When Oprah Loved Trump

There is one question about Donald Trump that I’m asked above all others, as someone whose professional life is devoted to studying voter behavior and, in particular, what drives Republicans. Here is a man who remains the front-runner for the presidency despite facing dozens of felony charges, a jury verdict as soon as next week, and the lingering frustration of voters — including Republicans — over the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol. Why doesn’t any of it affect his standing in the polls?

My answer starts with a story about how Oprah Winfrey once saw Mr. Trump.

During the presidential election year of 2000, she sent him a warm, handwritten letter that ended with her floating a political partnership between two of America’s most famous names.

“Too bad we’re not running for office. What a team!” she wrote.

A Trump-Oprah (or Oprah-Trump) ticket obviously never came to be, and in the intervening decades the two went in very opposite directions politically. Ms. Winfrey elevated and endorsed Senator Barack Obama for the presidency; Mr. Trump built a political following around false allegations and conspiracy theories about Mr. Obama’s birth.

By the time Mr. Trump was President Trump, Ms. Winfrey considered becoming Mr. Trump’s rival rather than his running mate. She called up Senator Mitt Romney to discuss ideas about taking on Mr. Trump in some fashion.

Yet Ms. Winfrey may have been on to something back when she thought voters might be drawn to her and Mr. Trump. In our Times Opinion focus group this month, when I interviewed a dozen women who voted for Mr. Trump in 2020 and asked them who else they’d like to see run for president, the first responses from one Republican and one independent were emphatic: Oprah! Oprah!

“She’s smart. She knows how to run a business,” one of our focus group participants said about Ms. Winfrey. “She’s not a pushover.”