Misreading Republican voters is a big mistake for GOP leaders
A few days ago, while trying to figure out why Congress is apparently incapable of coming up with a legislative solution for Dreamers, which is something most Americans support and the president has called for, it occurred to me that Republican leaders and the national political media have more in common than they realize. They claim to understand Republican voters. But many of them don’t, and although that’s always been the case, they didn’t actually realize it until 2016, when Donald Trump shocked them by winning the presidency, after shocking them by winning the Republican primary.
And Trump’s victory left both groups with an incentive to figure out why he won, which necessarily requires understanding the Americans who voted for him, most of whom are Republican. As a result, both Republican leaders and the national political media have been misreading Republican voters, and as a result, misrepresenting them.
That’s why I was having trouble figuring out why Congress can’t pass an immigration deal. I get that Republican Tom Cotton of Arkansas has strong views on the subject, but he doesn’t speak for most Republicans and only has one vote in the U.S. Senate.
And I would like to intervene, after providing an example of the kind of “misreading” I mean.
Last August, as we all remember, Trump defended the white nationalists who had gathered in Charlottesville, Va., for a protest that ended in tragedy when one of them drove a car through a crowd of counterprotesters, killing Heather Heyer.
“Not all of those people were neo-Nazis, believe me,” the president of the United States said.
Some of them, Trump added, were “very fine people.”
He was wrong about that, obviously. The people who had gathered for the “Unite the Right” rally were confused, belligerent racists.
But another fact that’s relevant, in this context, is that the group in question was really not a large one relative to the size of the American electorate.
And so the muted response to Trump’s comments from Republican leaders was telling. They apparently see neo-Nazis making fools of themselves with tiki torches as a demographic they can’t afford to offend. They wrongly perceived the group as one that might be able to influence the outcome of a primary election, which actually isn’t true, even in Texas.
And the New York Times, at least, misrepresented the protesters in a similar way, after concluding they were people we needed to understand, if only because of their role in our political discourse. In November, its national editor, Marc Lacey, noted that the Times regretted how many readers had been offended by its decision to profile one of them, a Nazi sympathizer and white nationalist from Ohio named Tim.
“What we think is indisputable, though, is the need to shed more light, not less, on the most extreme corners of American life and the people who inhabit them,” Lacey explained.
Not a new phenomenon
I agree, in a sense. Racism is hardly a new phenomenon, but the number of Americans openly espousing noxious theories about white nationalism has increased lately, as has the degree to which they’ve been emboldened to act on such beliefs.
But the misreading and subsequent misrepresentation of the Republican electorate, more generally, is one of the things that’s emboldened extremists lately. I know that, because I’ve been covering Texas politics for a decade, and in 2014 we elected a governor, Greg Abbott, who misreads the Republican electorate, too.
Consider, for example, that Abbott took a very bold stance on Jade Helm back in 2015, ordering the Texas State Guard to monitor U.S. military training exercises in Texas that had come under scrutiny from internet-based conspiracy theorists. But he was also, at the time, refusing to take any stance at all on a number of other issues, and continues to do so. Also, Abbott seems to think the Republican voters in Harris County who have repeatedly elected Sarah Davis to represent them in the Texas House will be receptive to his recent attacks on her — or are likely to prefer her challenger, Susanna Dokupil — even though the district literally includes the Texas Medical Center, and Dokupil wants to liberate us from the horror of herd immunity.
It’s as if the governor is worried about being challenged in the Republican primary, but also isn’t confident in his ability to win such a challenge, because he has no idea what the grass roots care about, or ability to tell if the activists who claim to speak for them actually do.
Drunk with unearned power
They don’t, in my experience. And Republican leaders who refuse to believe that will deserve some of the credit when Texas turns blue, which it will, eventually — and sooner than it might have, if the activists hadn’t become so drunk with unearned power that they decided it was safe to do things like target Texas teachers.
But the leaders who have decided to listen to the activists rather than the voters have made decisions that have taken a toll on Texas, and will continue to do so for the time being. And such things will take a toll on the entire nation, unless Republican leaders rediscover their principles — or unless the national political media realizes that they don’t necessarily speak for Republican voters, most of whom are not subliterate bigots wearing Nazi accessories, or busy waging war against public education.
Those people exist, and we shouldn’t minimize how noxious their views are, or the harm they might do, if implemented via the legislative process. But they’re outnumbered, even in the Republican Party, by voters who are just like the overwhelming majority of Americans: in favor of protecting Dreamers, and tired of school shootings.