The Republican elites don’t understand why voters like Trump

The Republican party’s old power structure still does not understand Trump’s allure. The bottom line is that his appeal isn’t geared toward white college educated voters, and the Republican elites can’t see what it is.

For decades, as the political analyst 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.

Focused on educated whites

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 both focused on winning the suburbs.

Now, a Republican nominee is tailoring 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.

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 another point 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.

And not on the “outcasts”

Then, in 2000, the GOP won the “trifecta” for the first time since the 1950s. That ended after a few months when a Republican senator from Vermont — whom the GOP had supported in his 2000 reelection bid — switched parties. Republicans won the trifecta again in 2002, and expanded those majorities in 2004.

Yet at the end of the Bush years, what did Republicans have to show for it? Expiring tax cuts, the GOP’s reputation on foreign policy in tatters, No Child Left Behind, TARP, and an expansion of Medicare to cover prescription drugs. This wasn’t really what conservatives had been promised.

There was also the revolt against comprehensive immigration reform, which was repeated in 2013. The old GOP’s response? To go all-in for Jeb Bush, whose main bona fides were his commitment to immigration reform and ability to modulate his Spanish accent depending on the audience.

I personally favor immigration reform and think TARP is one reason I light my house with electricity and not candles today.

But the point of politics is that you must appeal to a broader polity which may not always desire the “best” policies.

It was beyond obvious by 2015 that the GOP polity’s desires were very different from the establishment’s desires, which sometimes seemed geared toward winning over the votes of three people in think-tank cubicles (two of whom were voting for Libertarian Gary Johnson anyway).

Trump’s won the GOP

Whatever else you might say about Donald J. Trump (and there is much to say), his appeal is fundamentally different than previous Republican candidates. But it is not narrower.

All of this is to say that of course Donald Trump can win again. More importantly, if the GOP establishment and the remaining NeverTrump portion of the GOP wants to have a say in Republican politics in the future, they really need to work on figuring out why.