For those of us eager to see Donald Trump defeated by the widest possible margin in November, the news Friday afternoon that former Vice President Mike Pence would not be endorsing his former boss seemed encouraging. Pence doesn't command a large group of voters. Considering that he was eliminated from the Republican presidential primary late last year after failing to rise below single digits, there is no reason to assume that he will. Nonetheless, every prominent Republican who rejects Trump takes us further down the road.
But towards what?
Many of Trump's supporters on the center-right are convinced that Pence's refusal to support the man he served for four years points the way for Republican voters to give up (or, in popular parlance, “create a permission structure”). Former President. Nikki Haley, Mitt Romney, Dick Cheney, Dan Quayle, Bill Barr, Mark Esper, John Kelly, Mick Mulvaney, Dan Coats, John Bolton, HR McMaster, Liz Cheney and other former Cabinet members join a long list of current and former members of Congress. Pence is believed to have helped secure Trump's defeat in November, as local and state officials opposed Trump's bid for the presidency.
But is this really true? I believe that some measurable number of Reaganite Republicans could be persuaded to stay home on Election Day or vote for someone other than Trump. (I wonder how many more of them would have been moved to do so if Pence had called Trump unfit for the presidency on January 6th, instead of focusing on Trump's ideological heterogeneity.) But that only works if Trump fails to elect. It will ruin your chances. Gain support from different types of voters to replace those lost from the (formerly) mainstream GOP. Is it possible for Republicans from the Reagan and Bush eras to distance themselves from Trump? shine What qualifies the former president as someone trying to transform his party in a populist direction?
[David Frum: The ego has crash-landed]
President Trump was unique. On the one hand, this highly anomalous candidate, who attacked the Republican establishment and opposed the party's long-standing policy commitments on a variety of issues, won the nomination and the presidency. He also brought in White House figures like Steve Bannon, who he wanted to actively blast the Republican Party's electoral coalition in order to turn it into a 'workers' party'.
On the other hand, these radicals were severely outnumbered in the administration by remnants of the previous Republican era. These GOP norms pretty much ran the show. Their main accomplishments have been securing massive corporate tax cuts and helping to appoint staunchly conservative federal judges and Supreme Court justices. Most of the Trump administration's other right-wing populist initiatives, including anti-internationalism in its foreign policy and funding for a southern border wall, have been blocked or moved forward slowly over four years.
When it came time for Trump to run for re-election in 2020, enough high-income, well-educated, suburban Republicans had switched to Joe Biden for Trump to lose. One path to victory for Republicans this coming November is to win back suburban voters by portraying Trump as a safe alternative to Biden. Biden will primarily aim to get the economy back to where it was before the coronavirus pandemic plunged the country into chaos. . in this case was In Trump's 2024 election strategy, Vice President Pence's refusal to support the former president could be a serious problem for the campaign. Because it would send a signal to like-minded voters that Trump doesn't deserve their support.
But what is equally possible is that Vice President Pence's refusal to endorse will accelerate the Republican Party's shift toward the party that Trump and Bannon originally hoped to create eight years ago: a Workers' Party that could more accurately be described as an interracial coalition of voters. I didn't graduate from college.
Evidence supporting such an evolution in the Republican Party has been mixed over the past few election cycles, but polls so far show that this The cycle pointed to something bigger being afoot, with significant signs of an ongoing “racial realignment.” If such a change proves a reality in November, it will likely turn out to have been made possible by Pence, Haley, and others who abandoned Trump because of his differences with Reagan's conservatism. The policies favored by Reagan-Bush Republicans are no longer particularly popular with less educated voters, and the highly ideological and inauthentic ways in which the old guard speaks and thinks also differ from what Trump teaches these voters to see. Because in the political tribunes there is inexcusable brazenness, braggadocio and bullshit.
I am not suggesting that this is the ticket to a Trump victory in November. All of Trump's many debts remain. He was despised by tens of millions of Americans. He has been charged in multiple jurisdictions. He faces dozens of felony charges. He attempted to overturn the 2020 election by spreading delusional lies about election fraud, which he continues to affirm. He became the first president in U.S. history to attempt a coup to retain power by inciting a riot that threw Congress into disarray as it attempted to certify the election results.
[Damon Linker: Democrats should pick a new presidential candidate now]
All of this, and much more, will make the 2024 election a challenge for Trump. But the fact that the election is so close to the point where opinion polls are tilting against Biden means that former President Biden's approval rating is surprisingly higher than it was in 2016 or 2020. That doesn't necessarily mean he's on track to win. . But it does suggest that the Republican Party's new electoral coalition is stable and likely to grow. Even though the Reaganite Republican godfathers constantly express outright disgust for the man behind this stability and growth.
Whether Trump wins or not, we will continue to see the Republican base evolve away from what Pence, Haley, and others want. As I have previously argued, the relatively small number of voters eager for a Reagan restoration will not find it in the current Republican Party. They may not entirely find it in Democratic Joe Biden either. But at least there they can make common cause with centrist forces open to a Reaganesque mix of low taxes, free immigration, free trade, and a civil religion of hawkish internationalism and American exceptionalism. In the post-Trump Republican Party, such views (except for tax cuts) are actively unwelcome.
That's because a significant portion of Americans without college degrees, regardless of race or ethnicity, have different priorities and increasingly form the base of the Republican Party. Its voters prefer to think of the country as an armed bloc. They want to see government power used to advance what they consider to be their and the country's interests, and they like that message delivered with muscular vulgarity and humor. Reagan's high-minded, edifying and earnest speeches that portrayed America as a shining city on a hill with a duty to protect democracy abroad chilled voters. In this respect, ‘America First’ is working really well as a slogan for the emerging Republican Party eight years after President Trump first took over.
None of this is likely to change if Trump loses in November. The new Republican base isn't going to change direction and suddenly decide to love Pence and Haley. Reagan's existing approach is a dead end. Instead, the party will finally begin a serious search for Trump's successor. Ron DeSantis has been auditioning for the role for the past year, but the results haven't been great. Voters still decided they preferred Trump himself. DeSantis will probably try again, but next time he'll be joined by many others. (Prominent among them is JD Vance, who is spending much of his first term as a junior senator from Ohio, testing elements of a right-wing populist agenda for the post-Trump Republican Party.
Whoever Trump's successor turns out to be, he will be someone who speaks the language of non-college-educated voters and sees the world like them. The Republican Party has now become a vehicle for right-wing populism. Pence's frustration with this fact will likely do more to ensure the completion of these changes than to thwart the political ambitions of the new Republican Party.