President Trump’s candidate won big in the Alabama Republican senatorial primary on Tuesday, but to hear the loser tell it, the “Donald Trump agenda” did not.
When Trump-endorsed former Auburn football coach Tommy Tuberville easily beat former Attorney General Jeff Sessions 63% to 37% in the Alabama Senate runoff, it raised questions about how big a winner populism was for the president in 2016 and could be again this year.
“Too often, we’ve allowed the focus to be on GDP, on growth, on Wall Street, and trading issues like that, and not enough on the struggles of that single mom who’s got to buy four truck tires for her old car,” Sessions said in his concession speech after he was defeated in his quest to reclaim the Senate seat he held for 20 years. “It’s going to cost $600, and she doesn’t have it, and it has to go on a credit card that charges 25% interest.”
Sessions nevertheless told Republicans to follow Trump’s lead on immigration: “The American people are not against immigration, but they want a lawful system, and they want the kind of immigration that serves the national interest and that does not become a mechanism by which their wages are pulled down, and their ability to find a decent job is reduced substantially.”
He affirmed Trump on trade: “I think the American people have been right to resist this religious free trade idea that no matter how bad a competitor cheats you, or if they sell products, China sells products to the United States below cost, closing an American factory, laying off hundreds of American workers, these people, these religious free traders, think we should send them a thank-you note because you can get it a few cents cheaper at Walmart or one of our other stores.”
He also channeled a Trumpian “America First” foreign policy: “And I think we’ve got involved in too many wars that don’t have an end to them, have not served the national interest, and hasn’t even helped the people we thought we were trying to help.”
“Sen. Sessions was an articulate spokesman for Trumpism before Trumpism was cool,” said Republican strategist John Feehery. “So it is pretty ironic that the president campaigned so vociferously against him. So, yes, the Trump populists lost an effective voice for their cause.”
As the Trump reelection campaign searches for a message to help regain the lead from Democratic challenger Joe Biden, the lessons of 2016 are debated anew. “The same media polls that had the world convinced that Hillary Clinton would be elected in 2016 are trying the same trick again in 2020,” said new Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien in a statement Thursday. “It won’t work.”
One school of thought is that Trump upset Clinton because he broke with George W. Bush-era Republican orthodoxy on the trio of issues Sessions mentioned, widening the party’s electoral coalition to include the Rust Belt with his populist, nationalist variant of conservatism. The kind of blue-collar voter who might worry about his or her job at a factory crossed over and voted for Trump in states that hadn’t gone for a GOP presidential nominee since the Reagan Democrats of the 1980s.
“If he gets on message and stays on it, stays on those principle positions, I think he’ll be in a position to come back and win this election,” Sessions said of 2020.
The other theory is that Trump won because he is rich and famous. This, combined with his brash reality TV star persona, helped him outshine a crowded field of 16 other Republicans and then edge out an equally polarizing Democratic opponent. The pandemic, economic downturn, and civil unrest may make it difficult to win based on his personal brand a second time.
The last two years have not been kind to populists inside Trump’s orbit, especially since former chief strategist Steve Bannon’s departure from the White House, and only a relatively small number of lawmakers such as Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri and Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida have tried to claim the mantle. Ending “endless wars” and “bad trade deals” have competed with criminal justice reform for the Trump campaign’s attention.
“Sessions carried the torch of populism on subjects like immigration and trade for decades before Trump. Over the last few years, he even warmed up to having populist opinions on foreign policy and economics. His voice would have been badly needed in the Senate,” said Ryan Girdusky, author of They’re Not Listening: How the Elites Created the Nationalist Populist Revolution. “While nationalists and populists should respect his legacy and value his voice, his loss is not the end of the movement. To quote Yoda, ‘there is another.'”
Whether that translates into another Trump term remains to be seen.
