Why Trump’s Base of Support May Be Smaller Than It Seems

… A new working paper by the Emory University political scientists B. Pablo Montagnes, Zachary Peskowitz and Joshua McCrain argues that people who identify as Republican may stop doing so if they disapprove of Trump, creating a false stability in his partisan approval numbers even as the absolute number of people approving him shrinks. …

Individual news media polls typically do not have a measure of how respondents previously answered questions about party identification, so Mr. Montagnes and his co-authors had to estimate a range for Mr. Trump’s G.O.P. approval rating among those “missing” respondents — people who previously identified as Republican but no longer do so. CONT.

Brendan Nyhan (Dartmouth), New York Times