Tim STANLEY
The consensus had been that Donald Trump was a temporary feature of American politics. Well, he’s not. Trump has changed the Republican Party’s character, issue agenda and coalition – for a generation, at least.
Put yourself in the shoes of a moderate Republican, the kind of person who used to run the party.
What you wanted was for Trump to be repudiated in a landslide, to expose him as unpopular and an anomaly, allowing you to recapture and rebuild the party over the next four years.
Instead, election night brought you the worst of both worlds. On the one hand, Trump hastened the party’s decline among voters it should be able to rely on: the educated and the suburban. On the other hand, Trump gained sufficient support elsewhere to pull off a kind of “moral victory”, defying the polls and pushing the election so close that he could claim the Democrats stole it. And the new voters he attracted turn elite convention upside down. American politics has been essentially a 50/50 split since 2000: the goal of strategists every four years is to gain a few percentage points here or there to eke out a win. Republicans have targeted Hispanics for a long time, but they always assumed the way to win them was to move the party to the centre and to embrace immigration, something they had to do anyway, they said, because America was becoming less white and more socially liberal.
Trump ran in the opposite direction – and, to many people’s surprise, it almost worked. At the same time as his alleged racism probably drove white moderates away from his party, he seems to have attracted more support among those very groups he was accused of discriminating against – including Hispanics and African-Americans. In other words, Trump destroyed the strongest argument that the elite moderates had against him: he put together a class-based coalition that transcended the boundaries of race, including black rappers, Cuban-Americans, Orthodox Jews and the Amish. It’s too early to say precisely how he did this, or whether it can last, but it shifts the internal dynamics of the conservative movement. There will be no whitewashing of the Trump era; on the contrary, much of the party’s base loves the president and believes he’s the future.
Based on his record, why wouldn’t they? He’s avoided the foreign conflict that dogged his predecessors, slashed taxes, put conservatives on the Supreme Court and deregulated the economy. When he first ran for the nomination, the charge often levelled at him by Republican moderates was that he wasn’t a real conservative. Yet Trump has arguably been the most solidly centre-right president since Ronald Reagan, certainly the most willing to fight back in the “culture wars”. Once again, what alienated some Republicans has won converts elsewhere: depending on what exit polls you trust, Trump took between 50-60 per cent of the total Catholic vote, and much of that will have been Hispanic, a group that is more antiabortion than whites tend to be. The Left’s take on racial politics doesn’t appeal to everyone: the Republicans are building a coalition that is culturally conservative, anti-free trade and increasingly working-class.
‘Trump has arguably been the most solidly centre-right president since Ronald Reagan’
For the never-trumpers and those Republicans who endorsed Joe Biden, it’s hard to see a way back to their old party – they are a casualty of the realignment but they also stoked it. The party they leave behind will be dominated by Trump’s personality.
If he doesn’t run again in 2024 (don’t rule that out), his voice will be the most important one in the next presidential primaries, and no one will be able to win the nomination unless they swear loyalty to him and can mobilise his coalition. Pretty impressive for a man who as recently as 2009 was a registered Democrat.