Rip Gop

by Stanley B Greenberg

  This has played out in a country with a disastrous economy, Trump said, that has been “edited out of your nightly news and your morning newspaper.” He seemed sorrowful about the numbers of African Americans and Latinos trapped in poverty, the 14 million who had left the labor force totally, and the trade deficit that had grown to $800 billion. And then he offered an extended critique of what trade agreements had done to this country: “America has lost nearly one-third of its manufacturing jobs since 1997 following the enactment of disastrous trade deals supported by Bill and Hillary Clinton.”24 These agreements included NAFTA, China being admitted to the World Trade Organization, the South Korea deal on paying for U.S. military protection, and the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement.

  “I have visited the laid-off factory workers, and the communities crushed by our horrible and unfair trade deals,” Trump told the convention and country. “These are the forgotten men and women in our country. People who work hard but no longer have a voice.”25

  Then Trump pledged, “never again.” He would never “sign any trade agreement that hurts our workers.” As president, he would “turn our bad trade agreements into great trade agreements.”26

  He summarized the break with conventional wisdom: “Americanism, not globalism, will be our credo.” We must have leaders “who will put America First.”27

  He concluded with his promise to make America strong, proud, and safe again. And, of course, “we will Make America Great Again.”28

  Few in the GOP establishment thought he would get that chance as president. None of the party’s living presidential nominees appeared in Cleveland to attend or speak at the convention. The primary opponents who had most closely contested the nomination did not endorse Trump for president. After the release of the Access Hollywood tape of Trump’s lewdness in speaking with Billy Bush, many prominent senators and House members announced they would not vote for Trump or campaign with him. After all, just 56 percent of Republicans had voted for Trump in the primaries and caucuses. And after all the fanfare of winning the nomination, which usually leads those who supported the opponent to forget the past battle and think they supported the winner, Trump’s recalled primary vote did not rise. Those who voted for Cruz or Kasich recalled their vote accurately right through to the election.

  The GOP establishment believed Donald Trump had the national party on loan for three months, after which they would reclaim it.

  They didn’t realize the FBI and Russians would push him across the finish line in key battleground states.

  They didn’t expect that Hillary Clinton would run such an inept campaign.

  They watched the Democrats attack Mitt Romney early for running an investment firm that callously pushed out so many working people, which testified to his rich indifference. An ad run by the Obama-supporting super Pac Priorities USA Action featured a Kansas City steelworker: “When Mitt Romney and Bain closed the plant, I lost my health care, and my family lost their health care,” and he lost his wife to cancer in just twenty-two days. “I do not think Mitt Romney realizes what he’s done to anyone, and furthermore I do not think Mitt Romney is concerned.”29

  That attack disqualified Romney in Ohio and Michigan. So, in 2016, the GOP thought the Democrats would readily disqualify Trump because of his even greater vulnerability from his bankrupt companies that left small businesses, contractors, and employees holding the bag. They thought the Democrats would disqualify Trump because of his use of undocumented and foreign workers rather than Americans. The Clinton campaign, extraordinarily enough, did not attack Trump for forgetting his “forgotten Americans.”

  The GOP establishment did not understand how deeply the Tea Party and Evangelical base of the party were committed to Trump as the only leader who could forestall Armageddon. They were going to vote for an antiestablishment nominee, and they were not going to readily give the GOP back.

  Donald Trump showed that campaigns matter. Candidate Trump and chief strategist Steve Bannon ran a national campaign focused on Mexican immigrant violence, Muslim terrorists, a bad economy, and bad trade agreements that failed working people—all of which communicated that this Republican Party, unlike the elites of the past, would put America first and its hardworking white and Christian citizenry who were losing out in this new, multicultural America first. The powerful argument was this nationalist claim against the globalists, who couldn’t care less about the working stiff.

  President Obama closed the campaign for Hillary Clinton with rallies in Philadelphia, Raleigh, Miami, and Cleveland. Joined by Clinton and bedecked by big posters proclaiming “Choose Hope” and “Stronger Together,” the president on every occasion declared the country was headed in the right direction, with 15 million jobs, rising incomes, and falling poverty. He called on citizens “to build on the progress.” He told the base voters attending the rallies and the voters watching on their TV or phone, if you want to have another Obama term, Hillary is your man.

  In her book What Happened, Hillary Clinton noted that “Stan also thought my campaign was too upbeat on the economy, too liberal on immigration, and not vocal enough about trade.”30 She accepted “that, despite the heroic work President Obama did to get our economy back on the right track after the financial crisis, many Americans didn’t feel the recovery in their own lives and didn’t give Democrats credit.”31

  So, Clinton struggled to offer a clear economic break from Obama, which meant the change voters broke for Trump, particularly in the battleground states.

  For the first time in our post–World War II history, one major party’s stand on trade agreements played a contributory role in the election of a president, Donald Trump. He just brazenly cut through all of the fractures that divided both parties on trade and globalization and set the GOP against the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and NAFTA, the World Trade Organization (WTO), China, the EU, and the whole global trade regime.

  President Obama played a big role in aligning Democrats with these agreements and thus in legitimating Trump’s claim that only he would be able to bring back American jobs. Obama was proud to build on Bill Clinton’s legacy, which included passage of NAFTA and China’s entry into the WTO. He successfully completed the Panama, Colombia, and South Korea treaties and got them confirmed by the Congress.32 And he negotiated the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement and battled to have it pass through Congress as his final legacy, including personally lobbying the Democratic platform committee to make sure it included no language hostile to the agreement and sending cabinet members to advocate for the agreement in key states in the lead-up to the election. His plan was to bring up the treaty in the lame-duck session after Hillary Clinton was elected and before she took office.

  That meant Hillary Clinton was virtually silent or tongue-tied on trade agreements, even as Trump campaigned against TPP and NAFTA to show he was focused on American jobs. The result was trade mattered for the first time. The Diana C. Mutz study interviewed more than three thousand respondents in both 2012 and 2016, and you can see whether voters changed their positions on some issues and their perception of where the presidential candidates stood on them. Well, in 2016, the voters shifted to Trump’s position, wanting fewer trade agreements with other countries, and, ironically, voters came to believe that Clinton was pushing even harder for more trade agreements than Obama had in 2012. Then, the parties were seen as indistinguishable on wanting more trade agreements, but in 2016, voters saw the candidates as far apart, and it hurt Clinton in the election. Trump the candidate had set the agenda at Clinton’s expense.

  Issue positions of self (average voter) and perceptions of Republican and Democratic presidential candidates, 2012–2016. Note that change over time in opinion (self) is significant for own opinions on trade and immigration but not for own opinions on China. Change over time in perceived candidate positions is significant for all three issues for placement of both Republican and Democratic candidates (P<0.001).33

  The president was pressing the trade
agenda against the will of all the presidential candidates and the national Democratic political class: 75 percent of Democratic senators and 85 percent of Democratic House members voted against it.

  President Obama publicly attacked opponents Senator Elizabeth Warren, Congressman Sander Levin, and Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro, my wife, and suggested they needed to do their homework. Congresswoman DeLauro, who led the House and outside opposition to the TPP, described the contentious meeting with President Obama during a small group dinner at an off-site Democratic issues retreat.34 The exchange wasn’t angry but it was contentious. She observed, “I haven’t been invited to dinner with the president again.”35

  Democrats opposed the trade agreements, not because of union pressure, as President Obama charged, but because corporate lobbyists crafted it in secret, with special protections for foreign corporations and the outsourcing of jobs that undercut U.S. wages. It also weakened food and environmental standards.

  At the heart of Trump’s attack was the accusation that U.S. leaders had sold out the citizenry because American interests had to supersede the interests of all others. Trump did not think it was possible to have a trade agreement with reciprocity and that was mutually beneficial. He reflected Steve Bannon’s contempt for globalization that “derided the nation.”

  In the final weeks of the election, Trump declared that he would renegotiate NAFTA if elected and withdraw from the TPP.36

  The Trump-led effort to put trade agreements front and center shifted attitudes in a dramatic way. In June before the 2016 election, a majority of voters thought “past trade agreements have been a good thing” for the United States, and that view exceeded the opinion of those who thought them a bad thing by fifteen points in polls. By October and the weeks before the election, a plurality of 45 percent said past trade deals had been a bad thing. In June, strongly held opinions were equally split between their being a good and a bad thing, but in October, intense opposition was double that for those who thought them a good thing.

  The presidential campaign, on the other hand, turned Republicans dramatically against TPP, NAFTA, and just trade agreements in principle. This reflected pre-Trump long-term trends in the GOP base, which is heavily working class. Opposition in 2016 reached an intensity that would be hard to match on many issues after candidate Trump made it so central to his case against the failed elites. In June, 50 percent of registered voters opposed the TPP, but that jumped to 61 percent in October. The GOP base’s intense opposition jumped from 29 to 40 percent. So, if voters were looking for a party that hated the trade status quo, Trump gave it to them.37

  In October 2016, when the Trump-led GOP turned against NAFTA, even the GOP base had never been as enthusiastic as the party’s congressional leaders, who had provided most of the votes for its passage. Republican support went off a cliff in October when NAFTA sank to a mean score of 30.8 degrees (17 percent warm and 58 percent cool). Half gave it the most negative response possible.38

  Donald Trump made the GOP an America-first party in 2016 that was going to stand up for the American worker, unlike the elites of both parties, who had failed them. Public sentiment on trade moved closer to Trump’s position between 2012 and 2016, in part because both parties had grown substantially more doubtful about the agreements. The trade debate in the future is likely to be fought in very different ways.39

  Just as unprecedented in the 2015–16 election cycle was Donald Trump’s determination to set the GOP against immigration, particularly from Mexico, offering a “beautiful … impenetrable wall that would deter these violent immigrants from coming to the United States.”40 He also promised a Muslim ban to keep Americans safe from Syrian and other refugees who might make it to America.41

  Trump set the GOP against the growing immigration, foreign diversity, and growth of Islam in the West—all part of the growing multicultural diversity in the country.

  Hillary Clinton’s campaign was tongue-tied on economic change and trade agreements that favored Trump, but she communicated widely and with conviction her belief in America’s diversity.

  The campaign settled on “breaking barriers” as her authentic story and purpose and that a Clinton government would prioritize women and people of color. She personally flew to Flint, Michigan, to champion the African-American community there and aired her breakthrough ad in Nevada in which she hugged a Dreamer. As had President Obama, Clinton said she would build “ladders of opportunity” for each racial and ethnic group and close the gender gap for women.

  Her silence on how to manage immigration and almost exclusive focus on “a path to citizenship for the undocumented” left her vulnerable to attacks from Donald Trump.

  Nonetheless, Hillary Clinton communicated in a bigger sense that the Democratic Party was comfortable with growing immigration and foreignness, unapologetic about promoting immigration, and identified America proudly as an immigrant and multicultural country.

  The full realization of the GOP as an anti-immigrant party and the Democrats as a pro-immigration party completely polarized the parties and set their future course. It set the GOP against the multicultural America that could not be reversed—and put the GOP into a civil war against millennials and the dynamic metropolitan centers.

  But this was a Pyrrhic victory for the GOP in a country that was changing dramatically and welcoming it.

  Donald Trump played the race card in the most unapologetic way and it worked to get him across the finish line with working-class whites and in battleground Electoral College states. A study of eight thousand respondents who were polled in December 2016 and originally interviewed in 2011 and 2012 rightly put the spotlight on the Obama-Trump voters who comprised one in ten Trump voters. Sadly, the probability of switching to Trump was primarily a result of attitudes toward immigration, black people, and Muslims. Those were much more powerful than any other issues examined.42

  The success in using attitudes toward immigrants and blacks was critical to putting the pieces together for Trump in 2016. Immigration uniquely allowed Trump to unite a GOP divided on so many other issues. But immigration was also an important factor in why some of the independents and Democrats broke for Trump at the election’s close. The non–Republican Trump voters that helped him win in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin thought it was true that millions of undocumented immigrants voted illegally to elect Hillary Clinton. Their greatest hope for Trump was that he keep his promise to get immigration under control and deport those here illegally.43

  Clearly, some Democrats were looking for more from the Democrats on immigration, and that impacted Trump’s ability to shift voters with his racial ugliness in 2016.44

  The impressive research by Diana Mutz that included interviews with the same voters in 2011–12 and 2016 confirms the bigger story that unfolded on immigration. Trump had won votes because of immigration, but the electorate had shifted to be more pro-immigration, not less. More had shifted to support a “pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants” and to oppose returning “illegal immigrants to their native countries.”45 Structurally, the country was moving toward greater acceptance of immigration, even as the parties were more polarized on this issue than any other.46

  Issue positions of self (average voter) and perceptions of Republican and Democratic presidential candidates, 2012–2016. Note that change over time in opinion (self) is significant for own opinions on trade and immigration but not for own opinions on China. Change over time in perceived candidate positions is significant for all three issues for placement of both Republican and Democratic candidates (P<0.001). S=Self (Own Opinions), R=Perceived position of the Republican Candidate, D=Perceived position of the Democratic Candidate.47

  As the country became more visibly multicultural and accepting of the change, President Trump forced the GOP to resist even harder, pushing the GOP closer to the precipice.

  Think of that next time President Trump trashes a black NFL athlete, attacks refugees as “savages,” tries to investigate land se
izures from white farmers in South Africa, describes African nations as those “shithole countries,” or describes his handling of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico as “one of the great untold success stories.” He is telling the country in the starkest and ugliest way that the GOP is a party for white people, just as the majority of the country who welcomes a multicultural America grows year on year.

  THE CALIFORNIZATION OF THE GOP

  Two decades earlier, California Republicans had watched their state grow steadily more Hispanic, and they reacted by putting Proposition 187 on the ballot in 1994. It barred undocumented immigrants from attending public schools or being treated in hospitals and required their names be reported to the authorities or to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), though the federal courts later blocked the law from ever being implemented. Governor Pete Wilson campaigned in favor of Prop 187, and that proved a defining and branding moment for the GOP in California and, increasingly, in the Southwest, where other Republican governors led similar fights to toughen enforcement of immigration laws.

  In California, the Republican Party had always been a low-tax, small-government party in the Ronald Reagan tradition, but worries about the growing demographic threat from Hispanics and the battle over immigration drove out other issues. The party’s candidates included many who were pro-environment and pro-choice on abortion or who wanted to regulate guns, including Pete Wilson, for one, as well as Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. The cultural battle for survival against these accelerating, unstoppable immigration changes pushed other worries and priorities to the side or left those moderate constituencies to other parties to win over.