The Beltway Burkeans vs. Heartland Populists. By Ben Domenech. Real Clear Politics, July 2, 2013.
The Case of the Missing White Voters Revisited. By Sean Trende. Real Clear Politics, June 21, 2013. Demographics and the GOP, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.
Rand Paul Is a Savvier Politician Than Karl Rove Would Prefer. By Conor Friedersdorf. The Atlantic, June 27, 2013.
Domenech:
Watch
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s video concerning his 2016 agenda, if only for
the part where he pauses to take a drink from his union skull chalice. The
moderate Midwestern tone here drones a bit – dynamic this isn’t – but look at
how he’s marketing his legislative agenda in the frame of the 2016 run he’s
almost certain to make: it’s all lower- and middle-income focused. It’s worth
considering why Walker won his recall election – it was in not insignificant
ways due to these voters, who gave him more support than might be expected
given his conservative views (he even got 38% of the overall union vote, though
of course that was more from the private sector unions). He touts one of the
largest tax cuts in Wisconsin history, with a larger tax rate cut for those
making 15-50k; teases his higher ed reforms; follows Bobby Jindal’s lead in
pursuing a statewide expansion of school choice; spins the Medicaid expansion
refusal handily; and even talks up federal deficit reduction. Walker is still
getting slammed by all the usual suspects – for cutting entitlements, passing
tax cuts for the rich, and sneaking through what one legislator called
“vouchers on steroids” – he’s just savvier at pitching it.
Now,
set that aside for a moment, and consider Michael Gerson’s recent remarks about
Rand Paul in Aspen. “Gerson went on to argue that Paul won’t be able to lead
the Republican Party to victory, because he can’t solve the most challenging
political problem facing it: addressing the concerns of working class voters. ‘We
have an economy that is continually stagnant for them, no matter what the
situation is in the broader economy, and with new Americans who are concerned
with social mobility,’ he said. ‘One of the most extraordinary facts that came
out of the great recession was that in the worst days of the great recession,
people with a four-year college degree have a 4.5 percent unemployment rate.
People with just a high-school degree had a 24 percent unemployment rate. We’re
an economy that’s increasingly segregated by class based on things like skills,
education, family structure, a lot of things that have to do with social
capital. The question is, are Republicans going to speak to the lived
experience of the Americans they need to appeal to on the economy? I don’t think
libertarianism speaks to those concerns effectively.’”
This
seems short-sighted to me. As Sean Trende noted recently, the GOP does have a
significant choice to make about the path forward on framing policy for the
2016 cycle. It can abandon its corporatist leanings and adopt the message of a
more populist party which aims at the Jacksonian coal country whites, or it can
double down on the white suburbanite model, pass immigration reform to appeal
to Hispanics, appeal to upscale environmentalists by embracing cuts to
emissions and considering carbon taxes, and offer efficiencies and streamlined
government as the key to its electoral strategy (as opposed to an agenda
afterthought, as they are in Walker’s video).
In
their March piece in Commentary, Gerson
and Pete Wehner went for all of these points with gusto. Gerson’s criticism of
Paul, and libertarian-ish conservatism generally, is that it won’t address his
first point from that piece – the economic challenges of working and middle
class Americans. But the rest of his prescribed agenda doesn’t go toward that
populist aim any more than Gerson’s support for getting involved in even more
international conflicts. It seems very unlikely to me that shoving through the
Gang of Eight’s immigration bill, expanding environmental and anti-emission
regulations, guilt-ridding prison reform, trying to convince Hollywood to
promote marriage and family, and making the case for getting involved in Syria
is going to be an agenda that matches up with the lived experience of Americans
in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. This has little in common with Walker’s
more aggressive approach. Instead, it sounds like an agenda designed to appeal
to upper class white people.
This is
a good example of the very real challenges of 2016 agenda formation. The
Beltway Burkeans talk a good game about shifting the right’s coalition, but the
truth is that their agenda represents a much more modest shift, in large part a
reworking of the same ideas they’ve been pitching for years. The most
interesting part of that Commentary
piece for me remains the criticism Wehner and Gerson level against the rising
preference for individualism in place of community. But as Alexander Hamilton
reminded us, we must recognize things as they are, not as they ought to be. If
you believe that this rise of individualistic fervor is a tide driven by
culture and demography, not just politics – that it is much larger than any
policy agenda – then the wiser course would be to run with it as opposed to
against it. A bolder approach to remaking the coalition would ditch the false
promise of technocratic paternalism in favor of a bias toward individual
liberty and a rediscovery of the populist agenda which can prevail where Mitt
Romney failed. Whether that’s possible depends on the boldness of the 2016
field. It may only take one to pull the others in that direction.
Trende:
4. The GOP faces a tough choice.
Of
course, it isn’t that easy. Obama won’t be on the ticket in 2016, and the
likely Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, could have a greater appeal to
these voters (current polling suggests that she does). But there are always
tradeoffs, and Clinton’s greater appeal to blue-collar whites, to the extent it
holds through 2016, could be offset by a less visceral attachment with young
voters, college-educated whites and to nonwhites than the president enjoys.
But the
GOP still has something of a choice to make. One option is to go after these
downscale whites. As I’ll show in Part 2, it can probably build a fairly strong
coalition this way. Doing so would likely mean nominating a candidate who is
more Bush-like in personality, and to some degree on policy. This doesn’t mean
embracing “big government” economics or redistribution full bore; suspicion of
government is a strain in American populism dating back at least to Andrew
Jackson. It means abandoning some of its more pro-corporate stances. This GOP
would have to be more “America first” on trade, immigration and
foreign policy; less pro-Wall Street and big business in its rhetoric; more
Main Street/populist on economics.
For
now, the GOP seems to be taking a different route, trying to appeal to
Hispanics through immigration reform and to upscale whites by relaxing its
stance on some social issues. I think this is a tricky road to travel, and the
GOP has rarely been successful at the national level with this approach. It
certainly has to do more than Mitt Romney did, who at times seemed to think
that he could win the election just by corralling the small business vote. That
said, with the right candidate it could be doable. It’s certainly the route
that most pundits and journalists are encouraging the GOP to travel, although
that might tell us more about the socioeconomic standing and background of
pundits and journalists than anything else.
Of
course, the most successful Republican politicians have been those who can
thread a needle between these stances: Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and (to a
lesser degree) Bush 43 have all been able to talk about conservative economic
stances without horrifying downscale voters. These politicians are rarities,
however, and the GOP will most likely have to make a choice the next few cycles
about which road it wants to travel.
