… In a recent work, we explored the question “‘why did Republican lawmakers oppose Trump’s candidacy in the 2016 campaign?” There are diverse—and often contradictory—explanations of the #NeverTrump movement offered by politicians, pundits, and journalists in 2016. After cataloguing these explanations, we distilled them into four theoretical categories: (1) policy preferences, (2) identity, (3) electoral motivations, and (4) establishment dynamics.
We then tested these popular explanations by compiling data on every Republican member of Congress’s public position on Trump’s candidacy. CONT.
Lauren Johnson, Deon McCray & Jordan Ragusa (College of Charleston), LSE USAPP
