With the NFL draft coming this month, football fans are going to be reading a lot about whether their teams are aiming to “rebuild” or “win now.”
For those who don’t follow organized sports, this refers to the choice teams face each year. Should they pursue a long-term strategy of stocking up on promising – but inexperienced – young talent in the hopes that they can build a winning team over time? Or should they fill a few key holes and trade some draft picks for veterans, in hopes of competing for a championship right away?
The Republican Party is like one of those perennially mediocre teams that experience the worst of both worlds. It cannot manage to rebuild, and it cannot win now. Nothing has crystallized this reality more dramatically than Donald Trump’s success in the Republican primaries.
For decades, the demographic reality has been staring Republicans in the face: As the presidential year electorate is becoming more and more diverse, minority voters are becoming increasingly out of reach for Republican nominees. (This reality has been camouflaged by the fact that the midterm electorate that has allowed Republicans to take over the House and Senate tends to be older and whiter.)
Republicans haven’t proven that they can boost white turnout enough in presidential election years to win now; and a critical mass of their primary electorate doesn’t want to rebuild the party to make it more welcoming to minority groups.
Consider a few data points. In the nine presidential elections between 1972 and 2004, Republican candidates won the six times that they were able to win white voters by double digits, and lost the three times that Democrats were able to keep the GOP advantage with the white vote to single digits.
But in 2008 and 2012, the pattern broke. President Obama was able to win overwhelming victories even though he lost the white vote by double digits both times. In fact, in 2012, Mitt Romney won white voters by 20 points – the same amount as Ronald Reagan did in 1980. Yet Reagan won 44 states, and Romney lost. The difference was that in 1980 whites comprised 88 percent of the electorate, and in 2012, whites accounted for just 72 percent of voters.
For Republicans, it’s a vicious cycle. They lose non-white voters overwhelmingly, and then, because few minorities vote in their primaries, they end up producing candidates who have no realistic chance to appeal to those voters. The racial makeup of their primary voters still looks like the general electorate that voted for Reagan in 1980, even as the country has moved on.
It’s no surprise, then, to witness the debacle of the 2016 election cycle. Republicans had what was billed as the deepest bench of candidates in decades, providing their voters with a wide array of options. Whether Republican voters were looking for somebody with executive experience, somebody with policy chops, somebody electable, or a candidate with a staunch conservative credentials, this field had them covered. Yet the front-runner is none of the above.
Instead, the person who has won the most states and stands to come out of the primaries with the most delegates is Trump. He fails all of the typical conservative litmus tests – and badly. He has displayed an embarrassing lack of understanding of the issues. His statements have often been incoherent and inconsistent. But he has exploited and inflamed white resentment. And this has proven a more powerful force among the GOP electorate than support for limited government.
Over the course of his campaign, Trump has struggled to denounce the KKK, has called for banning Muslims entering the U.S., and attacked foreigners (other than the admiration he’s shown for certain foreign autocrats). He has been rewarded for refusing to be “politically correct.”
Even if one were to argue that voters are attracted to Trump for reasons other than his racist appeals, at the very minimum, it’s clear that his casual appeals to racism are not disqualifying. What’s more, Republicans who are bothered by this know that they’ll get nowhere by attacking him for it.
It’s revealing that the Republican National Committee, which has tried hard to stay publicly neutral in the race, broke with this policy by issuing an official statement denouncing Trump’s comments about John McCain’s military record last summer. This demonstrated that when push comes to shove, some statements are beyond the pale enough to warrant official condemnation. The RNC has issued no such statements in the face of Trump’s numerous comments throughout the campaign offensive to racial minorities and women.
For all the resources the RNC has put into minority outreach, the party’s unwillingness to condemn Trump sends the signal that bigotry is still tolerated, because calling it out risks alienating its own voters. It suggests that acknowledging white racism still exists is more troublesome among the GOP electorate than failing to denounce David Duke.
The fantasy among Trump supporters is that he can boost turnout among working class whites enough to tip a few swing states. But even that fantasy hinges on the assumption that Trump will do at least equally well among other groups as previous Republican nominees. In reality, polls show Donald Trump would enter the general election as the least popular major party nominee in modern polling history, and that an otherwise vulnerable Hillary Clinton would trounce him. So if the GOP nominates Trump, they lose. But if at their convention, they don’t nominate the candidate who will have won the most states and a plurality of delegates, they will alienate millions of his voters. Sen. Ted Cruz is at this point the best positioned candidate to unify the party, but he will have to simultaneously quell the Trump uprising while appealing to a broader electorate and staving off billions of negative advertising against him.
Republicans have lost the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections. Over time, demographic trends will only become more unfavorable to them. They came into this year with a number of electable candidates to put up against a weak Democratic front-runner. Yet they are poised to lose without making any progress toward rebuilding the party into one that can actually win in the future.
