On Election Day, a small but crucial percentage of Republican voters deserted their party, casting ballots for Democratic nominees in several elections that featured Trump-backed candidates at the top of the ticket. These Trump-driven defections wrought havoc on Republican ranks. At the extreme, a once-strong Republican Party in Michigan was shut out at every level of state government. …
Three political scientists — Sean Westwood of Dartmouth, Yphtach Lelkes of the University of Pennsylvania and Shanto Iyengar of Stanford — created the Polarization Research Lab, which conducted weekly surveys with YouGov of a total of 13,000 voters during the final seven weeks of the campaign.
Westwood observed in an email that the major finding of the survey “is that democratic norm violations of the sort many Republicans ran on are an electoral loser.”
Republican candidates, Westwood added, “running on platforms that supported democratic norm violations were standing behind a policy that seems to only resonate with Trump and a small minority of Republican voters.” CONTINUED
Thomas B. Edsall, New York Times
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