Republicans push populist proposals as they try to stand out from pre-Trump GOP

Republicans sympathetic to the populism of former President Donald Trump are trying to come up with policies that can compete with Democratic proposals to aid workers, sometimes running afoul of small-government conservatives and their party’s business wing in the process.

Sen. Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican, dropped his “Blue Collar Bonus” plan on Wednesday morning. His bill would offer a refundable tax credit to workers making less than $16.50 an hour, paid out in quarterly installments. Under the plan, an employee earning $12 an hour would qualify for a $2.25 tax credit. A valid Social Security number would be required for eligibility.

“Wages for blue-collar workers have been stagnant for decades,” Hawley said in a statement. “And government made the problem worse by shutting down the economy a year ago. It’s time we give blue-collar workers some respect and a pay raise. This plan would deliver meaningful relief for families and working Americans through higher pay while incentivizing and promoting work.”

This follows a Tuesday proposal by a pair of Republican senators to increase the federal minimum wage to $10 an hour by 2025 while mandating the use of an immigration mechanism called E-Verify. One of the sponsors, Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, is, like Hawley, a Trump ally who has advocated for a more populist GOP. But the other, Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah, is a “Never Trumper” whose failure to win white working-class voters was among the reasons he lost the 2012 presidential election.

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But Romney did campaign as a supporter of immigration enforcement, including E-Verify, that year. And one of his top domestic policy advisers, Oren Cass, is today one of the leading conservative policy wonks encouraging Republicans to pursue new ways to boost wages that go beyond tax cuts and deregulation. He praised the Romney-Cotton plan as “very well done.”

“Right-of-center continues shift toward sensible, pro-worker focus on tight labor markets and rising wages,” Cass tweeted. “Left-of-center, biz community are elsewhere.”

That is the challenge Cotton and Romney face. Their preferred minimum wage is too low, and phased in too slowly, for most Democrats, who are committed to $15 an hour even during the pandemic. Liberals were quick to point out that the state minimum wage in Cotton’s Arkansas is already $11 per hour.

Meanwhile, the GOP’s business wing is fond neither of a higher minimum wage nor E-Verify. Many Republicans point to analyses showing the Democrats’ favored $15 an hour would lift 900,000 people out of poverty only at the cost of 1.4 million, disproportionately entry-level, jobs.

“The Chamber of Commerce is closer to the Biden administration on immigration than it is to Tom Cotton,” said a Republican strategist.

Under Trump, Republicans made gains with blue-collar voters. This was especially true of the working-class whites who turned the Rust Belt red, for the first time since Ronald Reagan was president, in 2016 and kept those states competitive for the GOP four years later, even as the Democrats narrowly won them back.

Democrats contend that Trump’s appeal to the white working-class was based on cultural and racial resentments. But the former president frequently brought up jobs and wages, blaming trade and immigration policies favored by many in both parties for the erosion of their living standards. Moreover, Trump also made inroads with similarly situated Hispanic and black voters while also winning over noncollege whites who had supported Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012.

Where the Trump-era GOP lost ground was with college-educated suburban whites, especially women. Henry Olsen of the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center attributed President Biden’s success in flipping the Rust Belt back into the Democratic column, in addition to Georgia and Arizona, to Trump’s “suburban slippage.”

Before the pandemic upended the economy, there were indications of rising working-class wages. Goldman Sachs estimated in 2019 that the bottom half of earners were benefiting about twice as much from wage growth as the top half. But even many conservatives supportive of Trump’s breaks with the business wing of the GOP maintain he stuck too closely to Reagan-era solutions on taxes and regulations, especially during his first year in office when he might have been able to peel off Democratic support for an infrastructure plan.

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The proposals by Hawley, Cotton, and Romney are examples of Republican efforts to move past the Trump years and offer some version of a populist governing agenda. But it still remains to be seen whether they can gain converts within the GOP or crossover support from Democrats.

Hawley, and eventually Trump, sided with many Democrats in support of $2,000 individual stimulus payments. But most Republicans, and some centrist Democrats, favor more targeted support. Republican lawmakers who met with Biden at the White House about a new COVID-19 relief package favored a price tag closer to $600 billion. The administration wants $1.9 trillion.

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