The voters of Iowa spoke loud and clear on Monday night: This isn’t Donald Trump’s Republican Party, at least not yet.
But whose Republican Party is it, anyway? The caucus night victory speeches from both Sens. Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio made clear the two diverging paths that the Grand Old Party can pursue as it tries to defeat either Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders in November.
To be clear, Cruz and Rubio have similar voting records. Both came out of the Tea Party movement of Obama’s first term. Despite the narrative that Rubio would be a Romney redux, the Florida senator’s voting record has earned him a 94 percent score from Heritage Action, only slightly below Cruz’s 100 percent.
Where Cruz and Rubio differ much more is in their visions for how Republicans can win again. The last seven years have made clear that if conservatives want to govern, they need the White House. Cruz and Rubio’s divergent views on how best to build a winning coalition is rooted in a yet-unresolved debate on the right: Why, exactly, did we lose in 2012?
There are generally two camps on this issue, and both have a variety of data points that support their case. The first is the “missing white voters” thesis camp, which posits that Mitt Romney’s loss was driven by the absence of white voters who were unenthusiastic about Romney’s message. This thesis, admirably articulated by analyst Sean Trende, suggests that disconnection from a certain type of white voter — working class, rural — was an important factor in why Republicans failed to recapture the White House.
Ted Cruz often makes explicit reference to this in his speeches, saying that if Republicans do not nominate a firebrand, “the same voters who stayed home in ’08 and ’12 will stay home in ’16 and Hillary Clinton will be the next president.”
Cruz is certainly right that there are white voters who were part of Ronald Reagan’s and even George W. Bush’s coalition who have fallen away from the GOP. But what Cruz gets wrong is the approach that will win those voters back. His claim that these white voters were conservatives who stayed home on ideological grounds misses that conservatives actually increased very slightly as a proportion of voters in 2012 compared to 2008.
For a better idea of what the “missing white voters” would be energized by, look no further than Donald Trump, who rails against America’s trade deals and illegal immigration much more than he talks about the Constitution, limited government and conservative principles.
To reach these voters, candidates must speak to working-class economic concerns rather than about conservative purity litmus tests. As Trende noted, “This GOP would have to be more “America first” on trade, immigration and foreign policy; less pro-Wall Street and big business in its rhetoric; more Main Street/populist on economics.” This sounds much more like Donald Trump than Ted Cruz’s brand of limited government, very conservative ideology.
On caucus night, Cruz declared that he intends to win by putting the old band back together: “What scares them is that the old Reagan coalition is coming back together, of conservatives. We’re seeing conservatives and evangelicals and libertarian and Reagan Democrats all coming together as one and that terrifies Washington, D.C.”
The trouble for Cruz is that the old band may no longer be big enough to win on its own.
The other side of the debate about the Republican Party’s future is defined by the “ascendant electorate” thesis, which says that shifting generational and demographic camps are diminishing the available pool of reliably Republican voters. According to this thesis, to win, any GOP candidate must play a careful and deliberate game of addition, making inroads with millennials, single women, Latinos, urban residents and less religious voters. Republicans may not be able to win these groups outright, the thinking goes, but eating into Democrats’ margins even a bit would go a long way to shoring up GOP prospects.
Rubio’s rhetoric of a “new American century” has long suggested that he embraces this theory, at least in part. “When I’m our nominee, we are going to grow the conservative movement,” Rubio said on Monday night. Rubio has notably focused on issues like student loan debt and the sharing economy, issues that are close to young Americans’ pocketbooks.
Critics of the “ascendant electorate” theory point to candidates like John McCain and Mitt Romney as examples of why the GOP can’t afford to nominate a conventionally “electable” candidate with broad appeal. The problem with those candidates, however, is that they fell short on both counts: They were painted as friends of Wall Street and the rich rather than the working class, as well as being portrayed as out of step with key growing voter blocs.
Republicans need a candidate who stands for conservative ideas and can defend them. But the idea that they need a candidate who can “fire up the base,” ascendant electorate be damned, requires playing a dangerous mathematical game in the short run. And is a surefire loser in the long run.
Kristen Soltis Anderson is a columnist for The Washington Examiner and author of The Selfie Vote.
