The Virginia lesson: Conservatism can’t win the future by romanticizing the past or falsifying the present.
The Virginia lesson: Conservatism can’t win the future by romanticizing the past or falsifying the present.
R epublicans won the governor’s race in Virginia, and turned New Jersey into a nail-biter, by surging in the suburbs. That’s already become the conventional wisdom of the 2021 cycle, and in this case it’s wise to follow the convention. If you compare how the Virginia and New Jersey suburbs performed this year to how they voted for president last year, the shift is unmistakable. Royal-blue inner suburbs became light-blue. Violet neighborhoods shaded into purple. Light-red exurbs turned bright crimson.
Because Virginia and New Jersey hold their gubernatorial races in odd-numbered years, and conveniently close to the nation’s political and media capitals, they often get outsized media coverage. Given the current political moment, the victorious Glenn Youngkin will get even more coverage than usual — fawning from right-leaning media rooting for his success, hostile from left-leaning media rooting for his failure.
Still, success in gubernatorial elections is hardly the only sign of GOP resurgence this year in decidedly non-rural places. Quite a few other Republicans have also won election to local offices in cities and suburbs across the country. These Republicans essentially ran campaigns comparable to those of Youngkin and Ciattarelli in style if not in specifics. Rather than either cleaving closely to former president Donald Trump or actively denigrating him, they largely rejected efforts by opponents and journalists to inject Trump into their campaigns at all. Mattie Parker, for example, kept the officially nonpartisan office of Fort Worth mayor in the GOP column this summer despite a marked blue shift in the Lone Star State’s largest metros during Trump’s tenure. “When I was asked about the president and the election, I would just say, ‘I operate differently,’” Parker told the New York Times. She ran on a platform of cutting taxes, controlling spending, improving education, and fighting crime. Sound familiar?
For every Fort Worth, Miami, or Jacksonville with Republican mayors, of course, there are many more big cities governed by Democrats. But what often goes unmentioned is that while our densest urban cores are very Democratic, many Republicans hold office in the smaller cities and suburbs surrounding those urban cores, to which millions of Americans are moving annually.
Yes, metropolitan suburbs were the site of the party’s greatest down-ballot reversals during the Trump era, in congressional and legislative seats. These losses cost the GOP control of the U.S. House in 2018 and somewhat reduced the party’s power in state capitals (although Republicans still comprise 55 percent of state lawmakers, down just two points from their 2016 share, and continue to control many more state governments than Democrats do). Contrary to the hopes of Democratic leaders and to the fears of their GOP counterparts, however, these Trump-era losses in metropolitan areas did not constitute a lasting partisan realignment. The suburbs remain intensely competitive — and Republicans are feeling increasingly confident that they’ll snatch back many of these lost seats in the 2022 midterms. If they do, it won’t be by peddling conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election. It will be by employing tried-and-true conservative messages on taxes, crime, schools, and other issues that matter most to soft partisans and swing voters.
The nationalist-populist contingent would dispute this. They ridicule “zombie Reaganism.” They disdain actual knowledge about and experience in government. They counsel a turn away from market economics and small-government rhetoric in favor of fighting an all-out cultural war against an increasingly tyrannical Left (although waging such a war effectively would seem to require the very experience wielding governmental power that the national-populists so often denigrate). And they claim that transforming the GOP from the party of Richie Rich to that of Archie Bunker will give American conservatism a larger and more sustainable political vessel.
Nearly all these nationalist-populist claims are mistaken. Yes, there are forms of conservatism devoted not so much to shrinking government’s size as to ensuring that the right kind of people control it. You’ll find such movements in many times and places around the world. But in America, our conservative tradition is exceptional. The governing principles and institutions we seek to conserve here are revolutionary in origin and classically liberal in character. Want to make America great again? Then make its government smaller and more decentralized. Want to venerate America’s founders? Then do more than just protect their statues from vandalism. Protect their classical-liberal legacy from the vandals, Left or Right, who think in their ignorance and arrogance that they can do better.
In stark political terms, the nationalist-populist strategy for victory was to bring more blue-collar voters from rural areas into the GOP coalition even if that means losing some white-collar voters in the suburbs. The first part of the strategy was hardly revelatory. Republicans have been chasing after traditionally Democratic constituencies in comparatively downscale communities since the 1960s, using a combination of cultural and economic messages. It was the second part of the strategy that didn’t seem to make sense. Did attracting blue-collar voters really require picking a crude message and even-cruder messenger likely to repel others? More people consider themselves middle class than “working class.” And there are a lot more suburban voters than rural ones. Did it really make sense to pay the electoral equivalent of a dollar to purchase 80 cents’ worth of votes?
Plenty of campaign veterans and the journalists who interviewed them, including me, didn’t think so. In the run-up to the 2016 election, we predicted the net result would be Hillary Clinton outpolling Donald Trump by millions of votes. We were right. We also predicted Trump would lose. We were wrong. His distribution of votes turned out to be highly efficient. He drew the Electoral College equivalent of an inside straight.
His efficiency advantage continued into 2020. While Trump modestly increased his popular-vote showing to 46.9 percent, up from 46.1 percent in 2016, Joe Biden (51.3 percent) outperformed Hillary Clinton (48.2 percent) to a much greater extent. Yet if just a few tens of thousands of Biden voters had opted for Trump instead in a few key states, that would have changed the outcome.
Setting aside the baseless and pathetic claim the 2020 election was stolen, many nationalist-populists point to the mere fact that the presidential election was so close as proof that their political strategy is viable. But it isn’t. It can’t serve the needs of an intellectual movement (conservatism) or a partisan vehicle (the Republican Party) that may actually want to govern America for more than a brief time. Eking out a narrow presidential win in the Electoral College, or engineering a U.S. House majority through creative political cartography, will never produce a true governing majority capable of enacting durable policy change.
To preserve the blessings of American liberty, we must build and sustain a truly broad, multiracial, multiethnic coalition that includes traditionalists, libertarians, and centrists. Such a center-right coalition must win significant electoral majorities in rural America. But it must also win a goodly share of urban voters who share our principles and priorities. And it’s got to be competitive in the suburbs. That’s where most Americans now live, including a disproportionate share of the swing voters who still decide close races.
Such coalition-building has been done before. Consider the last time a Republican won the popular vote for the White House. In 2004, 46 percent of voters said in exit polls that they lived in suburban areas. They went for George W. Bush over John Kerry by five percentage points. By 2020, the suburban vote had risen to 51 percent of the electorate. It went for Biden, 50 percent to 48 percent. Bush and Trump actually won exactly the same share of the rural vote, 57 percent, in their respective races. Unfortunately for Trump, the rural share of the presidential electorate dropped from 25 percent in 2004 to 19 percent in 2020. Squeezing a few more Republican votes out of rural counties in 2022 and 2024 is conceivable. But it’s not going to make enough of a difference.
Earlier I said that nearly all of the claims of the nationalist-populists were mistaken. What’s the exception? The part about American culture being a proper battleground for political competition. By all means, conservative politicians, intellectuals, and institutions should fight intensely (though also artfully) against such progressive causes as politicizing public-school curricula, employing racial and other discrimination in hiring and university admissions, relegating religious liberty to a Sundays-only concern, and weakening law-enforcement agencies across the country.
Opposing these and other left-wing priorities is the right thing to do on the merits. But such opposition is also unifying for the American Right. It cuts across a wide spectrum of forms and factions. For example, religious conservatives think their fellow believers ought to be able to operate their bakeries, florist shops, and other small businesses according to their beliefs. So do libertarians! And outside of hard-core progressives, there is very little public support for such policies as racial preferences and reparations. By the way, labeling these matters as “social issues,” and scoring them accordingly, is one reason that survey researchers inaccurately describe libertarian-leaning voters as exceedingly rare. In reality, such voters make up 15 percent to 20 percent of the electorate. While hardly doctrinaire — I’m not talking about folks who can quote Bastiat or specify the size of Medicare’s unfunded liability — these voters combine fiscal conservatism with a healthy skepticism about government power and a “live and let live” ethos. They aren’t worried about their gay neighbors and doubt the drug war is worth the cost. But they are worried about crime, freedom of speech, age-inappropriate content in schools, and “anti-racism” training that sounds an awful lot like drenching the next generation in racial prejudices and animosities.
A great many of these voters live in suburbs. It may be a simplification to speak of the “suburban vote,” but it does capture something real: Most Americans are neither angry leftists nor angry populists raging against the Machine. While dismayed by recent events and frequently disappointed with the quality of their leaders, most Americans are reasonably happy. They feel neither squished cheek-to-jowl into some unaffordable studio apartment nor abandoned in some rural hamlet from which they cannot escape. They want government to deliver basic services at a reasonable cost, not salve their physical or emotional wounds. They don’t look to politics to supply meaning to their lives. God does that for them, or their children do, or the beauty of the natural world, or some other transcendent force that cannot be filibustered in the Senate.
By largely eschewing talk of Donald Trump on the stump in Virginia, Glenn Youngkin provoked scorn from Terry McAuliffe as well as the chattering classes. So what? I suspect Youngkin and other Republicans victorious in 2021 know what both nationalist-populist pundits and the formerly conservative pundits who’ve fled into the Democratic camp do not yet know. It is true that most right-of-center voters are generally supportive of Trump and like many policies pursued during his administration, such as tax cuts and conservative judicial picks. But many also disapprove of his behavior and want new leadership. In a September survey by the Pew Research Center, 44 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents said he should run for president again in 2024. It’s a higher share than I’d like, but it doesn’t constitute a majority. Another 22 percent said Trump should remain a major figure in the party but should not run again, while 32 percent said he shouldn’t even remain a major figure in the GOP. There’s your majority — a majority in favor of pressing play, not rewind.
When Glenn Youngkin and Jack Ciattarelli emphasized issues such as schools and crime, their messages didn’t just unify Republicans. Progressives have wildly misread the room. Their 1619 Project–style attacks on the Founding and Founders have angered not just most conservatives and libertarians but also independents and even center-left Democrats who think the Founding’s only failing is that it took too long for its noble and timeless ideals to be fully realized. A July 2020 poll for Fox News asked if the Founders were better described as heroes or villains. Only 15 percent picked the villain label. Nearly two-thirds said they were heroes, a sentiment that suffuses but obviously extends far beyond the ranks of American conservatives.
While President Trump delivered some stirring speeches about American heroes and traditions during his tenure, that hardly distinguishes him from earlier party leaders. Nor are the rhetorical excesses of the nationalist-populist Right necessary to rebuild American conservatism. The way forward is clear. It requires a recommitment to making government smaller and less intrusive, to putting down the Washington stick rather than promising merely to whack a different set of enemies with it. It involves stating popular positions on economic and cultural issues with both clarity and inclusiveness. It doesn’t require making Donald Trump the center of attention, whether it be positive or negative, and in fact will enjoy more success if he is not.
And that way forward winds through America’s suburbs.