The New York Times published this Nicholas Confessore article on Monday: How the GOP Elite Lost Its Voters to Donald Trump. It’s an interesting read.
From the article:
But the story is also one of a party elite that abandoned its most faithful voters, blue-collar white Americans, who faced economic pain and uncertainty over the past decade as the party’s donors, lawmakers and lobbyists prospered. From mobile home parks in Florida and factory towns in Michigan, to Virginia’s coal country, where as many as one in five adults live on Social Security disability payments, disenchanted Republican voters lost faith in the agenda of their party’s leaders….
“This is absolutely a crisis for the party elite — and beyond the party elite, for elected officials, and for the way people have been raised as Republicans in the power structure for a generation,” said Ari Fleischer, who served as press secretary for President George W. Bush. “If Donald Trump wins, he will change what it means to be a Republican.”
Many trace the rupture to the country’s economic crisis eight years ago: While Americans grew more skeptical of the banking industry in the aftermath, some Republicans played down the frustrations of their own voters.
While wages declined and workers grew anxious about retirement, Republicans offered an economic program still centered on tax cuts for the affluent and the curtailing of popular entitlements like Medicare and Social Security. And where working-class voters saw immigrants filling their schools and competing against them for jobs, Republican leaders saw an emerging pool of voters to court…
Most of these voters had long since given up on an increasingly liberal and cosmopolitan Democratic Party. In Mr. Trump, they found a tribune: a blue-collar billionaire who stood in the lobby of a Manhattan skyscraper bearing his name and pledged to expand Social Security, refuse the money of big donors, sock it to Chinese central bankers and relieve Americans of unfair competition from foreign workers…
While the party was drawing more of its money from an elite group of the wealthy, it was drawing more votes from working-class and middle-income whites. Between 2008 and 2012, according to the Pew Research Center, more lower-income and less-educated white voters shifted their allegiance to Republicans….
But rank-and-file Republicans had other ideas. For many blue-collar Republicans, anger against Mr. Obama now extended to their own party’s leadership, whom they viewed as not only failing to stand up to Mr. Obama, but also as colluding with him to make their lives worse.
They saw illegal immigration not only as a cultural and security threat, but also as an economic one, intertwined with trade deals that had stripped away good manufacturing jobs while immigrants competed for whatever work remained…
While jobs in places like Buffalo were vanishing, Washington was coming to resemble a gilded city of lobbyists, contractors and lawmakers. In 2014, the median wealth of members of Congress reached $1 million, about 18 times that of the typical American household, according to disclosures tabulated by the Center for Responsive Politics. During the same year, real hourly wages remained flat or fell for nearly all American workers…
While Republicans debated rhetorical approaches, Mr. Trump took a radically different tack. Announcing his campaign a few months later, he spun a tale of unfair trade deals hashed out by lobbyists, backscratchers and incompetent presidents who were stealing jobs from Americans. He would stop the flow of jobs over the border with Mexico, Mr. Trump promised, and build a wall to stop the flow of people.
That message has resonated with lower-income voters, and helped drive Mr. Trump’s string of successes. In Mississippi and Michigan, both of which Mr. Trump won, six in 10 Republican primary voters said that free trade cost the country more jobs that it produced, exit polls showed…
The article ends with a Haley Barbour quote wondering where this all ends. Sorry for the long quotes. It’s a good article. And it rings true.
Look at someplace like Pearl River County Mississippi. It’s very conservative–still dry outside the city limits of Picayune and, more recently, Poplarville. Trump won the primary with 50% of the vote. And it’s a county with one of those closed down factories that used to be a great job source in a poor county.
When I was a kid in the 70’s and 80’s, residents of Pearl River County could get a relatively good job at the Movie Star factory in Poplarville. But the industrial ‘icon’ that once employed as many as 750 people in a town of a couple of thousand closed in 2011 after 57-years in business. The reasons sound familiar: the Great Recession combined with textile operations moving overseas. It was a huge loss for the county. And it’s a loss that Trump speaks to.
Unfortunately for Democrats, this didn’t work out the way they hoped. Democrats have long wondered how the Republican shepherds could keep the sheep in the fold. Now they can’t. But Democrats assumed that people would switch their alliance to Democrats. They haven’t. Trump supporters despise the Democrats as much as ever. Now, they also dislike establishment Republicans.
It seems like a perfect opportunity for a new party. But my politically knowledgeable friends tell me that’s unlikely. So we have some sort of reshuffling of the voter deck where, as Haley Barbour observes at the end of the Times article, no one has any idea where this all ends up.
It’s fascinating.