In a three-part series on the Trump phenomenon, Sean Trende of Real Clear Politics argues that Donald Trump is the avatar of working-class anxieties within the Republican party. As he sees it, Trump is potentially “a more credible Santorum/Huckabee candidate.” That’s why poll after poll shows, “he draws his strength from the same sorts of downscale, less-educated voters with loose ties to the Republican Party.”
Writing at Politico, Tucker Carlson seems to think the balance of power is shifting decisively toward the Trump coalition because of the hubris of the party leadership. On immigration, he argues, “If you live in an affluent ZIP code, it’s hard to see a downside to mass low-wage immigration. Your kids don’t go to public school. You don’t take the bus or use the emergency room for health care. No immigrant is competing for your job. (The day Hondurans start getting hired as green energy lobbyists is the day my neighbors become nativists.) Plus, you get cheap servants, and get to feel welcoming and virtuous while paying them less per hour than your kids make at a summer job on Nantucket. It’s all good.” However, the great mass of the GOP sees something different, and love Trump.
But politics rarely takes on as straightforward a form as Carlson describes. Consider, for instance, the anxiety over Trump that Dan McLaughlin of RedState notes among “regular Republicans.” According to McLaughlin, these are reasonably informed, middle- or upper-middle class voters who reliably vote Republican, do not draw a living from politics, still see the GOP as representing mainstream conservatism, and care deeply about electability and national stewardship. Trump scares the bejesus out of them. I myself have noted this anxiety among my friends and neighbors, none of whom lives in an “affluent ZIP code,” most of whom are college educated, and none of whom is all that worried about Hondurans taking their jobs.
As Trende notes, party coalitions are big, unwieldy, and ever-changing. To this it might be added that the rule of party competition is winner-take-all; ours is not a system of proportional representation. Thirty percent of the vote might equal 30 percent of the parliamentary seats in a European country, but at the Republican convention in Cleveland this summer, if you fall one delegate short of a majority, you get nothing.
So a question worth asking is: Just how large is Trump’s base coalition? Is it bigger than the mass of “regular Republicans” about whom McLaughlin writes? Here are some relevant facts about Mitt Romney general election coalition from 2012:
-66 percent made at least $50,000 per year.
-32 percent made at least $100,000 per year.
-77 percent had at least some college education.
-48 percent had at least a college degree.
-72 percent were married
-53 percent attended church at least weekly
-59 percent thought abortion should generally be illegal
It looks to me like the “regular Republicans”—whom I often conceive of as the married, churchgoing middle class—constituted the majority of the Romney coalition in 2012. It is worth pointing out that they were probably a larger share of the 2012 primary electorate, as people higher up on the socioeconomic scale tend to be more likely to vote in low-turnout contests like primaries.
In other words, Trump’s base alone is not large enough to win a majority of the Republican electorate. Sure, he might win the Iowa caucus tonight, but that is because a non-Trump majority is scattered across half a dozen other candidates. He will have to pull in a not-insubstantial portion of the regular Republican vote to win the nomination once the field condenses.
And therein lies the great task of anti-Trump conservatives, those of us who believe that Trump is a liberal and a demagogue who manifestly lacks the temperament and discipline to be president of the United States. The leaders of this coalition must persuade those regular Republicans not to switch to Trump as the field consolidates.
The recent poll of Iowa from the Des Moines Register—widely considered a very good survey of the Hawkeye State—suggests that this is doable. The poll found that 60 percent of Iowa Republicans were bothered by Trump’s aggressive use of eminent domain, and 56 percent were bothered by his previous support of abortion (and in fact this latter number might be understated, for the pollster used the leftist phrase “late-term abortion” rather than “partial-birth abortion,” which has more salience among conservatives).
This implies two lines of attack to ensure that the non-Trump vote does not consolidate around Trump as the field winnows. First, as Liam Donovan argues, you shatter, “the illusion that Trump is a friend of the little guy.” Donovan frames this as a way to dislodge a quantum of Trump’s working-class support, but the results of the Des Moines Register data on eminent domain suggests that this has salience with the regular Republicans, too. You can have a college degree and still be appalled that Trump tried to take an old lady’s house to build a parking lot for limousines.
Second, you pummel Trump on abortion—particularly partial-birth abortion. The more he talks about this, the worse he sounds. In the September debate on Fox News, Megyn Kelly pointed out Trump’s recent conversion to the pro-life cause, to which Trump responded, in essence, that he knew a child whose parents nearly aborted him, that the child “today is a total superstar, a great, great child,” and that this caused Trump to change his mind. This is an incredibly tone-deaf answer for an audience of conservative Christians, who believe that abortion should be illegal because all human life has merit in the eyes of God. It should not matter how any child turned out—but for Trump, apparently, it did.
There is a third line of attack that is more speculative because the Des Moines Register did not poll on it. Still, it makes intuitive sense to pursue one of McLaughlin’s theories about the regular Republicans: They want an electable nominee who will prioritize public safety. Most polls show Trump losing to Hillary Clinton in the general election, and the billionaire’s favorable rating with the broader country is truly dreadful. If McLaughlin is right, this will resonate with regular Republicans. Trump’s most loyal supporters might see no difference between Mitch McConnell and Hillary Clinton, but that is not a sentiment shared by the mass of the GOP electorate, even if a majority is deeply frustrated with the party’s congressional leadership.
On the public-safety front, Trump’s opponents need to point how erratic he is, how nasty he is (not just toward the high priests of political correctness, but toward conservatives who dare critique him), and how ignorant he is of foreign policy. For good measure, they should remind voters of his recent chumminess with Vladimir Putin. Is a man of such intemperance really who they want as president? Could a President Trump, for example, resist using the IRS as a tool of political repression? Could he be cool and even-handed in advancing America’s interests abroad, or will a Twitter war with Kim Jong-un become a real war? Could he be trusted with the nuclear arsenal (which, by the way, he has not the first clue about)? A smart campaign gearing up for the final showdown with Trump should already be preparing a version of LBJ’s Daisy Ad to run against Trump.
Combined, these three points of attack—big government cronyism, extreme pro-choice views, and unelectability/instability—should hopefully be enough to keep Trump from growing his coalition. Indeed, the Des Moines Register poll was actually a terrible result for Trump underneath the topline number (where Trump leads Ted Cruz by 5 points). Trump’s net favorable rating is down to just 50-47, after having been as high as 61-35 in August. This suggests that, as regular Republicans take a closer look at Trump, they find a lot not to like.
Still, Trump remains a force to fear. Even if this strategy works—which itself is far from a certainty—a lot depends on the rest of the field. How quickly will it consolidate, and to how many candidates? How many delegates will Trump have accumulated by that point? Will the eventual anti-Trump candidate (or candidates) be able to prosecute this case successfully? None of these questions has sure and sound answers, so much remains up in the air.
More broadly, the tension that Trende and others have noted still exists. Party coalitions are always shifting, and there is a sizeable portion of the current GOP that is partial to Trump. This strategy to defeat Trump rests upon the premise that his crossover appeal is limited; the fact remains that he is still speaking to a real constituency within the party, one that feels underappreciated. It will be incumbent upon the eventual nominee to find a way to appeal to these voters, as a fractured Republican party stands a poor shot of defeating Hillary Clinton in November.
But first, the GOP needs to deal with the Trump problem. Sound theory and solid data suggest it can be done. But does the Republican party actually possess the wherewithal to do it?
Jay Cost is a staff writer at The Weekly Standard and the author of A Republic No More: Big Government and the Rise of American Political Corruption.
