Trump will move U.S. to the right. But voters may only back him up to a point

WASHINGTON —  With his victory, President-elect Donald Trump has reshaped American politics, putting together a conservative, working-class coalition, including a number of Black and Latino voters, that has the potential to hold a majority for years.

With a Republican-controlled Senate, probably the House as well, and a 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court, he now has the opportunity to shift public policy significantly to the right.

Or he could impulsively drive the whole thing into the ditch.

In his victory speech early Wednesday, Trump claimed voters had given him a “powerful mandate.”

They did, but for limited purposes.

What voters want from Trump

The campaign showed, and exit polls confirmed, that a broad swath of voters mostly want Trump to do two things — ensure against another bout of inflation and reduce the number of immigrants entering the U.S.

There’s much less reason to think voters long to hand broad government authority over to Elon Musk or give Robert F. Kennedy Jr. control of federal health policy.

On other topics, there’s strong evidence of what might be called an anti-mandate. Even in conservative states, for example, voters made clear that they oppose moves to restrict abortion. There’s very little support in the country for rolling back LGBTQ+ rights, despite the wishes of some of Trump’s evangelical supporters.

And there’s little public support for Trump to go on a revenge spree against his Democratic opponents.

Will he risk reigniting inflation?

Preventing a new round of widespread price increases should be easy: Inflation is already largely under control after the rapid rise in costs of 2022 and early 2023, and interest rates are coming down. Doing nothing would basically get the job done.

The problem is that Trump doesn’t want to do nothing. He wants to do several things — including imposing massive tariffs and enacting new individual and corporate tax cuts — that run a high inflationary risk.

Congress has given presidents a lot of power to levy tariffs — taxes on imports. But doing so would raise the cost of goods across the economy, a wide range of economists have warned.

Big tax cuts would increase the federal deficit, which is already running at record levels. That, too, is inflationary.

Immediately after the election, interest rates rose as bond investors began to price in the possibility of renewed inflation under Trump.

The new administration could seek to offset tax cuts with spending reductions, especially on healthcare and aid to the poor and elderly. Many Democrats believe he will back a renewed Republican effort to make deep cuts in Medicaid and cut health insurance subsidies under the Affordable Care Act, which make coverage possible for tens of millions of Americans.

But this time around, Trump avoided committing himself to repealing the healthcare law, a crusade that ended in political disaster for him last time.

Moreover, the history of the past half-century repeatedly has shown that Republicans talk about spending cuts when out of power much more than they enact them when in power. Instead, they default to more debt, which was the pattern of Trump’s first term.

How far will Trump go: Immigration

Reducing the immigrant population could be even trickier for the new administration.

Voters unquestionably soured on immigration during President Biden’s tenure. A majority now wants fewer immigrants entering the country, legally or illegally, and is open to the idea of mass deportations of people who live in the U.S. without legal authorization.

Trump’s core supporters feel especially strongly about the issue. About one-third of them listed immigration as their most important issue, according to the AP VoteCast survey of 115,000 voters.

Their anger doesn’t stop at the border. Immigrants currently make up about 14% of the U.S. population — near a record high. That’s helped the economy, staving off the sort of labor shortages and population declines that have hurt countries like Japan and South Korea. But it has also brought social and cultural changes that have unsettled many Americans.

But majority sentiment can swing both ways. When Trump moved against immigrants in his first term, many Americans believed he went too far. That generated a wave of pro-immigrant sympathy.

Trump has vowed to adopt “the biggest domestic deportation campaign in American history.” His advisor, Stephen Miller, has talked about assembling a “giant force” of National Guard troops and law enforcement officers from conservative states to hunt down millions of residents living in the country illegally, truck them to detention camps and then expel them.

In August, a majority of voters — 56% overall and 88% of Trump supporters — said they strongly or somewhat favored “mass deportations of immigrants living in the country illegally,” according to a Pew Research Center survey.

That doesn’t mean, however, that they’d support Miller’s dreams.

Voters’ views on immigration are often complicated. A separate question on the same Pew survey found that 61% of voters — although only one-third of Trump supporters — said that immigrants who lack legal status should be able to “stay in the country legally, if certain requirements are met.”

Other surveys have found that support for deportation drops when pollsters ask about specific categories of immigrants in the U.S. illegally, such as longtime residents, spouses of U.S. citizens and people brought to the U.S. illegally as children.

How far will Trump go: Rule of law

The efforts to prosecute Trump for federal crimes are over. Any president has the authority to tell the Justice Department to drop a case, and Trump has said he will do so and fire special counsel Jack Smith “within two seconds.”

Smith is already making plans to wind down his efforts and asked a judge to put all proceedings in the election interference case on hold.

Trump can’t similarly eliminate the two criminal cases against him in state court — the New York hush money and fraud case on which he was convicted in May and the Georgia case on which he was indicted on charges of interfering with the 2020 election. Presidents don’t have authority over local district attorneys or state judges.

Those cases, however, aren’t as much of a threat to Trump as the federal prosecutions were.

Trump hasn’t yet been sentenced in the New York case — sentencing is currently set for Nov. 26 — but the judge could dismiss the case before a Tuesday deadline or postpone sentencing indefinitely, and any sanction beyond a fine is deemed to be unlikely.

The Georgia case has faced one problem after another and may be fatally mired.

Beyond shutting down the cases against him, Trump for nearly two years has suggested he would pardon some or all of the people convicted of storming the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, many of whom were convicted of attacking law enforcement officers.

Both of those steps would provoke outrage from liberals — something Trump appears to enjoy — but Tuesday’s results strongly suggest a majority of voters won’t care much.

They might feel otherwise, however, if Trump follows through on his threats to use federal power to go after his political opponents. He’s talked of appointing a special counsel to pursue unspecified investigations into Biden, for example, and sometimes has revived eight-year-old threats to prosecute former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, his 2016 opponent.

One thing a large majority of Americans consistently agree on is a desire for less partisan confrontation.

How far will Trump go: Abortion

Trump will come under a lot of pressure from the antiabortion wing of the Republican Party to impose new restrictions. There’s a lot he could do without any new legislation from Congress, especially to limit medication abortions.

Throughout the campaign, he avoided answering questions about what, if any, restrictions he’d approve. His public statements have made clear that he understands the political danger the issue poses to his party.

In the current election, voters approved abortion rights measures in two very conservative states, Montana and Missouri, as well as in the swing states of Arizona and Nevada, and three liberal states — Colorado, Maryland and New York. In Trump’s home state, Florida, an abortion rights measure won a clear majority, 57%, although it failed to hit the 60% needed to amend the state constitution.

Just under two-thirds of voters nationwide said abortion should be legal in all (25%) or most (38%) cases, according to the APVoteCast survey. The exit poll conducted for the major television networks had a very similar number.

One key to Trump’s victory is that he won 40% of the voters who said the procedure should be legal in most cases, the AP survey found. The network exit poll pegged the share even higher — 49%.

All that suggests Democrats failed to convince a big swath of voters that Trump significantly threatened abortion rights.

That’s consistent with how voters viewed Trump overall: More than half said they believed his views were “too extreme.” But enough of those voters sided with him anyway to carry him to victory.

Whether he assuages their doubts or deepens them will quickly determine whether he can convert this week’s win into a lasting political triumph or a series of self-inflicted wounds.

What else you should be reading

LA Times special: With progressive ballot measures on track to fail, California’s political identity is questioned

Exit polls: Two exit polls give preliminary data on this year’s voters. Here’s the poll conducted for the major television networks and the APVoteCast survey.

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