Imitate Trump? Purge Trumpism? Create something new? The way forward for conservative politics is far from clear.
Imitate Trump? Purge Trumpism? Create something new? The way forward for conservative politics is far from clear.
T rump received over 73 million votes in 2020, but he lost. Trump got, by far, the most votes of any Republican president in history, but he ran behind most Republican House and Senate candidates. These facts frame the Republican challenge. Without Trump supporters, there is no Republican Party, but Trump supporters are not enough.
The way forward for conservative politics isn’t clear. One path is to continue in imitation of Trump (whatever imitation even means). A second path is to try to return the Republican Party to its pre-Trump form. A third path is to learn from the mistakes of both Trump and pre-Trump Republicans to create something new. All of these paths will be difficult to walk.
Imitation of Trump
Re-creating Trump’s appeal via a different candidate will be difficult, if not impossible. No conventional politician can hope to match Trump’s name recognition from decades of coverage in the business and celebrity press. None of them will be associated by normal, apolitical people with not only fabulous wealth but also tangible achievements such as hotels, casinos, and golf resorts.
To put it in perspective, what conventional Republican has been name-checked by the rapper Nelly as one of the gatekeepers to the status of super-rich? What conventional Republican would be supported by 50 Cent? None of them.
Another element of Trump’s appeal that is almost inimitable is his shamelessness. Trump is a genuinely funny guy, and regular politicians may learn how to tell a joke, even if improvisational wit is not teachable. But it is probably much harder to learn his shamelessness.
Trump’s absolute (and seemingly absolutely sincere) conviction that he is not bound by conventional propriety when propriety conflicts with his interests is almost a superpower. When other politicians try to break norms in the same way (as when Marco Rubio mocked the size of Trump’s genitalia) or explain away contradictions (as when Ted Cruz recently tried to explain Republican hypocrisy on the debt and deficit), they can’t shake looking guilty or fake, and that makes them look weak, because the guilt comes across as a lack of conviction.
When people say that Trump fights, they mean, in part, that he seems willing to say anything –without apology — to get what he wants or to hurt his enemies. For people who feel besieged and see Trump as their ally, this brazenness (as well as his contempt for their mutual enemies) is reassuring.
The only conventional Republican politician who even comes close to matching Trump’s rhetorical style is Florida congressman Matt Gaetz. The problem is that Gaetz could be described as Donald Trump without the fame, money, accomplishment, charisma, or wit. And that isn’t much of an imitation.
The Trump Offer
Another part of Trump’s appeal that Republican politicians don’t understand (perhaps because they don’t want to understand) is that Trump won over many swing voters by promising them things that most Republican politicians don’t want to offer.
In a 2013 article about secular, white, working-class swing voters, Henry Olsen noted that they valued hard work but also wanted a measure of dignity and security. In other words, these voters wanted a hand up, not a handout.
That’s what Donald Trump offered them. Unlike conventional Republican politicians, Trump explicitly rejected entitlement cuts. He told people in economically declining regions that their towns didn’t have to die, and he promised that he could bring back a version of the mid-1900s industrial economy through better trade deals. He promised vast new infrastructure spending and a health-insurance program that would be cheaper, more comprehensive, and more universal than Obamacare (it is notable that, during his presidency, one of the few times his job approval rating fell through its 40 percent floor was when the Republican Congress was trying to repeal Obamacare.)
He promised a lot of things. It is not unusual for politicians to have promises that don’t add up, but Trump reached a new level of economic surrealism when he, along with the above promises, claimed that he would increase defense spending and also eliminate the (then) national debt of $14–$19 trillion (depending on how you measured it) within eight years.
These promises are easy to mock, but they also mattered at the level of values and ideals. Trump told wage-earners in declining areas that he was going to fight for them. After the 2012 election, Henry Olsen observed that the Republican offer to Rust Belt workers was that Republicans would cut the taxes of the boss and, in return, the boss might put off outsourcing the factory for another year or two. Oh, and by the way, you should also plan on having lower Social Security and Medicare benefits than were promised. That offer by conventional Republicans is why many white, working-class voters in Rust Belt areas voted for Obama in 2008 and either voted for Obama again or stayed home in 2012.
Trump gave these voters a better offer, which is one reason they supported Trump in 2016 and helped him flip Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania to the Republican column for the first time since 1988 in a presidential election.
Conservatives don’t want to reckon with the importance of these promises because they are contrary to conservative economic thinking. But any attempt to understand Trump’s appeal to so many voters who rejected Romney must begin by acknowledging that Trump did more to assure them of a secure and dignified life. That doesn’t mean conservatives should support Trump’s 2016 agenda. It does mean recognizing that Romney’s 2012 agenda wasn’t enough.
Bourbon Republicanism
One hope is that, since congressional Republicans significantly outran Trump in 2020, Trump is an albatross who can safely be ditched, while Republicans go happily back to what they had been before Trump came along. That isn’t likely.
In 2012, Mitt Romney lost to President Obama, but he outran most swing-state Republican Senate candidates. Running on a conventional Republican agenda, Romney didn’t do well enough to win, and Senate Republicans did even worse than Romney (losing 25 out of 33 seats).
One reason that Senate Republican candidates did better in 2020 than 2012 is that Trump brought huge numbers of swing and low-propensity voters to the Republican Party. In Fayette County, Pa., Republicans won 25,045 votes in 2004; 26,081 votes in 2008; and (despite more favorable circumstance) 26,018 votes in 2012. Trump won 34,590 in 2016 there and 39,978 in 2020.
A similar story unfolds in Mercer County, Pa. McCain got 26,565 in 2008. Romney got 25,925 in 2012. Trump got 31,544 in 2016 and 36,059 in 2020. The Republican advantage in the county went from 1,693 in 2012 to 12,811 in 2016 to 15,075 in 2020.
These were the swing and low-propensity voters who won Trump the “blue wall” states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania in 2016. Because of losses among suburban, college-educated voters, Trump lost those states in 2020. Since some of those suburban, college-educated voters split their tickets and voted for Republicans down-ballot while voting against Trump, the Republican gained some seats in the House (while falling a little short of a majority) and minimized their losses in the Senate.
But that also means that Republicans can’t afford to trade suburban voters who had been voting Republican prior to Trump for the low-propensity and swing-voters that Trump attracted. Republicans need both sets of voters to be competitive. Republicans can’t take for granted those rural, swing, and low-propensity voters who voted for Democrats within the last decade. And Republicans definitely can’t count on keeping these voters by turning back into the party those voters had previously rejected in election after election.
The Conservative Gentry
But there is a chance that many in the Republican Party will try to turn the clock back to the time before Trump. One reasons for that is the influence of what might be called the conservative gentry.
In September, history podcaster Patrick Wyman took a stab at describing this group in his article “American Gentry,” but his take was too narrow and too hostile to the elites he was profiling. The conservative gentry are owners of small and medium-size businesses (certainly not billionaires) who dominate the local chambers of commerce outside the bluest areas of blue America.
They are restaurateurs, hoteliers, family farmers, realtors, car dealers, construction contractors, landscaping contractors, owners of food-processing plants, and the owners and managers of all manner of franchises. Contra Wyman, most in this group work long hours. Some work with their crews outside during the day and do the bookkeeping at night.
They are also the backbone of the local chambers of commerce that are the single biggest source of social capital for center-Right politics. The closest competition are evangelical churchgoers, but this latter group is more regionalized. This conservative gentry is the incubator and most reliable initial funder for up-and-coming conservative politicians, and their importance has only grown with the collapse of community associations among poorer Americans.
The conservative gentry are mostly . . . conservative. For instance, many of them are strongly pro-gun — and this shouldn’t be a surprise since quite a few of these business owners have to carry around large sums of cash from time to time.
But they are also a particular kind of conservative. They want lower taxes for themselves (and for economic growth of course). They also support lower entitlement benefits (for the sake of fiscal responsibility, of course).
The 2012 Romney campaign can partly be understood as a defense of the interests, priorities, and favored status of the conservative gentry. It wasn’t just the Romney campaign’s support of both high-earner tax cuts and entitlement cuts. It was also that Romney’s “you built that” campaign message focused on the accomplishments and resentments of small-business owners. The Romney campaign’s economic message was that the interests and priorities of gentry conservatism were the interests and priorities of all of America.
Then, when Romney lost, the 2012 exit polls showed that only 34 percent of voters thought Romney’s policies would benefit the middle class. Republican elites chose to learn the wrong lessons from this experience.
The False Choice
After Romney lost, the Republican National Committee convened a group of consultants, lobbyists, and pollsters to understand what went wrong. The resulting “autopsy” recommended that the Republican Party support “comprehensive immigration reform” — a Washington lobbyist euphemism for upfront amnesty and expanded low-skill immigration. Failing this, the report warned, “our Party’s appeal will continue to shrink to its core constituencies only.” The autopsy had no recommendations regarding Romney’s unpopular high-earner tax cuts and entitlement benefit reductions.
There were several ironies here. First, this analysis ignored the existence of a large pool of working-class white voters who were potentially gettable by a more populist Republican Party. Second, the autopsy’s answer to the political weakness of gentry conservatism was for the Republican policy agenda to become even more oriented toward the gentry.
Romney departed from gentry conservatism, however, in his support of immigration enforcement and in his opposition to amnesty. While gentry conservatives are conservative in most things, they are closer to Democratic elites when it comes to low-skill immigration. Gentry conservatives, as one would expect, like a large pool of low-wage workers for their crews. They also have an admiration for hardworking immigrants (in contrast to spoiled, demanding, and unreliable native-born, low-skill workers) that is as sincere as it is self-serving.
The convenient answer was to keep the high-earner tax cuts, keep the entitlement-benefit cuts, and compromise the party agenda on immigration policy. It seemed the only way.
But it wasn’t the only way. There was never reason to think that persuadable Hispanic Americans were single-issue voters focused only on immigration. There really was a large number of persuadable, white, working-class populist voters.
The Republican elites chose to appeal to Hispanic voters based on immigration policy, and they ignored white, working-class populist voters because this tactic was more convenient for the interests and priorities of gentry conservatives.
In theory, it should be possible to appeal to working-class white populists as well as persuadable nonwhites. But to do that, the GOP would have to abandon some of the more unpopular parts of the gentry-conservative economic agenda. That is why gentry conservatives would prefer to choose between persuadable nonwhite voters and white populist voters. Appealing to both groups simultaneously (through family subsidies and expanded health-insurance coverage) would be more expensive than a strategy of divide and rule. But the GOP, before Trump, put gentry conservatism first.
The Perils of Populism
But appealing to both persuadable nonwhites and working-class white populists won’t be easy. GOP populists who want to do that won’t have Trump’s name recognition or his identification with tangible success. They might partially make up for that by being less repellant to some suburban, college-educated Romney-Clinton and Trump-Biden voters who decided they couldn’t stand Trump but voted for Republicans for Congress, but these voters are unlikely to be enough by themselves.
These populist conservatives are going to have to give wage-earners a better offer. Even there, it will be a delicate balancing act. No remotely responsible politician can match Trump’s over-the-top 2016 promises.
But Marco Rubio demonstrates the dangers of not going far enough. In the 2016 cycle, Rubio tried to balance the demands of gentry conservatism and the interests of wage-earners. For gentry conservatives, he supported an enormous expansion of low-skill immigration and vast high-earner tax cuts. Rubio also proposed an expanded child tax credit and a wage subsidy.
Rubio’s expanded child tax credit and wage subsidy weren’t enough to get the attention of the voters (especially as he had been defined for many Republican voters by his cave-in to the donors on immigration policy).
The challenge for conservative populism will be to construct an agenda that responds to concerns of wage-earners of all races and ethnicities, without flying off into Trumpian hyperbole. It will be difficult, but if conservative populists want a workers’ party, they will have to make workers a better offer.