by Henry Olsen
Democrats were meanwhile tacking back to the center. The House and Senate campaign chairs strategically recruited more moderate candidates to run in the states and House districts they needed to retake control. They would thus look more like Clinton at a time when Bush was looking more like Gingrich on domestic issues, and would furthermore be aided by the increasing quagmire in Iraq.
The election of 2006 was a Democratic landslide. They gained thirty House seats to retake the majority and won nearly every contested Senate seat up for grabs, picking up a net six seats to return Senate control to them. Republicans also lost six governors’ chairs. The New Republican party looked very much like the old, pre-Reagan Republican Party: tired, out of ideas, and out of power.
The man the Republicans nominated in 2008 to succeed Bush, Arizona senator John McCain, also showed he misunderstood Reagan’s ideas. He proposed eliminating the exemption from income taxation of health insurance premiums paid by employers, effectively raising the cost of health care for every American who got health insurance through his or her job. Employer-provided health insurance had been free from income tax since World War II; it continued to work for most people even though many economists argued it encouraged unnecessary medical spending.
Reagan had warned against the “slavish devotion to abstraction” and knew that “human nature bends over backward to avoid radical change.” McCain’s radical change to a system that provided secure access to the basic necessity of health care was the polar opposite of the change people wanted. It seemed to be exactly the type of thing a Republican would propose who cared more about abstractions than the “realities of everyday life,” more about their money than your life.
The Democratic nominee, Illinois senator Barack Obama, did not ignore this opportunity. Despite an extremely liberal voting record as a state senator, he campaigned as someone who could unite rather than divide. So he leaped at the opportunity to attack McCain’s proposal. One of the ads he aired attacking McCain’s health care plan was even determined to be the most aired ad of the prior decade.15
Obama had come to national attention when he gave a well-received keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention.16 The best-remembered lines of that talk are those in which he argued that the political differences among Americans did not detract from their fundamental unity of American purpose:
There is not a liberal America and a conservative America—there is the United States of America. There is not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there is the United States of America. The pundits like to slice-and-dice our country into Red States and Blue States; Red States for Republicans, Blue States for Democrats. But I’ve got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the Blue States, and we don’t like federal agents poking around our libraries in the Red States. We coach Little League in the Blue States, and yes we’ve got some gay friends in the Red States. There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and there are patriots who supported the war in Iraq. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.
Progressives saw someone who could communicate their values in a language average Americans might respond to. The seeds of his presidential campaign were born that night with those words, and he was careful during the campaign to avoid giving people a different impression. On election night, 50 percent of Americans told exit pollsters that Obama’s views were “just right”; only 42 percent, almost all of them partisan Republicans, said they were “too liberal.”17
The 2008 election was the worst defeat for the Republican Party since 1974. Obama beat McCain by a 53–46 percent margin in the popular vote and a 365–173 vote margin in the Electoral College. He carried the swing state of New Hampshire and every midwestern state, including Indiana, which went Democratic for the first time since LBJ’s 1964 landslide over Barry Goldwater. Obama also won the former Republican western strongholds of Nevada and Colorado and took three coastal southern states; Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida. Virginia also had not voted for a Democrat since 1964, and North Carolina had voted Republican every four years since 1976.
Obama’s midwestern strength was due in part to his ability to keep whites without a college degree. Exit polls show he carried working-class whites in Iowa, Michigan, and New Hampshire and performed better among them than among college-educated whites in Indiana.18 He lost them in Ohio by only 10 percent, a development that allowed him to ride massive margins among the sizable African American population there to victory.19 Evangelical voters were still largely Republican, but other whites of all educational backgrounds were very open to the apparently centrist Democrat.
The carnage was even worse in other races. Republicans lost another 21 House seats to drop to a mere 178, their lowest total since before the 1994 victory. The party lost an astounding eight Senate seats, reducing them to 41, the smallest number since 1978. When a liberal Pennsylvania Republican switched to the Democrats in April, the party held a filibuster-proof 60 Senate seats. Democrats looked like they were back.
We all know what happened after that.20 Obama had campaigned as a healer, a person who could mix red and blue in pursuit of a common American vision. When he instead governed as a progressive (albeit as one never pure enough for the faithful), pushing a trillion-dollar government spending program sold as an “economic stimulus,” climate change, and Obamacare as his major priorities, he broke faith with the independents and moderate blue-collar Democrats who had elected him and given Democrats the largest House and Senate majorities they had possessed since before Ronald Reagan.
These were simply unwise priorities to push when the nation was wracked with a massive, worsening recession. But that did not matter to the forty-seven-year-old who had already authored two autobiographies. According to the New York Times, Obama’s first treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, told him early on that his legacy would be preventing a second great depression. Obama replied, “That’s not enough for me.”21 That, plus encouraging a fast recovery, would have been enough for most Americans.
Obama’s progressive advisers, ignoring the counsel of his first chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, believed the reason Bill Clinton’s Democrats had been wiped out in 1994—after they had sought to pass a progressive wish list—was that they had flinched and not rammed their priorities through Congress. Do that, they told Obama, and Americans will reward the bold. Instead, Democrats lost even more seats in the House in 2010 than they had in 1994, dropping to their lowest level since 1946.
Devastation dogged down-ballot Democrats too. Democrats lost six Senate seats, and probably would have lost three more had not poorly qualified, Tea Party–backed candidates defeated more capable, and more moderate, opponents in the Republican primaries.22 Republicans picked up five governorships, winning in the large states of Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Florida. They gained an incredible 720 state legislative seats, picking up majority control in twenty-one legislative chambers. In two years, Democrats had gone from their strongest position in forty years to their weakest in over eighty.
The reason for this reversal of fortune was not hard to see: the white working class, especially those from nonevangelical backgrounds, had voted Republican en masse. By Election Day, President Obama’s approval rating among whites without a college degree was only 30 percent, or only a few points higher than when Richard Nixon resigned in disgrace.23 These voters had been making it clear in election after election since 1966 that they did not want the rapid expansion of government programs and did not trust the government’s management of the economy. Their revolts had fueled Nixon’s 1972 landslide, Reagan’s epic 1980 victory, and the 1994 Republican tsunami. They had come back into the Democratic fold when they had been promised the progressives wouldn’t be running the show. To find that the opposite was true, at a time when their jobs were drying up and their paychecks had been declining or flat for years, was just too much.
Fully forty-four of the sixty-three seats Republicans gained in the House were from the South or the Midwest. Some were from Republican-leaning seats that had fallen in the last two Democratic landslides, but many were long-held Democratic seats from white working-class areas. These were places like Duluth’s Minnesota 8, western Wisconsin’s 7th District, Illinois’s 17th on the Mississippi River, the Appalachian coal country of Ohio 6, and northeastern Pennsylvania’s 10th and 11th Districts. If one lays a map of those seats and others like them over the map of 2016 presidential county-level election returns, one would find an eerie overlap between Democratic seats like these and places where Donald Trump gained the most compared with Mitt Romney. Trump’s victory was presaged by the 2010 working-class revolt against Obama and his progressive politics.
These voters were saying no to Obama, but the Tea Party, antigovernment Right thought they were saying yes to it. Inspired by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s 2008 “Roadmap for America’s Future,” House Republicans adopted a revised version of that plan—the “Path to Prosperity”—as their answer to Obama’s progressive expansion. But this seemed to miss the popular mood. Voters had just bent over backward to avoid the radical change Obama wanted. The Roadmap and, to a lesser degree, the Path, promised radical change in the precisely opposite direction.
The original Roadmap could have been cooked up in David Stockman’s laboratory.24 It promised a tax plan that focused on cutting the top income tax rate to 25 percent and eliminated any income taxes on “unearned income”: capital gains, interest, and dividends. It adopted a version of the Bush Social Security plan, permitting people under fifty-five to divert up to a third of their payroll taxes into a private account without specifying where the revenue to pay current benefits would come from. It also endorsed lowering current benefits by adjusting the way the annual increase was calculated as well as cuts to future benefits by raising the retirement age. It promised to replace Medicare for those under fifty-five with a set payment with which they would be expected to purchase their own coverage. It would end Medicaid, the federal-state shared program that provides health care coverage for the poor, disabled, and elderly people who need to live in nursing homes, replacing it with a set payment those people could use to buy their own care. And it reproposed the McCain health insurance plan, replacing the exclusion of health insurance premiums from income and payroll taxes and replacing it with a set credit amount that was meant to help people buy their own, individual health insurance plans.25
In one fell swoop, every major social insurance program would be revamped to decrease an individual’s security and increase his or her risk and choice. At the same time, billionaires who get much of their income from unearned income would pay virtually no federal income taxes. Mitt Romney, the man who selected Ryan to be his 2012 presidential running mate, would have benefited enormously from this latter provision. His 2011 tax return shows that nearly all of his income, over $13 million, came from unearned income.26 Instead of paying nearly $2 million in income tax, Romney would have paid nearly nothing under the Roadmap.
These sweeping changes were proposed to avoid any tax increases, reduce federal spending to 18.5 percent of GDP (the post–World War II historical average) and keep taxes level at 19 percent of GDP forever. The Roadmap promised to “ensure a safety net, maintained by government if necessary,” but its heart was clearly on the side of a small, limited government of the sort not seen since before the New Deal.27
The Path to Prosperity scaled back the Roadmap’s ambition but retained its basic structure, priorities, and approach. It dropped specific endorsements of the Bush Social Security and McCain health insurance plans.28 Elimination of income taxes on unearned income was removed.29 It also replaced the fixed contribution for low-income Medicaid recipients with a block grant of the entire program to the states.30 It retained, however, both the emphasis on reducing the top personal income tax rate to 25 percent,31 and the conversion of Medicare into a fixed-payment system as opposed to the fee-for-service it has always been.32
Whatever the merits of these plans, polls made it clear this was not the change the working-class white Democrats and independents whose votes fueled the 2010 election wanted. At the same time as Ryan was unveiling the Path, the Pew Research Center released its triennial analysis of the American electorate, “Beyond Red vs. Blue.”33 That analysis breaks voters into different groups of shared views and demographic characteristics. One group was primarily made up of whites without college degrees making the median income or below. Pew called these voters “Disaffecteds.” What they wanted was not what the Roadmap or the Path promised.
The Ryan agenda was premised on the idea that the rising federal budget deficit was the most important issue facing America: get that under control now, and in the future America would prosper. On this Ryan was in accord with the Republican base: 50 percent of the group Pew labeled “Staunch Conservatives” thought the federal budget deficit was the biggest economic worry.34 Disaffecteds disagreed: only 9 percent thought the deficit was the biggest worry.35 They were worried about jobs: 43 percent said “the job situation” was the biggest worry.36
That priority made sense in light of their experiences in the Great Recession. Seventy-one percent of Disaffecteds had experienced unemployment in their household during the prior year, the largest total for any of Pew’s groups.37 Sixty-three percent said the recession had had a major impact on their household from which they had not yet recovered.38 This was also the largest total for any group. Eighty-three percent said they often didn’t have enough money to make ends meet.39 This experience had made them pessimistic: almost half said hard work was no guarantee of success, again the largest total for any group.40
As one might expect, these voters did not want cuts to programs they relied on. Eighty-two percent opposed changing Social Security and Medicare, the heart of Ryan’s Roadmap.41 Only 17 percent thought the best way to tackle the deficit was to cut major programs, compared with 59 percent of Ryan’s Staunch Conservatives.42
Disaffecteds also wanted more government help than Staunch Conservatives were willing to provide. Sixty-one percent of Disaffecteds said the government should do more to help the needy even if it meant going more into debt; only 9 percent of Staunch Conservatives agreed.43 Members of the former group believed that poor people had hard lives because government benefits didn’t go far enough to help them live decently.44
Despite these differences, Disaffecteds leaned Republican in their voting preferences. They agreed with other Republican-leaning groups on questions of government efficiency, and stood between the most conservative and liberal groups on a host of foreign policy and social issues. But they thought of themselves as independents: 63 percent chose to call themselves that while only 25 percent said they were Republicans. This is the classic definition of a swing voter, someone who sees himself between the two coalitions and can be swayed either way.
Accordingly, one should not be surprised that 60 percent had a favorable view of Bill Clinton while only 28 percent approved of Obama.45 They were open to New Deal Democrats like Clinton or Republicans who approved of the core elements of the New Deal like Reagan. They opposed both progressives and Goldwater-style conservatives.
The Pew data made clear what savvy politicians like Reagan and Clinton had realized for decades: the Disaffecteds were the key to either party forming a durable majority. They were the only group that could be swayed to join a party’s base without irrevocably fracturing the new coalition. Despite this, they had either been betrayed or ignored by both parties’ ideological leaderships for decades. Their frustration was building up and they were losing hope. Eighty-two percent told Pew that elected officials didn’t care what people like them thought, again the highest total for any group.46 The seeds for Trump were being sown.
There were other hints in these data that a Trump-like candidacy could excite these voters. Disaffecteds were suspicious of immigrants, thinking by large margins that immigrant
s took American jobs and threatened American customs and values.47 They were the most anti–free trade group, with 59 percent saying free trade agreements were bad for the United States.48 They were anti–Wall Street, with 59 percent saying Wall Street hurt the economy more than it helped.49 They were the most isolationist group, saying the United States should focus more on domestic problems, and believing Obama wasn’t pulling out of Afghanistan fast enough.50 All of the themes Trump used to excite these voters and distinguish himself from the GOP field in 2016 could be found in the 2011 Pew survey.
The path to rebuilding the Reagan coalition was wide open, but once again the Republican Party refused to walk down it. The key group it needed to win was economically and educationally downscale, disliked Wall Street, was concerned about jobs rather than growth, felt elites didn’t care about them, didn’t want big cuts to entitlements, and were opposed to free trade. So the GOP nominated a rich, MBA-educated financier who was the son of a former auto company CEO and governor. That man liked Wall Street and free trade, was concerned about growth over jobs, and picked the author of the GOP’s entitlement cuts, Paul Ryan, as his running mate. Republicans were not offering working-class whites a choice, they were presenting an echo of the persona and policies the Dissaffecteds had rejected for a very long time.
Romney and Republicans were oblivious to this. The Republican Convention was an orgy of enthusiasm for businessmen and bosses. “We built this” became a convention theme, praising the entrepreneur and businessman for his daring and risk taking.51 Romney’s remark that the 47 percent of Americans who paid no federal income tax were therefore dependent on the federal government for benefits deepened this negative image.52 Ryan compounded this when it was discovered that he had previously said that the battle in America was between “makers” and “takers,” people who work hard and pay income taxes versus those who don’t and get benefits. Millions of working Americans like the Disaffecteds, however, work very hard for very little money. They pay payroll, sales, and gas taxes even if they don’t pay income taxes. They may get by with some help from government programs, but they don’t view themselves as “takers.” Romney and Ryan had not only failed the “truckers and cashiers test”; they had told those voters they really didn’t care much about people like them.