Until now, that strategy has worked relatively well—allowing him to retain much of his support, even as he has pushed the envelope rhetorically and with policy. Trump has survived a multitude of scandals and crises by holding the support of the congressional majority and much of the Republican electorate. And this weekend, a Wall Street Journal/NBC poll found that Trump’s approval ratings are up to 47 percent—the best of his term.[...]
The president’s method has pretty strong support from social scientists. The overwhelming weight of recent scholarship points to two major trends in American politics over the past three decades to justify his theory. The first is that partisan polarization in Washington has greatly intensified since the 1960s. The distance that separates the parties on most issues has vastly increased. The ideological homogeneity of each party has solidified. In other words, centrists faded as a major force in politics and policy making. The second and related trend is that the phenomenon has been much more pronounced within the Republican Party. The GOP has moved further to the right than Democrats have moved to the left. Republicans are more ideologically cohesive as a party than are Democrats, who still exhibit greater division and fragmentation relative to their counterparts (although not as much as they did in the 1950s and ’60s, when Democrats were fundamentally divided between southern and northern wings).[...]
Trump has not left this to chance. He has been extremely aggressive staying on the campaign trail, holding rallies to build his own support and to make sure that candidates in key states understand the risk of opposing him. Many Republican candidates have declared their allegiance to the president as the head of the party. With Trump counting on the fact that Republican legislators will always come home, he has been able to employ a parliamentary governing style, in which the White House and the congressional majority act with a degree of unity that even the late President Woodrow Wilson would have admired.
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