Republicans, whether they love Trump, hate Trump, or merely have come to terms with Trump, need to understand what Trump and the 2016 election signify: that the Republican Party is no longer and can never again be the party of the country club, of the wealthy, of Wall Street.
Democrats have been slowly taking over the country club for years. By bumpy and gradual stages, Democrats have been increasing their share of upper-class and upper-middle-class votes.
Republicans no longer dominate among wealthy donors. And Democrats are embracing the lobbyist class, as K Street learns it has more to gain from backing Chuck Schumer than from backing Paul Ryan.
Republican elites have often responded to this realignment by trying to stop it—trying to bring Westchester County and Montgomery County, Md., back into the GOP fold. One reason was lack of imagination. You could call it political protectionism: Republicans had won before as the party of the well-off, and so they thought that to win again they should become that type of party again.
Another reason was elite identity politics. Mitt Romney, one could argue, viewed the 47 percent as hopelessly unpersuadable, and he chased the upper-middle-class vote because he wanted a party of people with whom he was comfortable. This is a widespread but rarely admitted feeling in GOP leadership—we must hold onto the elite vote, because the alternative is too unseemly.
The alternative, of course, is a populist Republican Party — a GOP of the working class.
Donald Trump’s victory showed us many things. It showed us that a crafty entertainer can game cable news to guarantee saturation coverage. It showed us that the GOP base is less ideological than the conservative movement is. Trump’s victory, however, mostly showed us that there were tens of millions of working-class white voters who were politically homeless and looking for a champion.
Democrats didn’t want the backcountry whites bringing to their guns and bibles into the party. And Romney-type Republicans didn’t view the 47 percent as part of their support-base.
Trump wanted them, and he got them. “Counties with Trump support correlate with counties where voters have less education, [and] work in old-economy jobs” data analyses showed.
These were the voters who stayed home, unsurprisingly, in 2012. “[D]ownscale, Northern, rural whites” reduced their turnout rate at a rate far greater than any other demographic, pollster Sean Trende showed in an analysis in which he named them the “missing white voters.”
How did Republicans react to that 2012 election? By issuing an after-action report, colloquially known as the RNC “autopsy” calling for, among other things, comprehensive immigration reform. This included the importation of guest workers who will accept lower wages. Marco Rubio, perhaps believing the autopsy, took part in the “Gang of Eight” immigration deal — a move that arguably ruined his chances to be the GOP nominee this year.
While immigration appears to bring mostly good things to the upper-middle class — nicer restaurants and cheaper labor, for instance — it appears to bring more harm to the working class (linguistically divided schools, changing neighborhoods and lower wages). In a recent poll, 59 percent of workers in blue-collar professions said they believed that immigrants take jobs from Americans.
So Trump ran for the missing white voters, deviating from GOP orthodoxy on trade and immigration, and dropping the standard GOP emphasis on limited government and tax policy. And Trump won.
Should the GOP become the party of Trump, then? There are thousands of reasons why not to. For one thing, Trump is sui generis. Other candidates cannot run and win the nomination as he did. Also, Trump has fueled his campaign in part on racism, or at least racial antagonism. That’s not only politically painful in the long run, it’s morally unacceptable.
Finally, Trump has trampled on conservatism — both economic and moral. For conservatism, a Trump GOP would be a death sentence.
So what lesson can conservatives take from Trump? Easiest to divine, but maybe not as useful, is the rear-facing lesson. Instead of pushing away the 47 percent, and trying to quash or ignore rising populist fervor (which was evident as early as the Tea Party) conservatives could have and should have embraced it and guided it in a more constructive direction.
Tea Party populism included ire at the bailouts and a rigged system in which insiders get rich at the expense of the rest of the country. Today, Trump channels that populism into anti-trade, anti-conservative, anti-immigrant sentiment, which not infrequently bubbles over into racism. Republicans should have and could have channeled the sentiment into free-market populism, which argues that the way to unrig the game is to take power away from the insiders.
As Democrats openly embrace lobbyists, corporate welfare and power centralization, a free-market populist party could be running for the people and against the powerful.
Moving beyond the could’ves and should’ves, is the populism on the Right now permanently Trumpized? Is the missing white vote of 2012 now the nativist, unconservative white vote? Or can other conservatives, such as some strong down-ballot candidates this year and in the future build a GOP that is populist, conservative, and less fueled by racial anxiety?
Or will Republicans go the easier route, and hang out in the country club while their party falls apart?
Timothy P. Carney, the Washington Examiner’s senior political columnist, can be contacted at [email protected]. His column appears Tuesday and Thursday nights on washingtonexaminer.com.
