I’ve noticed a lot of historical analysis when looking at Trump’s approval, and Dem’s chances for a revival. But, to me, this moment feels unique and unprecedented (I was born in the early 80s). Consequently, I keep thinking about a book I read in grad school called “Analogies at War,” which argued that leaders often draw the wrong lessons from past events. As a result, they frequently implement bad policies in the present, based, in part, on their faulty understanding of history.
Do you think there could be similar issues in public opinion analysis - where there’s a mismatch between present realities and past experience - or is there something about the field that makes it good at adjusting for political and cultural changes and staying current?
The Democratic party seems to be quite adept at learning the wrong lessons. In 2016 in all the ways Clinton bungled her campaign, and in 2024 when Biden convinced himself that he was the reason that he won in 2020 instead of just due to the backlash from Trump's first term.
This was really good and just what I come here for! I recently read Dan Carter's super book, The Politics of Rage, about George Wallace. Wallace's populism is an interesting forerunner of Trump. although the book was written well before Trump appeared on the political scene, there are a lot of parallels (Wallace was a superb speaker, for example, able to read a crowd and get them worked up into a frenzy, his populism was a mishmash of ideas from different sources and not particularly ideologically coherent, he drew on white working class voters in a way similar to Trump, etc.) If we ever get a slow news week again (and those may be a long way off), I'd love to see you look at Wallace's support in 1968 as an independent candidate and in 1972 in the Democratic primaries and see if there's a connection to Trump's support. (I know that's a long temporal gap from 1972 and 1968 to 2016-2024, but some trends seem to be persistent.) In the meantime, I highly recommend Carter's book for anyone interested in the role populism has played long term in US politics and for its absolutely chilling description of racial issues in the 1950s and 1960s.
I've never found much predictive power in questions like, "Do you approve or disapprove of the way Donald Trump is handling his job as president?" You might as well ask people, "Do you favor the Democratic or Republican party?" Changes are dominated by changes in party attitudes, and by a few voters who disapprove of their party's leader, or approve of the other party's leader.
Going by anecdote rather than polls, I think you need at least two dimensions to address this question: policy and tactics. MAGA supporters I know approve of both Trump's policy goals and his (decisive-strong-hardball/reckless-illegal-divisive, take your pick) ways of going about them. But I know a lot of center and center-right people who generally approve of his policy directions but are appalled by his tactics; as well as people with no love for his policies, but who prefer any strong actions to the same problems dragging on forever due to gridlock / timidity / lobbyists / bureaucracy / special interests / legal technicalities.
Logically there should be people who oppose both Trump's policies and his tactics, but I don't know many. Lots of progressives and center-left people express outrage about Trump's actions, but based on pre-Trump attitudes most of them seem as hungry for decisiveness as MAGA supporters, just in the opposite policy direction. It's some of the centrists I know who consistently respect legalities, bipartisanship and checks and balances.
The erosion of Trump's support I see is from people who expected a return to the first Trump administration tactics. They did not expect Trump to be so much better prepared this time around, with more competent subordinates and allies, to move so quickly and aggressively. They wanted a strong wind to clear out obstacles, not a hurricane to level buildings.
Great analysis. Sincerely. I took Jan 6 Trump seriously, so while I’m appalled by what’s happening, I’m not shocked by it. Republicans dismantling the Federal Government for the sake of the Leader is very much on-brand. I think the big question is whether even MAGA ppl are so appalled by billionaire influence over Medicaid and Social Security that they shift allegiances. I’m not holding my breath, but I suppose Hope springs eternal.
I try to speak to as many MAGA supporters as I can, I've been doing that since 2015, because I think it's important to understand them. None use "billionaire" to mean "devil," most think of Musk as a successful, no-nonsense innovator and manager. They trust him far more than any career bureaucrat, politician or lawyer.
Few of them I've spoken to have clear ideas of what to do about Social Security. Medicaid is not a big MAGA issue, although Medicare is. But they trust that Trump and Musk will do the necessary things to root out fraud and make the programs fiscally sound, while non-MAGA politicians will promise everything and then blame someone else when the Trust Funds run out.
I'd argue the 'competent' labeling, and I think the recent leak of a secret military plans to a report really highlights my point. It's just that they are exceptionally confident in what they are doing, and have absolutely no guardrails.
Well, yes, perhaps "effective" in the sense of causing big effects rather than doing good is a better word than "competent." Overconfidence can cause big effects, whether it's justified or not.
When statisticians predict a Kamala win until just before the bitter end, wholly ignoring the polymarket predictors, and then make a last second flip to Trump -- no one normal believes anything that statistician says on anything. But good luck feeding the red meat to the lefties.
Ummm… not to sound like a deranged lefty Nate fanboy or anything but he called it 50/50 and said the most likely outcome was Trump winning all 7 swing states. Maybe you’re confusing him with the “politics” subreddit?
A constant pet peeve of mine: People who think a 50/50 forecast was wrong simply because one of the 50% chance events ended up occurring, while the other did not.
If anything, he made a last second flip to Harris - I remember reading his post on Election Day and thinking this was the most positive Nate had been about Kamala's chances since August.
Nate never believed Kamala would win and it came through in every one of his posts from the time he began Silver Bulletin. If people were not able to see that, that's their issue. Was very clear to me from day one Nate did not believe Kamala would win.
The main reason I subscribed to the Silver Bulletin at the that time was because Nate was keeping it real. No one with a brain could have any false hope for her if they had been reading this site, in my opinion.
Sick at heart she lost, but I was never under any illusion she would win. We'll see if we have any kind of a democracy or government standing at the end of Trump's 4 years. The nightmare never ends for me, these days.
The 180° turn in foreign policy, alienating allies and cozying up to dictators is the most shocking. I expected terrible things from this guy, but not that - at least not so blatantly.
With 'allies' like Trump, Zelensky needs no enemies. With Trump negotiating for him, Zelensky really does have NO cards.
Critical context Part I: David Shor was just interviewed in Vox and the NY Times. He estimates that if all registered voters had actually voted in November, rather than just a subset, that Trump would have won by 5 points instead of 1.
For year Democrats have operated under the assumption that higher turnout benefits them. That may no longer be the case.
In addition Shor points out that there are numerous generational divides between Zoomers and Millennials, and it appears that Zoomers are far more conservative. One possibility: Millennials were raised by liberal Boomers. By contrast Zoomers have parents from Gen X. Zoomer conservatism may not be a passing fad.
The problem with trying to compare Trump's second term with other president's in their second term is that there hasn't been a President who lost reelection then came back to win a second term in over 100 years. When most incumbents get into their 5th and 6th years voter fatigue sets in. This is like a brand new president. People's memories fade, Trump 2.0 is much different than Trump 1.
Fwiw as far as we can tell Grover Cleveland was wildly unpopular most of his second term, albeit no polling existed. The Panic of 1893 happened about 1-2 months into his second term. The Democrats actually went quite radically in a different direction for the 1896. That might be more trivia than anything to do with today, though.
This is not a real major concern, and it's not something widely talked about in R circles. They're more focused on people like Vance succeeding Trump, not Trump establishing a dictatorship. Trump will be over 80 when this current term is over, and no matter how much the "vigorous fighter" vibes he has, eventually he'll run into issues of mortality.
This "Trump is going to run for another term!" alarmism is mostly a left-leaning worry to invigorate the base. The right had a similar worry during Obama's presidency.
1. Trump got the 'easy' stuff out of the way, and he'll be battling the things that require more effort and things will get nasty. If judges continue to hold up the policies he seeks or congress doesn't go along, it will seem like more of the same for voters: angry politicians, nothing gets done. If Trump's focus is entirely grievances, it wouldn't bode well for his popularity.
2. The opposition will cook things up (Russia hoax, impeachments, etc). Anyone's guess this time around, but what will the Steele dossier 2.0 be this time around?
Reasons to expect turnaround:
1. Economy is subtly improving in ways important for the every day voter. Egg prices down $2/~30%. Oil prices down 30% to ~$65/barrel. Inflation tame. Manufacturing jobs/jobs for voting americans on the rise. Fed rate cuts imminent which means reduction in cost of lending, which could mean more affordability for car/house payments.
2. Will govt canvassing/censorship break? Reddit and legacy media are holding strong in their messaging, but will the administration find and shutter the funding sources that are architecting resistance behin the scenes? Is there a US govt equivalent to USAID for domestic issues to prop up trans/BLM/anti-Musk sentiment while shutting down vaccine injury/trump assassination/biden laptop stories? If that is shut down, will the 'loud left' realize they're far fewer in real numbers like the 10 of 12 being FBI informants in the gov whitmer kidnapping plot?
This reads like anything that isn't right leaning is bad and should be shut down by the government and it's only censorship when you don't like it?
I mean put it all out there- I'm not for censorship, but there's just as much spin and opinion presented as fact on the right. It's no better to say only your story gets told.
Trump cannot be held to the standard of a lame duck president because his supporters expect him to win another term. And maybe some of his non-supporters believe it as well, as abhorrent as that sounds to them. And he’s not behaving like a lame duck President either. He’s behaving like someone who will be President for the rest of his life.
Jeez, I'd have said he was behaving like someone under a very tight clock, who knows he has only a very limited window to get the stuff done that needs to get done. I'll allow that *maybe* he's behaving like somebody who *wants* to be President for life and believes that getting that stuff done is the only way to convince people to accept it -- but it could just be, I don't know, that he thinks that stuff is vitally important to his country.
"Riverian types" -- if you need two sentences of explanation here you probably just shouldn't be using the term as a blatant book-selling play to people, many of whom paid to read this ad.
Critical context Part III: Has anybody asked why Silicon Valley flipped so heavily for Trump? Trump's base is working class with no further education beyond high school. By contrast the Valley is filled with people with degrees in CompSci, Physics, etc. Many of them have advanced degrees as well. What's the commonality between the Valley and Trump's working class MAGA base?
Alanah Newhouse at Tablet describes a schism around "brokenism": basically the real political divide now is between those who view the system as seriously broken and those who want to defend the status quo. Trump's Silicon Valley backers are brokenists and that is why Trump is their guy.
Not to toot my own horn here, but I have something coming up on my own Substack for anybody that's interested on this topic.
My impression from being around a lot of Silicon Valley people is that basically the only ones who flipped were the ones who stood to gain significantly from Trump's economic policies - the venture capitalists really obsessed with AI, the cryptocurrency holders, and so on. The average software engineers are still heavily Democrat voting (and this holds up in the data).
Musk, David Sacks, Maguire, etc. don't really fit that description. The straw that broke the camel's back was clearly the NY criminal case--see Maguire's tweet on X.
I have no idea what a software engineer is (yes, I know it's a popular course description but in the real world the term is so elastic as to be meaningless) but ime the people are are hands on with the code and administration tend to be libertarian to the extent that they're not apolitical.
The people who are hands on with the code, as you put it, are heavily progressive and Democratic. There are tons of surveys proving it, or you can go to literally any company in the Bay Area and talk to the people with code on their computer screens.
Musk absolutely fits the economic gain box - look at all the grift he's getting out of this. Sacks is a VC who's invested in crypto. Maguire is another VC who's heavily invested in crypto. Of course they're supporting Trump, he's funneling the money right back to them.
I think there are plenty of surveys showing that the Valley as a whole is pretty Democratic (this is California after all) but surveys for all of the network/Linux/database admins, or the coders, or dev ops? I'm not aware of any. In fact when I think of the stereotypical techie I think of somebody likes James Damore, who is political only by circumstance in that his analysis of DEI efforts ran athwart of leftist political orthodoxy.
As for Musk, as has been noted ad nauseum he's taken a massive hit to his personal finances as Tesla stock prices decline.
Oh sure, Tesla stock prices are down, but no one expected that - I'm sure least of all him - as you can see from the huge rise in TSLA over the couple months after the election.
Regarding techies in general, you can look at FEC campaign contribution data. It shows that people who have the job of "software engineer" (so anyone writing code at any Bay Area company) contribute 79% to Democrats and 21% to Republicans. There are also studies like https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/00380261231182522, which found that tech workers are left-wing and that there is a "substantial ideological divide between tech workers and their leaders" (the leaders are the ones who you are citing as your sources). You could even look at this Tyler Cowen column talking about why tech workers are quite woke. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-04-29/why-does-america-s-tech-workforce-lean-left
53 of the last 60 donations by software engineers are to Democratic campaigns, and the remaining 7 are to non-partisan PACs that contribute to a mix of Democratic and Republican campaigns.
Again, what's the definition of "tech worker"? Somebody who works in the HR department at Google is technically one but they clearly belong in a different category than somebody who is a DBA.
Silicon Valley remains extremely anti-Trump. What happened this cycle is that some very notable tech luminaries came out quite publicly for Trump, but that was so eye-opening because doing something like that would have been utterly beyond the pale in, say, 2018 or 2021, since SV is so associated with liberal progressivism.
Contrast that with other industries where most people would have assumed that the CEOs and boardrooms were quietly supportive of the GOP candidate in pretty much any election, for typical fiscal/deregulatory reasons.
I divide the Valley, and tech in general, between the coders and admins on one hand and the project managers and HR types on the other. The latter may be politically liberal but the former if anything are libertarian to the extent that they are not apolitical. For that reason I would never describe SV as associated with liberal progressivism.
Critical contest Part II: For years now conservative minorities have been voting disproportionately for the Democratic Party. That appears to be fading now with substantial movement towards Trump in 2024. In addition educational polarization is probably more important now than racial classification and the Hispanic and black subgroups are disproportionately blue collar compared to whites.
Musk, David Sacks, Sean Maguire, etc. don't fall into that category and for guys like Maguire I think it's pretty clear that the straw that broke the camel's back was the NY state criminal case.
I have no idea what a software engineer is (yes, I know it's a popular college course description but in the real world the term is so elastic as to be meaningless) but the average tech worker who is hands on with either coding or administration tends to be libertarian to the extent that they are not apolitical in my experience.
I’ve noticed a lot of historical analysis when looking at Trump’s approval, and Dem’s chances for a revival. But, to me, this moment feels unique and unprecedented (I was born in the early 80s). Consequently, I keep thinking about a book I read in grad school called “Analogies at War,” which argued that leaders often draw the wrong lessons from past events. As a result, they frequently implement bad policies in the present, based, in part, on their faulty understanding of history.
Do you think there could be similar issues in public opinion analysis - where there’s a mismatch between present realities and past experience - or is there something about the field that makes it good at adjusting for political and cultural changes and staying current?
Make more comments, Sean, please.
The Democratic party seems to be quite adept at learning the wrong lessons. In 2016 in all the ways Clinton bungled her campaign, and in 2024 when Biden convinced himself that he was the reason that he won in 2020 instead of just due to the backlash from Trump's first term.
This was really good and just what I come here for! I recently read Dan Carter's super book, The Politics of Rage, about George Wallace. Wallace's populism is an interesting forerunner of Trump. although the book was written well before Trump appeared on the political scene, there are a lot of parallels (Wallace was a superb speaker, for example, able to read a crowd and get them worked up into a frenzy, his populism was a mishmash of ideas from different sources and not particularly ideologically coherent, he drew on white working class voters in a way similar to Trump, etc.) If we ever get a slow news week again (and those may be a long way off), I'd love to see you look at Wallace's support in 1968 as an independent candidate and in 1972 in the Democratic primaries and see if there's a connection to Trump's support. (I know that's a long temporal gap from 1972 and 1968 to 2016-2024, but some trends seem to be persistent.) In the meantime, I highly recommend Carter's book for anyone interested in the role populism has played long term in US politics and for its absolutely chilling description of racial issues in the 1950s and 1960s.
I've never found much predictive power in questions like, "Do you approve or disapprove of the way Donald Trump is handling his job as president?" You might as well ask people, "Do you favor the Democratic or Republican party?" Changes are dominated by changes in party attitudes, and by a few voters who disapprove of their party's leader, or approve of the other party's leader.
Going by anecdote rather than polls, I think you need at least two dimensions to address this question: policy and tactics. MAGA supporters I know approve of both Trump's policy goals and his (decisive-strong-hardball/reckless-illegal-divisive, take your pick) ways of going about them. But I know a lot of center and center-right people who generally approve of his policy directions but are appalled by his tactics; as well as people with no love for his policies, but who prefer any strong actions to the same problems dragging on forever due to gridlock / timidity / lobbyists / bureaucracy / special interests / legal technicalities.
Logically there should be people who oppose both Trump's policies and his tactics, but I don't know many. Lots of progressives and center-left people express outrage about Trump's actions, but based on pre-Trump attitudes most of them seem as hungry for decisiveness as MAGA supporters, just in the opposite policy direction. It's some of the centrists I know who consistently respect legalities, bipartisanship and checks and balances.
The erosion of Trump's support I see is from people who expected a return to the first Trump administration tactics. They did not expect Trump to be so much better prepared this time around, with more competent subordinates and allies, to move so quickly and aggressively. They wanted a strong wind to clear out obstacles, not a hurricane to level buildings.
Great analysis. Sincerely. I took Jan 6 Trump seriously, so while I’m appalled by what’s happening, I’m not shocked by it. Republicans dismantling the Federal Government for the sake of the Leader is very much on-brand. I think the big question is whether even MAGA ppl are so appalled by billionaire influence over Medicaid and Social Security that they shift allegiances. I’m not holding my breath, but I suppose Hope springs eternal.
Thank you for the kind words.
I try to speak to as many MAGA supporters as I can, I've been doing that since 2015, because I think it's important to understand them. None use "billionaire" to mean "devil," most think of Musk as a successful, no-nonsense innovator and manager. They trust him far more than any career bureaucrat, politician or lawyer.
Few of them I've spoken to have clear ideas of what to do about Social Security. Medicaid is not a big MAGA issue, although Medicare is. But they trust that Trump and Musk will do the necessary things to root out fraud and make the programs fiscally sound, while non-MAGA politicians will promise everything and then blame someone else when the Trust Funds run out.
I'd argue the 'competent' labeling, and I think the recent leak of a secret military plans to a report really highlights my point. It's just that they are exceptionally confident in what they are doing, and have absolutely no guardrails.
Well, yes, perhaps "effective" in the sense of causing big effects rather than doing good is a better word than "competent." Overconfidence can cause big effects, whether it's justified or not.
When statisticians predict a Kamala win until just before the bitter end, wholly ignoring the polymarket predictors, and then make a last second flip to Trump -- no one normal believes anything that statistician says on anything. But good luck feeding the red meat to the lefties.
Ummm… not to sound like a deranged lefty Nate fanboy or anything but he called it 50/50 and said the most likely outcome was Trump winning all 7 swing states. Maybe you’re confusing him with the “politics” subreddit?
A constant pet peeve of mine: People who think a 50/50 forecast was wrong simply because one of the 50% chance events ended up occurring, while the other did not.
You get it.
If anything, he made a last second flip to Harris - I remember reading his post on Election Day and thinking this was the most positive Nate had been about Kamala's chances since August.
Silver isn't the only game out there. The markets expected Trump to win and they called it early.
Nate never believed Kamala would win and it came through in every one of his posts from the time he began Silver Bulletin. If people were not able to see that, that's their issue. Was very clear to me from day one Nate did not believe Kamala would win.
The main reason I subscribed to the Silver Bulletin at the that time was because Nate was keeping it real. No one with a brain could have any false hope for her if they had been reading this site, in my opinion.
Sick at heart she lost, but I was never under any illusion she would win. We'll see if we have any kind of a democracy or government standing at the end of Trump's 4 years. The nightmare never ends for me, these days.
The 180° turn in foreign policy, alienating allies and cozying up to dictators is the most shocking. I expected terrible things from this guy, but not that - at least not so blatantly.
With 'allies' like Trump, Zelensky needs no enemies. With Trump negotiating for him, Zelensky really does have NO cards.
Critical context Part I: David Shor was just interviewed in Vox and the NY Times. He estimates that if all registered voters had actually voted in November, rather than just a subset, that Trump would have won by 5 points instead of 1.
For year Democrats have operated under the assumption that higher turnout benefits them. That may no longer be the case.
In addition Shor points out that there are numerous generational divides between Zoomers and Millennials, and it appears that Zoomers are far more conservative. One possibility: Millennials were raised by liberal Boomers. By contrast Zoomers have parents from Gen X. Zoomer conservatism may not be a passing fad.
The problem with trying to compare Trump's second term with other president's in their second term is that there hasn't been a President who lost reelection then came back to win a second term in over 100 years. When most incumbents get into their 5th and 6th years voter fatigue sets in. This is like a brand new president. People's memories fade, Trump 2.0 is much different than Trump 1.
Fwiw as far as we can tell Grover Cleveland was wildly unpopular most of his second term, albeit no polling existed. The Panic of 1893 happened about 1-2 months into his second term. The Democrats actually went quite radically in a different direction for the 1896. That might be more trivia than anything to do with today, though.
100% true about the gap term effect being unknown.
Extrapolating from Nixon and Bush 2 is pretty risky also.
But you have to go to the stats analysis with the data you have, not the data you want.
It may be that lame duckness ends up being the dominant statistical influence anyway.
This is not a real major concern, and it's not something widely talked about in R circles. They're more focused on people like Vance succeeding Trump, not Trump establishing a dictatorship. Trump will be over 80 when this current term is over, and no matter how much the "vigorous fighter" vibes he has, eventually he'll run into issues of mortality.
This "Trump is going to run for another term!" alarmism is mostly a left-leaning worry to invigorate the base. The right had a similar worry during Obama's presidency.
Looking forward to projections of Trump/Musk drag on the mid-terms.
Looking at those approval rating ranges...
The most popular president in the last 50 years? George W. Bush.
The least popular president in the last 50 years? Also George W. Bush.
Wild.
Reasons to expect continued decline:
1. Trump got the 'easy' stuff out of the way, and he'll be battling the things that require more effort and things will get nasty. If judges continue to hold up the policies he seeks or congress doesn't go along, it will seem like more of the same for voters: angry politicians, nothing gets done. If Trump's focus is entirely grievances, it wouldn't bode well for his popularity.
2. The opposition will cook things up (Russia hoax, impeachments, etc). Anyone's guess this time around, but what will the Steele dossier 2.0 be this time around?
Reasons to expect turnaround:
1. Economy is subtly improving in ways important for the every day voter. Egg prices down $2/~30%. Oil prices down 30% to ~$65/barrel. Inflation tame. Manufacturing jobs/jobs for voting americans on the rise. Fed rate cuts imminent which means reduction in cost of lending, which could mean more affordability for car/house payments.
2. Will govt canvassing/censorship break? Reddit and legacy media are holding strong in their messaging, but will the administration find and shutter the funding sources that are architecting resistance behin the scenes? Is there a US govt equivalent to USAID for domestic issues to prop up trans/BLM/anti-Musk sentiment while shutting down vaccine injury/trump assassination/biden laptop stories? If that is shut down, will the 'loud left' realize they're far fewer in real numbers like the 10 of 12 being FBI informants in the gov whitmer kidnapping plot?
This reads like anything that isn't right leaning is bad and should be shut down by the government and it's only censorship when you don't like it?
I mean put it all out there- I'm not for censorship, but there's just as much spin and opinion presented as fact on the right. It's no better to say only your story gets told.
Trump cannot be held to the standard of a lame duck president because his supporters expect him to win another term. And maybe some of his non-supporters believe it as well, as abhorrent as that sounds to them. And he’s not behaving like a lame duck President either. He’s behaving like someone who will be President for the rest of his life.
Jeez, I'd have said he was behaving like someone under a very tight clock, who knows he has only a very limited window to get the stuff done that needs to get done. I'll allow that *maybe* he's behaving like somebody who *wants* to be President for life and believes that getting that stuff done is the only way to convince people to accept it -- but it could just be, I don't know, that he thinks that stuff is vitally important to his country.
The obvious question is whether Trump can get Vance past the post in 2028.
"Riverian types" -- if you need two sentences of explanation here you probably just shouldn't be using the term as a blatant book-selling play to people, many of whom paid to read this ad.
Critical context Part III: Has anybody asked why Silicon Valley flipped so heavily for Trump? Trump's base is working class with no further education beyond high school. By contrast the Valley is filled with people with degrees in CompSci, Physics, etc. Many of them have advanced degrees as well. What's the commonality between the Valley and Trump's working class MAGA base?
Alanah Newhouse at Tablet describes a schism around "brokenism": basically the real political divide now is between those who view the system as seriously broken and those who want to defend the status quo. Trump's Silicon Valley backers are brokenists and that is why Trump is their guy.
Not to toot my own horn here, but I have something coming up on my own Substack for anybody that's interested on this topic.
My impression from being around a lot of Silicon Valley people is that basically the only ones who flipped were the ones who stood to gain significantly from Trump's economic policies - the venture capitalists really obsessed with AI, the cryptocurrency holders, and so on. The average software engineers are still heavily Democrat voting (and this holds up in the data).
Musk, David Sacks, Maguire, etc. don't really fit that description. The straw that broke the camel's back was clearly the NY criminal case--see Maguire's tweet on X.
I have no idea what a software engineer is (yes, I know it's a popular course description but in the real world the term is so elastic as to be meaningless) but ime the people are are hands on with the code and administration tend to be libertarian to the extent that they're not apolitical.
The people who are hands on with the code, as you put it, are heavily progressive and Democratic. There are tons of surveys proving it, or you can go to literally any company in the Bay Area and talk to the people with code on their computer screens.
Musk absolutely fits the economic gain box - look at all the grift he's getting out of this. Sacks is a VC who's invested in crypto. Maguire is another VC who's heavily invested in crypto. Of course they're supporting Trump, he's funneling the money right back to them.
I think there are plenty of surveys showing that the Valley as a whole is pretty Democratic (this is California after all) but surveys for all of the network/Linux/database admins, or the coders, or dev ops? I'm not aware of any. In fact when I think of the stereotypical techie I think of somebody likes James Damore, who is political only by circumstance in that his analysis of DEI efforts ran athwart of leftist political orthodoxy.
As for Musk, as has been noted ad nauseum he's taken a massive hit to his personal finances as Tesla stock prices decline.
Oh sure, Tesla stock prices are down, but no one expected that - I'm sure least of all him - as you can see from the huge rise in TSLA over the couple months after the election.
Regarding techies in general, you can look at FEC campaign contribution data. It shows that people who have the job of "software engineer" (so anyone writing code at any Bay Area company) contribute 79% to Democrats and 21% to Republicans. There are also studies like https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/00380261231182522, which found that tech workers are left-wing and that there is a "substantial ideological divide between tech workers and their leaders" (the leaders are the ones who you are citing as your sources). You could even look at this Tyler Cowen column talking about why tech workers are quite woke. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-04-29/why-does-america-s-tech-workforce-lean-left
If you want to dig into it, the FEC campaign contribution data is here - https://www.fec.gov/data/receipts/individual-contributions/?contributor_occupation=Software+Engineer&min_date=01%2F01%2F2024&max_date=12%2F31%2F2025
53 of the last 60 donations by software engineers are to Democratic campaigns, and the remaining 7 are to non-partisan PACs that contribute to a mix of Democratic and Republican campaigns.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/02/elon-musk-tesla-ev-subsidies-donald-trump-flip-flop/
Again, what's the definition of "tech worker"? Somebody who works in the HR department at Google is technically one but they clearly belong in a different category than somebody who is a DBA.
Silicon Valley remains extremely anti-Trump. What happened this cycle is that some very notable tech luminaries came out quite publicly for Trump, but that was so eye-opening because doing something like that would have been utterly beyond the pale in, say, 2018 or 2021, since SV is so associated with liberal progressivism.
Contrast that with other industries where most people would have assumed that the CEOs and boardrooms were quietly supportive of the GOP candidate in pretty much any election, for typical fiscal/deregulatory reasons.
I divide the Valley, and tech in general, between the coders and admins on one hand and the project managers and HR types on the other. The latter may be politically liberal but the former if anything are libertarian to the extent that they are not apolitical. For that reason I would never describe SV as associated with liberal progressivism.
Critical contest Part II: For years now conservative minorities have been voting disproportionately for the Democratic Party. That appears to be fading now with substantial movement towards Trump in 2024. In addition educational polarization is probably more important now than racial classification and the Hispanic and black subgroups are disproportionately blue collar compared to whites.
So I'm in the camp that a recession is inbound and that Trump's approval rating will suffer accordingly.
But so what? After the recession comes the recovery and you would expect Trump's ratings to go back up as the economy improves.
The only real question is if it happens around the midterms.
Musk, David Sacks, Sean Maguire, etc. don't fall into that category and for guys like Maguire I think it's pretty clear that the straw that broke the camel's back was the NY state criminal case.
I have no idea what a software engineer is (yes, I know it's a popular college course description but in the real world the term is so elastic as to be meaningless) but the average tech worker who is hands on with either coding or administration tends to be libertarian to the extent that they are not apolitical in my experience.