opinion
Written by Sean Trend for RealClearPolitics
A few weeks ago, a Morning Joe panel concluded that if Donald Trump becomes the Republican nominee (spoiler alert: he will), Republicans will lose in the fall. And this is by no means a unique sentiment — former House Speaker Paul Ryan expresses that idea here, journalist Bernard Goldberg wonders whether Trump is trying to lose here, etc.
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As I read these analyses, I wonder if I have somehow been transported back to 2016, when such snapshots Strictness. Here in 2024, we know that Donald Trump won in 2016 and came close to winning in 2020. He led Republican senators to the finish line in both years, and the GOP won House seats in 2020, much to the surprise of most analysts. The election.
At a similar time in the campaign cycle, when he trailed Hillary Clinton by 4.5 points in the RCP average and Joe Biden by 5.6 points, Trump actually leads Biden by 1.9 points in national polls.
My goal here is not to rehash the arguments about whether Trump can win — I think that's clear enough. The matter is not intended to raise the Trump issue He should Wins; Anyone who has followed me on Twitter over the past decade knows what I think about it Which. Rather, it is about the continued blindness of the Republican Party's old power structure to Trump's appeal.
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The bottom line is that Trump's appeal is not directed toward white, college-educated voters, leaving us unable to see its underpinnings. For decades, as Michael Barron has pointed out, the Republican Party was largely defined as the party that benefited “the system,” while Democrats were a bunch of outsiders.
That began to change in 1992, when Bill Clinton launched a full-frontal assault on Republican dominance among the “winners.” Over time, the appeal of Democratic candidates has leaned increasingly toward that message, and away from the older “untouchable” approach.
So, for decades, college-educated whites were in a position where both parties were largely focused on their messaging they. It's true that Democrats had a more populist approach, and yes, Republicans always had candidates with an aristocratic flair, but overall the focus was on winning in the suburbs.
It's a bit surprising, then, that suddenly a Republican candidate like Trump is tailoring his appeal to people who think the system isn't working for them. It's an interesting strategic shift to largely withdraw from the fight over college-educated whites. It also has its pros and cons.
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One big positive, overlooked by college-educated Republicans who believe the party's message should remain directed at them, is that Trump succeeded where the old GOP failed: by winning Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, and then winning. She almost won it a second time in 2020. Iowa and Ohio were states where GOP dreams once died; Now they are strongly red states.
This gets to the final point that I think the old GOP establishment has not fully grasped: The revolt of the party's former base is not without a rational basis. During Ronald Reagan's presidency, the excuse for not fully enacting the conservative agenda was that Republicans never controlled the House. fair enough.
Then, in 2000, the GOP won the triple prize for the first time since the 1950s. That ended a few months later when the Republican senator from Vermont—whom the GOP had backed in his 2000 re-election bid—switched parties. Republicans won the trifecta again in 2002, and expanded those majorities in 2004.
But at the end of the Bush years, what did Republicans have to show for it? The tax cuts end, the GOP's reputation on foreign policy is in tatters, No Child Left Behind, the Troubled Asset Relief Program, and the expansion of Medicare to cover prescription drugs. This was not really what the Conservatives promised.
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There was also the revolt against comprehensive immigration reform, which was repeated in 2013. How did the old Republican Party respond? This means doing everything we can for Jeb Bush, whose main goodwill has been his commitment to immigration reform and his ability to adjust his Spanish accent depending on the audience.
I personally support immigration reform and believe the Troubled Asset Relief Canvas is one of the reasons I light my house with electricity and not candles today. But the point of politics is that you have to appeal to a broader political system that may not always want to pursue the “best” policies. By 2015, it was not clear that the desires of the GOP political system were so different from those of the establishment, which at times seemed geared toward winning the votes of three people in think tank cubicles (two of whom were voting for liberal Gary Johnson anyway). .
Whatever you might say about Donald J. Trump (and there is a lot that could be said), his appeal is fundamentally different from that of previous Republican candidates. But it is not narrower.
All of this means that Donald Trump can win again. More importantly, if the GOP establishment/the remaining portion of the GOP that doesn't know Trump wants to have a say in Republican politics in the future, they really need to work on figuring that out. Why.
Sean Trendy is a senior election analyst at RealClearPolitics. He is co-author of the 2014 Almanac of American Politics and author of The Missing Majority. It can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnTrendy.
Reprinted with permission from RealClearWire.
