by Henry Olsen
Obama surprised the entire Republican establishment by winning comfortably. He won 51 percent of the popular vote, the first time since FDR that a Democratic presidential candidate had won two popular-vote majorities in a row. He won the Electoral College 332–206 by again winning most midwestern states and New Hampshire, along with Nevada, Virginia, Florida, and Colorado. Democrats also dashed the Republicans’ Senate hopes by gaining two seats when earlier many observers thought they would lose control. Once again, the failure to come to grips with what working-class, nonevangelical whites wanted from government cost the GOP dearly.
One answer to the exit poll tells you everything you need to know about why Romney lost. Voters were asked which of four personal characteristics they thought was most important in a president.53 Seventy-four percent of voters selected either “shares my values,” “strong leader,” or “vision for future.” Romney won each of these categories by between 9 and 23 percent. He lost the presidency because 21 percent selected the fourth category, and he lost among those voters by 63 percent, 81–18. That category: “cares about people like me.”
Eighty years after the New Deal, Republican leaders finally woke up and saw they had an empathy gap. Or so they tried to tell you. Establishment and conservatives alike tripped over each other to show how much they cared about people. There was just one problem with their approach: they forgot the words “like me.”
The establishment, business wing of the party expressed its views in a comprehensive analysis of what went wrong in 2012. Known officially as “Growth and Opportunity Project” and colloquially as “the autopsy,” the report spent most of its space analyzing the party’s campaign tactics and infrastructure and offered sound ideas for reform.54 But tools are only useful if you have a good idea how to use them. In politics, that means knowing who might vote for you and what you need to promise to get them to do so. On this question, the report was fatally flawed.
The party establishment uncritically accepted the Democrats’ and the media’s explanation for the Obama victory: what the Democrats called “the Rising American Electorate.”55 This theory, first propounded by the progressive thinkers Ruy Teixeira and John Judis in their 2002 book The Emerging Democratic Majority, noted that people of color (black, Hispanic, Asian, and multiracial individuals), college-educated whites working in information industries, and unmarried women were all growing in voting strength.56 Every four years these voters grew in number, and the groups that supported Republicans, especially older whites without college degrees, shrank. While Judis and Teixeira argued that Democrats still had to do well enough with working-class whites to get their majority, most Democrats did not note this. Instead, they argued that by the 2008 election the Rising American Electorate would be large enough in size that they could win a majority without moving away from progressive policies because the conservative Republican coalition—focused on smaller government, lower taxes and traditional religion—could not compete for these voters.
The authors of the autopsy saw this future and decided the GOP had to compete with Democrats among these groups. But they did not understand that the reason these voters didn’t like Republicans was because they disagreed with the party’s underlying philosophy of caring more about what they viewed as abstractions (small government) or money (taxes) than life. The autopsy’s authors presented what I call the “barrier” explanation of why these voters did not like the GOP. According to the autopsy, Republicans held certain views on a couple of issues that these voters held to be unacceptable. The report noted two: opposition to immigration and same-sex marriage.57 Remove these “barriers,” the report argued, and these voters would be open to the underlying philosophy.
This short, superficial analysis ignored two important points. First, a very large share of the Republican voter base cared intensely about immigration and same-sex marriage. Casting aside these issues meant dividing the party in the hope that Republicans could then reunite it and gain new voters. The other point is even more important: the groups the barrier explanation were meant to attract wouldn’t want what the authors desired to sell them even if the barriers were removed.
Take Hispanic voters. Polls show that immigration actually ranks low on the voting priorities of Hispanic voters. They care much more about education and health care than they do about immigration. Their views tended to side more with Democrats than Republicans on these issues.
Many Hispanics also disagree with the fundamental, core tenant of the Republican Party establishment, that helping business and the wealthy with lower taxes helps everyone. The Public Religion Research Institute’s 2013 Hispanic Values Survey showed this clearly. It asked Hispanics which of two sets of policies would help grow the economy more: higher taxes and more government spending on education and infrastructure, or lower taxes on individuals and business and reduced government spending. By a nearly two to one margin, 58–33 percent, Hispanics agreed with the higher taxes, more spending approach.58
The electoral crisis the autopsy was meant to solve was the fact that Mitt Romney received only 27 percent of the Hispanic vote. But the evidence shows that even if the “barrier” of immigration were removed, an “autopsy-friendly” Republican candidate would add only 6 percent to Romney’s measly total. A move that tiny would only have helped pick up Florida, leaving the GOP nominee well short of the 270 Electoral College votes he or she would need to win.
Paul Ryan’s move to embrace caring was better thought out and more comprehensive. He spent over a year traveling the country, visiting poor neighborhoods and meeting with experts on poverty. The result was what I call “Ryan 2.0,” a comprehensive vision to reform the safety net and help move people out of poverty.59 He also gave a speech to accompany that vision in which he explicitly endorsed the concept of the modern safety net in which he said that “earned success and earned security go hand in hand.”60 (Emphasis in original.) Finally, he retracted his “makers versus takers” formulation.61 Ryan had heard the message of 2012; he cared about people.
I know Ryan and I also know that he has always cared about people. But his post-2012 statements and policies did not address the GOP’s political problem well enough. Like the authors of the autopsy, he showed that he “cared about people” and forgot the last two words: “like me.”
The working-class, nonevangelical white voters who had elected Reagan and had largely left the GOP since heard nothing in Ryan’s words to reassure them. They wanted someone who would share their values, and those values included more than caring about the poor. These voters were not poor. They might have been afraid of becoming poor, but they were more afraid about the changes that were buffeting their lives that no politician seemed to see or care about. They wanted someone who would see the world as they saw it, tell them they were right, and promise them he had their backs. Ryan has a noble vision. But it fails the “truckers and cashiers test,” big league.
In effect, Ryan had a different barrier theory, only his idea was that the barrier that kept people from voting Republican was a perception that Republicans did not care about people at all and that working-class voters had been offended by his clever rhyme. But that was not, and has never been, the case. These voters do not, and have not since 1932, liked to vote for a Republican whose underlying philosophy is explicitly or implicitly in conflict with the New Deal’s core promises.
Ryan’s and the autopsy’s approaches to addressing the 2012 election are what I call “clothes and cosmetics conservatism.” The theory in each case was different, but the result was the same. Republicans hoped that by changing the packaging a bit, putting on nicer clothes and some good makeup, people would change their minds about who they were. Clothes and cosmetics conservatism fails because underneath the fancy packaging is the same old stuff these voters have not been buying for decades.
Not all Republicans thought that they needed to show they cared, however. Some conservatives didn’t think the voters rejected them because they were too antigovernment; they
thought the voters rejected them because they hadn’t been clear enough about the fact they were antigovernment. This view, centered in the Republican’s Tea Party wing, argued that only people who were militantly unrepentant about their opposition to the status quo could mobilize voters who had chosen Obama over Romney or who had sat out the election entirely. These people advocated what I call “louder and clearer conservatism,” and their leader was Texas senator Ted Cruz.
Cruz was elected in 2012, and he wasted no time in making a national name for himself. By the summer of 2013 he was leading a crusade to shut down the government rather than fund Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion and subsidies for people to purchase health insurance. He told Republican senators that if they opposed him they were supporters of Obamacare.62 After this quixotic effort predictably failed, he turned his attention to the debt ceiling. In 2015, he urged another government shutdown—and an American default on its bond obligations—if the legislative authority to borrow money to fund the government did not include cuts in future spending.63 In the course of these fights he worked with like-minded congressmen to undermine House Speaker John Boehner and called Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell a liar on the Senate floor.64
Cruz’s theory was that Romney had lost because millions of conservative Americans had not voted in 2012 because of Romney’s moderation. He told conservative audiences that they were a majority if only they would rally the troops with “bold colors, no pale pastels.”65 Compromise was the enemy of victory, he argued; only consistent, unwavering, hard-line conservatism would defeat liberal Democrats.
It’s not just that Cruz was wrong; it’s that so much he knew just wasn’t so. Take his claim that over two million conservatives stayed home in 2012, and that an increase of “less than a million votes would have produced 84 electoral votes, more than enough to win.”66 This was, at best, a distortion of the facts. Turnout was down in 2012, but not in six of the seven swing states Cruz cited. Of those seven, only Ohio cast fewer votes in 2012, and the difference (128,000) was smaller than Obama’s margin in the state. Moreover, in three of the swing states Cruz cited, voters actually cast more ballots in 2012 than in 2008.
Nor did the conservatives and Republicans who did vote abandon Romney. Romney carried 93 percent of Republicans, which tied for the all-time high since exit polling began in 1972. His 82 percent among conservatives sounds low until you compare it with the percentages other GOP nominees won. Only George W. Bush in 2004 bested that share, with 84 percent, and the only other candidate who even equaled it was Ronald Reagan in his 1984 landslide.
Republicans of all stripes were clearly missing the point about the 2012 election, but so too were the Democrats. Their faith in the Rising American Electorate theory meant they thought moving further to the left was the best way to win. President Obama therefore pushed on climate change, signing the Paris Accords. He made a deal with Iran and made light of the new terrorist group ISIS, calling it “the JV.” He bypassed a Congress unwilling to approve comprehensive immigration reform and issued an executive order that effectively legalized the status of millions of undocumented immigrants. And he pushed forward on negotiating free-trade agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). The result: Republicans took control of the Senate in the 2014 midterms, picking up nine Senate seats.
The House election results were less dramatic but more ominous for both parties. Republicans gained thirteen seats, pushing their total to 247 and besting their previous post–New Deal high set in 2010. Six of those seats were in working-class white Democratic territory in the Midwest and Northeast, including seats in Iowa, Maine, and New York that president Obama had won with large majorities. As with 2010, laying the map of these seats over the 2016 county election returns map shows another eerie similarity: these seats also contained the areas where Trump would gain the most over Romney. The Trump train was getting ready to leave the station, and none of the major strategists in either party had any idea it was on the tracks.
Everything Trump did and said from the minute he entered the race in summer 2015 was, by luck or by design, music to the working-class whites’ ears. He blasted immigration’s economic and cultural impacts. He attacked free trade agreements, saying that China and Mexico were eating our lunch and stealing our jobs. He reminded these voters how these problems had been developing for years (i.e., both parties were to blame) and that the elites who ran the country hadn’t been listening to them. Only strong, active leadership would make America great again, and he was just the man to provide it.
Even the things he supposedly did wrong worked with these voters. His lack of enthusiasm about traditional religion and his flip-flops on abortion might have hurt him with the party’s evangelical, social-conservative wing, but nonevangelical working-class voters (and, we discovered, many evangelicals who did not attend church often) didn’t care. They were what the Canadian conservative political strategist Patrick Muttart called “morally moderate”: they may have held traditional views on social issues, but those views did not motivate their votes.67 Trump’s running feud with Jeb Bush reminded these voters of the defeat and depression his brother had brought them. His lack of coherent tax cut or spending cut plan didn’t bother these voters; they didn’t care about the size of government. His statement that he did not want to cut Social Security or Medicare earned the scorn of the GOP’s antigovernment warriors and budget hawks, but as the Pew survey showed, these voters loved Trump’s position.
Trump would add one element to his appeal that proved decisive: his proposed ban on Muslim immigration. Trump’s national poll numbers were stuck in a narrow band between 25 and 30 percent prior to the Paris and San Bernardino terrorist attacks in late 2015.68 His appeal skyrocketed after he proposed the ban on December 7. Polls taken after that date showed him in the mid to high 30s, a position of dominance he never gave up.
The exit polls confirm this interpretation. The ban was highly popular among Republican primary voters, with between 63 and 78 percent approving it in every state where the question was asked. Trump normally won between 45 and 50 percent of these voters. But this actually understates the import of the issue to his candidacy. Between 80 and 90 percent of his voters backed the ban, meaning that it united his backers more than any other concern.
The Republican race started with seventeen candidates including Trump, but it effectively boiled down to a race between four men. Cruz ran as Cruz, the “louder and clearer” conservative. Bush was the autopsy candidate, stressing his tax cuts and his openness to Hispanic immigration even though many conservatives disagreed with him.69 Marco Rubio was effectively the Paul Ryan “clothes and cosmetics” conservative, displaying a strong interest in poverty while endorsing a Ryanesque tax cut and economic growth plan. Each ran in his own way as Reagan’s true heir. But the man who beat them had a bead on an element of Reagan’s appeal that every one of his competitors missed: citizenship.
Citizenship is another way of expressing what Reagan called self-government. At its most basic level, self-government meant governing yourself, or personal responsibility. But it always meant more than that for Reagan. As we saw in chapter 4, self-government for Reagan included a sense of obligation to and for one’s fellow Americans. You were not their master or their keeper, but you did have an obligation to be their helper. For this reason, self-government for Reagan always required some sense of obligation to help citizens who “through no fault of their own” were in genuine need, whether that help involved getting out of their way, providing monetary assistance, or levying trade sanctions on the Japanese to punish unfair practices.
Trump’s appeal to the working-class, nonevangelical white electorate was rooted in this idea. Trump voters believed they had played by the rules and had been unfairly punished because political elites simply didn’t care about people like them. It’s against the rules to manipulate a national currency to gain a trade advantage or steal intellectual property, but nothing happens to the Chinese when they do that even wh
en it costs Americans their jobs. It’s against the rules to come to and work in this country without permission, but nothing seems to happen to the millions of people who do that or the businesses that hire them. It’s against the rules to open fire on your neighbors, but some Muslims, whether immigrants or natives, do just that repeatedly on American soil, and it keeps on happening. In the eyes of these voters, the elites of both parties had broken the bonds of trust and obligation that bind Americans to each other. Once Trump said he understood their pain and had their backs, they tuned out anything those elites said to try to change their minds.
Trump had electrified one of the elements of the Reagan coalition, but the other elements—antigovernment conservatives, social conservatives, and business conservatives—were wary. Once he clinched the nomination, however, he pledged to support something they each cared deeply about, such as a conservative Supreme Court nominee for social conservatives, deregulation for business conservatives, and a big tax cut for antigovernment conservatives. He also argued that they had nowhere else to go: if they did not back him, they implicitly backed Hillary Clinton. In effect, he was banking that “Never Hillary” would be a stronger pull for most Republicans than “Never Trump.”