Returning to the Party of Lincoln

T he electoral tea-leaves of 2020 are still settling, so reading them too closely can be a foolhardy enterprise. Still, a few possible hints arise.

The electoral coalition that put Trump in office in 2016 was, in and of itself, an insufficient foundation for a durable governing majority. He lost the popular vote by a significant percentage and only barely scored the trifecta of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan to win the White House. However, in its increased appeal to working-class voters, that coalition might have contained the seeds for such a majority. Last Tuesday’s election shows that it still remains plausible, even if not fully realized.

Despite perhaps the worst conditions for an incumbent party since the Great Depression, November 2020 was not a cataclysmic rejection of the Republican Party — nothing like the electoral Armageddon the GOP faced in 1932, 1964, or 2006–2008. Contrary to pundits’ expectations, Republicans gained seats in the House. Depending on the results of the January runoffs in Georgia, the GOP may end up losing only one seat in the Senate (from 53 seats to 52, if Republicans win both the Georgia runoffs and Thom Tillis maintains his lead in North Carolina). At the moment, Trump’s margins in both the popular vote and the Electoral College are a far cry from the repudiations of 1932, 1980, or even 1992.

It may be too early to place absolute faith in exit-poll data (polling has been one of the big losers of 2020), but some district-level results suggest that Republicans in 2020 did indeed make their political coalition more ethnically diverse. In 28 counties in South Texas (many of which have large populations who identify as “Hispanic”), Trump cut Clinton’s 2016 lead in half, losing this time to Biden by only 17 points. Republicans saw a resurgence in South Florida, toppling two Democratic House members in the Miami area. In Lawrence, New Bedford, and other Massachusetts cities with a significant immigrant population, there was a swing toward Republicans at the presidential level. In some of these areas, Trump did better than down-ballot Republicans. For instance, Trump won Texas’s Zapata County by 5 points, but Senator John Cornyn lost it by 11 points. (In 2016, Clinton won this county by 33 points.)

However, Trump did slip significantly in suburban counties, often more than his fellow Republicans. In the suburban Atlanta county of Cherokee, Trump went from having a 50-point lead over Clinton to only a 40-point lead over Biden. Fulton County, at the core of metropolitan Atlanta, experienced a surge of voters and shifted slightly in the Democratic direction (Biden’s margin was about four points bigger than Clinton’s). This swing was not, however, confined to Atlanta proper. The affluent Atlanta suburb of Roswell went from favoring Trump in 2016 to backing Biden in 2020.

Parts of the Rust Belt tell a similar story. Compared with Hillary Clinton, Biden picked up more support in the suburban Philadelphia counties of Bucks, Delaware, and Montgomery. Pennsylvania’s Luzerne County is one of the paradigmatic Obama-to-Trump counties, yet Trump’s margins slipped there, too (from a 19-point margin in 2016 to a 14-point one in 2020). Kent County, Michigan — home to President Gerald Ford — has long been considered a stronghold for the GOP. Trump won it in 2016, but lost it in 2020. In the Grand Rapids suburb of Grandville, Trump’s victory margin was more than halved, from 28 points in 2016 to 13 points in 2020. In Grandville, both the Republican House candidate (Bill Huizenga) and Senate candidate (John James) got more absolute votes than Trump and a higher percentage of the vote.

Much has been made of the GOP becoming a “working-class party,” but, as of this moment, that is more a wish or a projection than a reality. Especially in urban cores, the Democratic Party often still significantly outperforms Republicans among lower-income voters. In addition, the GOP policy apparatus has not yet unified behind a cohesive “working-class” agenda. The Trump administration itself embodied — in Daniel McCarthy’s words — a “political cyborg,” fusing populist gestures with conventional corporatist policies. While the Trump White House did make some populist adjustments on trade and immigration (albeit via execution action), the signature legislative achievement of his presidency was a fairly conventional tax cut.

Moreover, to secure a governing majority, it seems as though Republicans cannot afford to forfeit entirely their old base of suburbanites (including at least some well-heeled white-collar workers). The independent householder and local gentry class have been at the core of the Republican Party for most of its existence. If it wants to rack up the kind of broad coalition that is essential for enduring political success in the United States, the GOP will have to play across all regions. Susan Collins is an instructive example here. In her successful 2020 race, Collins relied on many rural and working-class counties. But she was also palatable to white-collar suburbanites, winning most of the coastal counties of Maine.

Collins is instructive in another way, too, as she might also demonstrate how a Republican Party can combine populist policies with middle-class outreach. She has been a leading figure for COVID-19 relief on Capitol Hill (an issue many proponents of a more working-class GOP are deeply invested in). She has also been a critic of austerity measures for health-care policy, being a deciding vote against the “skinny repeal” of the Affordable Care Act.

One potential path for an expanded GOP coalition would be locating a political program that addresses the overlap between the concerns of traditional Republican voters and those of the working-class. Both blue- and white-collar voters have anxiety about health care. Indeed, health-care policy was a wedge Democrats used to push suburbanites away from the GOP in 2018. Both feel the bite of rising health-insurance costs, and both fear the vulnerability that comes without having a health-care plan. Efforts to reduce the costs of health care and provide a subsidy backstop for the vulnerable could speak to voters across the income and education spectra.

There are other overlapping issues, too. Cutting back guest-worker programs could provide more opportunity for workers with and without a college degree. An effort to return medical-supply chains to the United States could lead to more jobs for factory workers and help spur on domestic technical innovation (as production and invention often intertwine). Efforts to reinforce family formation can likewise have a broad appeal. Addressing corporate concentration can at once empower workers and increase the leverage of smaller businesses and stakeholders.

At first blush, populists and middle-class voters would seem to be at odds over cultural politics. Colorful, in-your-face messaging often thrills populists while irritating moderate voters. (Donald Trump’s continued social-media feuds did not help him with suburban voters.) Yet there are even certain affinities there. The results from 2020 suggest that a lean into radical wokeness helped drag down Democrats in some working-class communities, and there is also some evidence that skepticism about hard-edged wokeness helped keep some white-collar suburbanites from voting straight-ticket Democratic. Pro-worker policies accompanied by inclusive public culture could be an appealing alternative to a battered neoliberalism that increasingly tries to sustain itself through cultural feuds.

A coalition of work and probity, fusing support for the market with attention to government policy as a vehicle for the common good, could be ethnically as well as economically diverse. Many immigrants who come to the United State still see it as a land of commercial opportunity, where they too can have a home of their own. The reflexive denigration of the United States might be quite unpersuasive to those who have left countries dominated by warlords and cartels. While wokeness often pours Americans into a demographic centrifuge, the lived dynamics of American life show an impulse toward mixing, heterogeneity, and blurring.

The work of creating such a coalition remains to be done, and it is unclear whether Republicans will actually continue to cultivate it. The mixed verdict of the past four years reveals the depth of the tensions within the party. Nevertheless, such a coalition might be less a radical innovation for the GOP and more a return to form. In an 1861 address at Independence Hall shortly before he became president, Abraham Lincoln said that the promise of the Declaration of Independence was that “in due time the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all should have an equal chance.” A party of work and prosperity, of virtue and liberty, would seek to realize that promise.