Last year, as it became clear that Donald Trump would win the Republican nomination, analysts on both the right and the left speculated that millions of regular Republicans would be repulsed by his ethnonationalism and misogyny. …
Come Election Day, however, Republican voters did not abandon their party. The Republican share of the electorate grew slightly, from 32 percent in 2008 and 2012 to 33 percent in 2016, and Trump carried these voters 11 to 1. …
In fact, as the political scientists Leonie Huddy, Lilliana Mason and Lene Aarøe argue in an article in American Political Science Review, the most powerful form of partisanship is not principled, ideological commitment to conservative or liberal policies, but “expressive partisanship,” which is more of a gut commitment: CONT.
Thomas B. Edsall, New York Times