despite a very unpopular policy agenda:

This is very important work. @cwarshaw did this for Trump I.

I think Trump I, followed by Trump II, are the administrations with the lowest support for their formal policy agenda of any in the polling era. And yet they win elections. Feels like a post-policy era. https://t.co/9wRnOM2iY8— Jake M. Grumbach (@JakeMGrumbach) February 25, 2025

There’s definitely some truth to the idea that that policy positions can get swamped by other factors, particularly given how much Trump’s coalition depends on sporadic voters. I do, however, think there are some major caveats:

• Looking at those healthcare numbers, it seems very likely that Trump’s political future plays out differently if John McCain doesn’t vote against ACA repeal. The 2019 nostalgia that was so critical to Trump winning would have been a lot harder to pull off if what a lot of people remembered about 2019 was chaos in the healthcare market.
• Given how close 2024 ended up being in the Electoral College, I think it’s very likely that Trump 1)telling massive lies about his positions on Project 2025 and abortion policy and 2)the political press taking these obvious lies mostly at face value was critical to Trump winning. Trump doesn’t campaign like we’re in a total post-policy era and I don’t think he’s wrong about that.

This is to some degree a “media wired for Republicans” problem — needless to say, Harris’s efforts to distance herself from a couple of unpopular positions from the 2020 primaries were not met with “brilliant gambit, ma’am!” But countervailing that is that there’s no moderation to how Trump is governing in his Second Reich, going right ahead and doing a bunch of very unpopular stuff unilaterally via an obnoxious plutocrat. His brief and shallow honeymoon period has already ended and I think that red line is going to keep heading up.