NATIONAL INTEREST
A few weeks ago, a “Morning Joe” panel concluded that if Donald Trump were to become the Republican nominee (spoiler alert: he will), Republicans will lose in the fall. This is by no means a unique sentiment – former House Speaker Paul Ryan expressing this idea here, journalist Bernard Goldberg wondering if Trump is trying to lose here, and so forth.
As I read these analyses, I wonder if I’ve somehow been transported back to 2016, when such takes were de rigueur. Here in 2024, we know that Donald Trump won in 2016 and came close to winning in 2020. He carried Republican senators across the finish line in both years, and the GOP gained House seats in 2020, much to the surprise of most election analysts. And, at a comparable 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 polling.
My goal here isn’t to rehash the arguments over whether Trump can win – I think that’s plain enough. Nor is it to make a case Trump should win; anyone who has followed me on Twitter over the past decade knows my opinion on that. Rather, it’s to talk about the continued blindness of the old power structure of the GOP regarding Trump’s allure.
The bottom line is that Trump’s appeal isn’t geared toward white college educated voters, which leaves us unable to see its foundations. For decades, as Michael Barone has pointed out, the GOP was defined in large part as the party that “the system” benefited, while the Democrats were a collection of outsiders. That began to shift in 1992, when Bill Clinton began a full-frontal assault on Republican hegemony among the “winners.” Over time, the appeal of Democratic nominees increasingly tilted toward that message, and away from the older “outcasts” approach.
So for decades, college-educated whites have been in a situation where both parties were largely focusing their messages on them. Yes, Democrats had more of a populist approach, and yes, Republicans would always have candidates with a bit of a patrician air, but overall the focus was on winning the suburbs.
It is a bit jarring, then, to have a Republican nominee like Trump suddenly tailor his appeal toward people who think the system doesn’t benefit them. It’s an interesting strategic shift to disengage in large part from the fight over college-educated whites. It also has its pluses and minuses. One of the major pluses, and this is overlooked by college-educated Republicans who believe that the party’s message should still be geared toward them, is that Trump succeeded where the old GOP failed: by winning Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, and then very nearly winning them a second time in 2020. Iowa and Ohio were where GOP dreams once went to die; now they are solidly red states.
This gets to the final point that I think the old GOP establishment hasn’t fully digested: The revolt of the party’s former base isn’t without a rational basis. During Ronald Reagan’s presidency, the excuse for not fully enacting a conservative agenda was that Republicans never controlled the House. Fair enough. Then, in 2000, the GOP won the…
