The GOP will need to put its money where its mouth is.
Although a pro-worker economic agenda should help working-class voters stick with the GOP, culture-war issues are likely what alienated them from Democrats in the first place.
E ver since Trump’s 2016 upset sparked a series of fierce internecine battles on the right, there’s been an ongoing dialogue within conservative circles about “economic populism,” “pro-worker conservatism,” and the GOP’s “working-class realignment.”
Many populist-friendly right-wingers began to speak of a “multiracial working-class conservatism,” after the 2020 election made clear that the GOP was making significant inroads with certain non-white voting blocs — in particular, Latinos. Giddy about the disintegration of the Left’s “emerging Democratic majority” thesis — which held that the growing non-white share of the U.S. electorate would invariably push the country left — Republicans were quick to trumpet the emergence of a new “Rainbow Republican” coalition. “The Republican coalition is bigger, more diverse, and more energetic than ever before,” House GOP majority leader Kevin McCarthy tweeted, thanking Donald Trump for his role in expanding the party’s demographic base. Senator Josh Hawley (R., Mo.) announced: “We are a working class party now. That’s the future.” The “future of the GOP,” Senator Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) agreed, was “a party built on a multi-ethnic multi-racial coalition of working AMERICANS.”
As for what all that meant in terms of substantive policy, it remains to be seen. It’s possible that, insofar as there has been a working-class realignment in American politics, it’s driven more by negative polarization — i.e., the Democratic Party’s alienation of working-class voters — than any significant shift toward a GOP policy agenda that’s more attractive to workers. And to be fair, this election cycle, Republicans are running as the out-of-power party at a moment when, as Jim Geraghty noted, “Americans are the most frustrated, sour, and disappointed about the state of the country as they’ve ever been around a midterm election.” In that environment, it would be political malpractice to spend too much time playing around with risky new policy proposals. (Senator Rick Scott’s unforced-error-ridden NRSC platform, released in February, earned the deserved ire of many Republicans for that reason.) A political party’s purpose, above all else, is to win elections — and in 2022, the way to win is to run as “not a Democrat.”
But eventually, the GOP will need to put its money where its mouth is. If Republicans take back both the House and the Senate on Tuesday, as many political analysts now forecast, it will necessitate some kind of affirmative Republican policy agenda. In the face of skyrocketing inflation and a deteriorating quality of life as it pertains to crime and public order in working-class and middle-class neighborhoods — all amid unified Democratic control of the federal government — proponents of a “working-class conservatism” can skate by on their simple promise to rid the country of Democratic majorities. But once those majorities are gone, and the nation’s eyes are set on 2024 — when Republicans will face a far more favorable Senate map, positioning them to expand their majority in the upper chamber if they succeed in retaking it this week — voters will expect a plan. The working-class voters who flocked to the GOP in recent years, in particular, will need to be convinced that it is a party that sees and cares about them — a party of the blue-collar union bar rather than the country-club elitists who were regarded with suspicion by their Democrat-voting parents. If these are “our people,” as Pat Buchanan put it in his famous plea to the 1992 Republican National Convention, then “we need to reconnect with them. We need to let them know we know how bad they’re hurting. They don’t expect miracles of us, but they need to know we care.”
That does not, of course, require embracing the entire Buchananite platform, which carried its own flaws. (The paleoconservative’s “promise to run both a trade surplus and an investment surplus,” for example, was “impossible as a matter of simple math, not just theory,” Ramesh Ponnuru noted in 1999.) It certainly doesn’t mean the watered-down Marxism of the self-styled “post-liberals”: That cohort’s initial criticisms of the GOP’s excessively corporate-friendly economic agenda — and insufficiently aggressive cultural strategy — have morphed over the course of the past few years into a far more radical kind of statism (a politics with far less mass appeal, ironically, than the “Dead Consensus” that said intellectuals defined themselves in opposition to). In formulating a new, working-class conservative agenda, Republicans must balance electoral incentives to champion popular policies against the importance of crafting good ones.
A prudent pro-worker conservative economic agenda is as much about a rethinking of the Right’s priorities as it is a radical break from traditional conservative principles. It’s about applying conservative principles creatively to address the needs of the GOP’s new voters. Republicans seeking to court those new voters have already begun to experiment with this endeavor: As Matthew Continetti wrote of Glenn Youngkin’s victory in last year’s Virginia gubernatorial election, “Youngkin’s economic agenda fits well with the emerging Republican coalition of non-college-educated voters. Rather than cut marginal tax rates, Youngkin would double the state standard deduction, eliminate the grocery tax, and suspend the gas tax, easing the burden on lower- and middle-income taxpayers suffering from a rising cost of living.” Youngkin didn’t “quite run away from the hard-line conservative positions favored by the Republican base, but he hasn’t embraced them either,” Henry Olsen added. “Instead, he’s focused on a mix of new programs that sounds different from traditional Republican pablum.” The then-candidate’s “tax cut plan throws supply-side dogma out the window,” with the relative benefits of the sales-tax cut and standard-deduction increase flowing “to the poor and working class since they tend to spend a larger share of their budgets on staples such as groceries.” Amid rising crime rates, Youngkin “responded by touting proposals to fully fund police and keep qualified immunity for officers.” And on education — the defining issue of the campaign — Youngkin presented himself as a decisive opponent of progressive activists in public-school classrooms and a staunch defender of working- and middle-class parents.
Another example this cycle is Cassy Garcia — the Latina Republican hopeful who’s running in Texas’s 28th congressional district, located in the heavily Latino border region of South Texas, where the recent Hispanic “realignment” toward Republicans has arguably been more potent than anywhere else in the country. Garcia has broken with Paul Ryan–era orthodoxy on welfare cuts, particularly as it pertains to health-care benefits. She promises “an economy that works for workers” and “healthcare for nuestras familias,” touting the “many Hispanics, including Democrats, who are voting for me because they know I will fight for healthcare, Social Security, and Medicare for South Texas.” Her “American Dream” plan melds traditional Republican economic priorities such as “keep[ing] taxes low” and “end[ing] the reckless spending driving inflation” with “protect[ing] Social Security” and a promise to “defend Medicare [and] Medicaid,” “bring quality healthcare to South Texas,” and “oppose any effort to strip Americans of their healthcare.” She’s even gone so far as to pledge not to repeal the Affordable Care Act, telling me in an emailed statement that she wants “to focus on making the ACA work better for families in South Texas” instead:
As a woman with a pre-existing condition, I know how important healthcare is to my community and this issue will be one of my top priorities in Congress. I want to focus on making the ACA work better for families in South Texas. Every day, I hear from Spanish speakers who tell me they struggle to navigate the website because the translations are not very good — I want to address that. I also want to secure mobile clinics for underserved rural areas; funding for hospitals; and help for people struggling with cancer and diabetes. I also want private-public-partnerships to set-up community health centers to support working families. . . . I want to expand healthcare access, protect coverage for pre-existing conditions, and ensure that programs like Medicare and Medicaid remain strong.
Economics, of course, is only one part of the equation. While the embrace of a comprehensive pro-worker economic agenda could be what causes working-class voters to stick with the GOP, culture-war issues are likely what alienated them from Democrats in the first place. Those issues have as much to do with social affinity — i.e., a sense that Democrats are out-of-touch elites who don’t understand or empathize with working-class Americans — as they do with any one specific policy. “One of the reasons South Texas is turning red is if you’re a Hispanic guy who works in the oil field in South Texas, and you drive a pickup truck, and you go bird hunting on the weekend, Joe Biden and the national Democrats want to destroy your job, put you out of business, and destroy your ability to provide for your family, and they also want to take away your guns and silence your ability to speak,” Senator Ted Cruz told me at a campaign rally for Garcia in the Rio Grande Valley last month. “Those guys voted for Donald Trump. And they’re voting for Cassy Garcia.” Emphasizing cultural issues such as transgenderism, Black Lives Matter–style “anti-racism,” and campus-activist anti-Americanism will heighten the growing gap between national Democrats and working-class voters; aggressively championing a policy agenda to push back against the cultural Left will show those voters that Republicans are actually willing to fight for them.
Economics and culture do not exist in siloed-off categories. The “pro-family” agenda favored by a number of conservative policy wonks is best understood as an attempt to comprehensively address both the cultural and economic challenges facing the Great American Middle. Conservative family policy already has a pedigree with some sympathetic Republican lawmakers. Rubio has been a leader in this regard: The Florida senator released a comprehensive pro-family package — including paid parental leave, new forms of economic relief for low-income parents, and a reorientation of certain forms of welfare benefits for expectant mothers — on the heels of Dobbs. His efforts to expand the child tax credit have a growing bench of support among elected Republicans. And of course, support for parents and families, particularly vulnerable ones at the lower end of the economic spectrum, also means championing a pro-family social agenda — backing parents’ rights in education fights, cracking down on radical race and gender ideology in public classrooms, and supporting efforts to protect children from obscenity, both on the internet and in school libraries.
All of these issues work in tandem. The push to make the GOP a “parents’ party,” as Ramesh Ponnuru put it in 2019, requires a reorientation of its economic worldview: “Republicans should stand for a government that does less than it now does to inhibit economic growth — but also one that burdens families less,” Ponnuru wrote. “To succeed, they will have to remember that voters are not reducible to how they make their income, and that the business of America is not business.” That reorientation will naturally make allies of new constituencies — and enemies of old ones. The Chamber of Commerce’s growing estrangement from its longtime allies in the GOP, for example, is a natural outgrowth of this broader realignment. But building a Republican Party that places the priorities of its working- and middle-class voters over those of its pro-business donors is a necessary step toward an authentic working-class conservatism.