Refocusing the Republican Party

Refocusing the Republican Party

Borrowing Mark Antony’s famous lines from Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar, “I come to bury Trump, not to praise him. The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones.”

The evil perpetrated by Trump-inspired rioters earlier this month will live after them…and after him. Just as Watergate comes first to mind when remembering President Nixon, too many of the good things that were accomplished during the last four years will be interred with Trump’s presidency.

The question going forward is how the Republican party will react and adapt to Trump’s reshaping of its voting base.

Trump was far more a populist than a Republican, appealing to a broad swath of working-class Americans. His “Make America Great Again” slogan appealed to many who felt left out both economically and culturally by the coastal elites cultivated by Democrats.

As a political outsider, his promise to drain the Washington DC swamp resonated with voters opposed to illegal immigration, to those who’d lost jobs to globalization, and to those who saw the nation’s elites as opposed to religion and the religious.

Over the last several decades, the Democratic Party shifted its focus away from blue-collar workers – many of whom fit into one or more of Trump’s targeted groups – and toward college-educated suburbanites.

Sen. Chuck Schumer stated Democrats’ rationale: “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.”

Republicans traditionally have been portrayed as the pro-business party of the wealthy. Despite this image, five of the last eight presidents in the last 52 years have been Republicans and held the office for 32 years of that span. Yet Republicans controlled the Senate in only 22 of those 52 years and the House of Representatives in only 20.

Democratic missteps allowed Republican openings leading to those years of Republican control of Congress. Both Clinton in 1993 and Obama in 2009 proposed forms of nationalized health care; Clinton lost both houses of Congress in 1995 while Obama lost the House in 2010 and the Senate – which realigns more slowly – in 2014.

Trump’s populist MAGA campaign correctly diagnosed the mood of those voters whom Hillary Clinton memorably called “deplorables.” Both Clinton and Schumer misread the electorate’s disaffection with Democrat’s focus on the educated elite.

With Trump most likely headed for the “dustbin of history,” the Republican party finds itself with feet in two canoes. One carries the party’s traditional preferences for smaller government, balanced budgets, and traditional values. The other canoe is filled with those who resonated with Trump’s America First, populist rhetoric, and his opposition to globalism and immigration while supporting traditional religious values.

Getting all these folks reconciled and comfortable in the same boat will be a challenge but not an impossible one. Republicans have recovered from comparable splits twice in the last 60 years. They elected Richard Nixon only four years after Barry Goldwater’s landslide loss in 1964 and more recently found ways to bring the Tea Party movement into the mainstream fold.

Sen. John Thune, Senate Republican Whip, says, “We’ve got to chart a course. I think our identity for the past several years now has been built around an individual. And we’ve got to get back to where it is built on a set of ideas and principles and policies, and I’m sure those conversations will be held.”

Republican strategist Karl Rove concurs: “The key is to remember that what [Republicans are] for is as important as what they’re against. There are more conservatives in America who believe in traditional values, family, faith, personal responsibility, patriotism and law and order than there are liberals who don’t.”

Republican Sen. Tom Cotton observed that many suburban, middle-class voters were turned off by Trump’s personal style. “But they don’t want their taxes raised. They don’t want the police defunded. They don’t want open borders. In the meantime, those same policies appeal to a lot of the new voters who have joined our party over the last five years.”

Validating Cotton’s remarks, 2020 Republican Congressional candidates out-polled Trump in many districts and narrowed the Democratic majority in the House of Representatives from 37 to 11. These results were due in many cases to candidates who were female, Hispanic, Asian-American, black and younger, a trend Republicans need to build on.

One key will be reminding Trump voters how Republican tax reform and deregulation boosted jobs and incomes for blue-collar workers and especially minorities and women. As a result, the percentage of minority voters supporting Republican candidates continued to grow even during Trump’s loss.

Contrasting minority economic gains under Republican policies with Democrat’s portrayal of minorities as victims – while offering them nothing more than continuing nanny-state welfare – could add increasing numbers to the Republican base.

It’s time for Republicans to go on the offensive, hammering home the point that Republican policies and values benefit the majority of Americans.