Why is Donald Trump so appealing to American voters?

Donald Trump has claimed another victory in his battle for the White House by adding former Republican primary rival Ron DeSantis to his ever-growing flock of supporters. 

DeSantis, the governor of Florida, spent tens of millions of dollars pitching himself as a younger, less chaotic version of the former president. But there was a "fatal flaw in the plan," said The Telegraph's deputy US editor Rozina Sabur. DeSentis "reckoned on a Republican Party that had tired of the 77-year-old, criminally indicted Trump", yet "it took just one state to vote in the party's nomination contest to shatter that illusion".

DeSantis quit the GOP nomination race on Sunday, after Trump won last week's Iowa caucus with more than 50% of the vote.

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What the papers said

The biggest lesson for DeSantis is that "personality matters more than policy in presidential races", said The Telegraph's Sabur. And the more time voters had to get to know DeSantis, "the less they seemed to like him".

Things might have been different, suggested Vox, had not the Republican's "anti-Trump wing" invested "so many resources into Florida's exceptionally uncharismatic governor". But that miscalculation doesn't explain the "scale of Trump's polling advantage", nor the "tolerance" of the GOP's primary electorate for the former president's "authoritarian criminality". 

Rather, the site argued, "the Republicans' inability to oust Trump is a symptom of deep, structural pathologies in American political life – specifically, the decades-long decay of our nation's political parties and the radicalisation of the GOP base".

Polls suggest that Trump is now in a "stronger position to win the presidency in November than he was at this time in 2016".

The former leader "may have grown in power", said The Spectator's deputy editor Freddy Gray, "but he's essentially the same ego-crazed maniac that he was eight years ago". What has changed is the "soul of conservative America". 

"The religious right, which dominated conservatism from the 1960s to the end of the George W. Bush era, has become less pious and more political," Gray continued. "It has been Trumpified."

That Trump won more than three-quarters of the white evangelical vote in 2016 and 2020 is of little surprise. What is strange is that "white people, rather than voting for Trump because they are Christian, have started to declare themselves Christian because they support Trump".

"Politics has become the master identity," Ryan Burge, a Baptist professor of political science, told The New York Times. "Everything else lines up behind partisanship."

Another surprise – and one that will greatly concern Democrats – is that Trump is also winning the backing of the young. A pollby The New York Times and Siena College published in December showed Trump leading Joe Biden, by 49% to 43%,  among voters aged 18 to 29.

The latest Harvard Youth Poll found that Americans under 30 trusted Trump more on the economy, national security, the Israel-Hamas war, crime, immigration and strengthening the working class, while Biden won on issues including climate change, abortion, gun violence and protecting democracy.

The Harvard findings appear to be borne out by reports from the ground, said The Economist. Joe Mitchell, a former Iowa state representative who runs a group called Run GenZ that recruits young conservative candidates, told the site that what he hears most is that "we had more money in our pockets when Donald Trump was president".

Two supporters in the midwestern state of Iowa summed up Trump's basic appeal. "The economy was great when he was in power, I love that," a rodeo attendee told Newshub. "I think everybody could use a mean tweet and some cheap gas," another added.

What next?

DeSantis's exit leaves former UN ambassador Nikki Haley as the only viable candidate standing in the way of a Trump coronation. 

The next GOP primary, on Tuesday, is in New Hampshire, where Haley has slowly been building support. A shock victory by her there would give Trump and his supporters pause for thought, but with the former president holding a commanding lead in national polling, the chances of Haley ultimately winning the Republican nomination are slim.

At times, said Newshub, it seems like Trump is "the bronco that keeps on bucking – refusing to go down". But with Trump facing four criminal trials that will play out in the run-up to November's presidential election, "his biggest challenge is still ahead of him".

His legal woes represent the "biggest imponderable" of 2024, agreed The Spectator's Gray. "It's so complicated that even the most ardent Trump lovers and loathers struggle to keep up." 

The reality is that nobody really knows how voters will react to a conviction. For now, however, Trump "appears to be invincible, at least as far as the Republican race goes, and everything that doesn't kill him makes him stronger".