There were three main components of the Republican voting coalition that provided Donald Trump his narrow victory in 2016, and supported him in his narrow loss in 2020. They include, first, the voters who voted for Donald Trump for personal or for policy reasons. The second group are those who describe their votes more as a vote against Joe Biden than as a vote for Trump. And the third group are GOP partisans. These groups are not mutually exclusive even though each has different central motivations.
The critical factor for the future of the GOP is that none of these component groups represents a majority of the party. As a result, different combinations of two of these three imply different majorities controlling the GOP with correspondingly different policy and tonal emphases. But because of the possibility of cycling among these three groups, none of the possible majority coalitions represents a stable coalition for the GOP. Which two of the parts coalesce will determine to what extent the party will remain distinctly Trumpist or return more or less intact to its pre-2016 contours. Both are plausible futures given the component parts of the current GOP.
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