Explaining 100% support

Jim Geraghty in WAPO makes a decent enough point:  we shouldn't be surprised if polling shows virtually 100% support for Trump from MAGA, because people who stop supporting Trump don't count themselves as part of MAGA :

For most Americans, “Do you identify as MAGA?” and “Do you support the president?” are essentially the same question.

If you’re a Trump supporter who is upset or wary about the Iran war or the resulting impact on gas prices … maybe you’re not as inclined to identify as MAGA to a pollster lately.

When Trump came to power, some voters who always thought of themselves as Republicans found that their party changed dramatically. It became more protectionist and skeptical of free-market economics, more noninterventionist in foreign policy, less focused on traditional values and even libertine in social policies — all under the leadership of a bombastic and erratic casino owner who kept having temper tantrums on social media.

Some of these people stopped describing themselves as Republicans when pollsters called but still held fairly conservative views. Nevertheless, they landed in the “independent” bucket — where many of them remained throughout the Biden years.

Other than a burst of support at the start, independent voters were never that enthusiastic about Joe Biden’s presidency. After beginning with a job approval rating around 60 percent among independents in a Gallup poll, by September 2021 Biden was at 37 percent, and thereafter he rarely exceeded 40 percent. One reason that independents soured on Biden so quickly and irrevocably? A sizable chunk of them were former Republicans.

That’s why we shouldn’t expect to find many MAGA supporters expressing their opposition to Trump’s decisions on Iran or much else. When people in this demographic disagree strongly enough, eventually they just stop calling themselves MAGA.