Trump’s supporters are more liberal than he is — with one big exception

On the large majority of policy issues, Donald Trump has a more conservative policy position than the people who intend to vote for him. But there’s one issue where Trump and his supporters align exactly: His proposal to temporarily ban all Muslims from entering the US.

But for virtually every other issue — from taxes to campaign finance to climate change — Trump holds a more conservative stance. Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton is ideologically similar to her supporters, although there are interesting contrasts when it’s broken it down issue-by-issue.

We know all this because, for the past few weeks, we’ve been running a survey called Vote Compass. It’s a tool that calculates where you are on the political spectrum compared to the candidates, based on the issues. (You can try it here; it’s long, but worth it.) We now have about 70,000 responses, and the respondents are diverse enough that we can weight our data so it reflects the demographics of voters in the 2012 election. This is what we found:

This shows that, across the issues, Trump’s likely voters are more socially and economically liberal than Trump himself. Meanwhile, Clinton’s likely voters pretty much end up in the same spot as Clinton.

It’s important to remember that this is where the candidates stand in the context of the modern American political landscape, and the data only represents what is considered conservative and liberal in this context. (The Vote Compass methodology is here.) But looking at these relative points shows us the differing relationship Trump has with his electorate compared to Clinton.

Trump’s stances on almost every issue Vote Compass asks about — ranging from immigration to climate change — are more conservative than those who plan on voting for him.

In fact, the only issues on which Trump’s supporters are more conservative than he is are gun control and minimum wage. Trump believes it should be somewhat harder for people to buy guns — mostly for people on the terrorist watch list and no-fly list — but his voters believe it should be about the same as it is now. For the minimum wage, Trump believes it should be somewhat higher, but his voters want it to stay the same.

But on the large majority of issues, Trump’s likely voters are more liberal than Trump. This includes standardizes testing, government bailouts, climate change, and taxation, among other issues.

One of the more interesting results is that Trump supporters pretty much agree with Trump on the temporary ban of Muslims entering the country, which Trump has amended to say this would include people from countries “compromised by terrorism.” So while he no longer wants to ban people by their religion, he has arguably expanded his scope to include countries like France. Meanwhile, his supporters also closely agree with him on gay marriage, and his desire to take away federal funding for Planned Parenthood.

There will be some coalition of hardcore Trump supporters after this election. But on November 8, he will likely get the majority of his electoral support from voters who tend to be more moderate. These are likely people who are voting along party lines and have yet to be turned off by Trump’s antics, but don’t see Trumpism as the future of the party.

For the most part, Clinton and her voters are on the same page.

There are some minor differences in things like standardizes testing and free trade agreements, but their positions are close enough that there’s no reason to fret about it. There are some areas, though, where the differences are stark.

For example, Clinton’s likely voters are far more liberal when it comes to drug policy; they tend to believe personal possession of drugs should not result in jail time, while Clinton somewhat disagrees with that. Her voters want to abolish the death penalty, but she somewhat disagrees with that, too. And her supporters want the government to pay for more health care than it currently is — which might be influenced by the single-payer system on which Bernie Sanders’s campaign ran — but Clinton’s position is to defend and forge forward with Obamacare.

On the matrix above, Clinton is close to her supporters on a composite level. But issue-by-issue, her views aren’t in line with some prototypical Clinton supporter. Instead, she skews left on about half the issues and right on the other half.

There is certainly a coalition of Sanders supporters who have pushed Democrats to the left on a handful of issues, like health care, but that isn’t to say Clinton voters moved to the left as a whole. When we broke out those who voted for Sanders in the primary versus those who voted Clinton, we didn’t find much variation. In addition, Clinton voters skewed more conservative than Clinton on several issues, like immigration and how aggressively the US should be fighting ISIS.

Over the past 60 years, the partisan gap has widened so it’s been increasingly easier for voters to tell the difference between Republicans and Democrats. While this election has largely been about the difference in the candidates’ style — and, frankly, Trump’s harsh rhetoric against women and minorities — their policy positions are far apart enough that even casually informed voters can likely parse out the differences.

So the hope for Trump is that enough voters are align closely enough with his conservative ideology to make this a close race. That’s the math that could work in a conventional election. But Trump isn’t a conventional candidate, and right now he is polling about 5 points worse than if a generic Republicans had run for president. Surely part of that is the non-policy issues that have dominated this campaign, but the ideological gap between him and his supporters may also be playing some role.

Much thanks to the Vox Pop Labs team (no relation to Vox Media) for their data analysis on the Vote Compass data.