Peter Coy of Bloomberg Businessweek explores the response from traditional Republican groups to presidential candidate Donald Trump’s message.
The question of identity cuts deeper than usual this year for Republicans, who convene in Cleveland starting July 18. Trump rejects much of what his party stands for—or has stood for until now, anyway. For that reason some party regulars such as Akerson still view him as an undeserving interloper. Except that he got more votes than every orthodox Republican in this year’s primaries—and, as it happens, more primary votes than any other Republican has ever received. “I don’t think when you have this degree of political support for a candidate, you can consider it a fluke,” says James Cicconi, who worked for President Reagan and went on to be deputy chief of staff to President George H.W. Bush but is voting for Clinton this year.
Cicconi has a point: Trump might just have located the pulsing heart of a new Republican Party. In 2014, when his run for president was a gleam in nobody’s eye but his, the Pew Research Center clustered American adults into eight groups of roughly equal size based on how they answered 23 questions on subjects including immigration and gun control. No surprise, “business conservatives” and “steadfast conservatives” tended to agree with each other on a lot of matters, as did “solid liberals” and the lower-income “faith and family left.”
Pew identified several issues on which voters busted out of the classic left-right continuum. Business conservatives and the older, less educated steadfast conservatives were far apart, for instance, on whether the U.S. should “concentrate on things at home.” Steadfast conservatives were far more isolationist. Today they form the core of Trump’s base, cheering him on when he threatens to reduce the U.S. commitment to NATO. There were splits on the Left as well. Pew found that 82 percent of the faith and family left agreed that most people can get ahead if they’re willing to work hard, but only 29 percent of solid liberals felt that way, although they earn more.
Trump’s brand of Republicanism draws heavily on support from Pew’s steadfast conservatives and much less on business conservatives, who part with him on trade and immigration. He also reaches across the aisle to appeal to what Pew labels “hard-pressed skeptics,” a mostly white group that leaned heavily toward the Democratic Party as of 2014 but believes government is wasteful, considers immigrants a burden, and agrees that “success in life is determined by forces outside our control.”
Even before Trump arrived on the scene, the Republican Party was struggling to hold together a diverse set of voting blocs. Bible-loving religious faithful keep their distance from abortion-permitting, marijuana-decriminalizing libertarians, who are suspicious of subsidy-taking CEOs. The glue that traditionally held the party together was support for small government and low taxes.
Now it’s something else. Trump has made clear that shrinking government is less important to him than “making America great again.” He opposes cuts in Social Security and Medicare. Conservatives are skeptical of his promise of tax cuts because he hasn’t sketched out plausible spending cuts to pay for them. His positions on immigration and trade conflict with the party’s free-market agenda. On social issues, too, he departs from party orthodoxy. While opposing abortion, he’s praised Planned Parenthood. He brags of having “so many fabulous friends who happen to be gay.”
The Republican leadership has no one but itself to blame for Trump’s emergence as its de facto head, says former House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, who in 2014 lost in the primary to a Tea Party challenger coming at him from the right. GOP leaders created an opening for Trump by “overpromising and underdelivering,” says Cantor, who’s now vice chairman of Moelis, a boutique investment bank. “The inability of the party to connect to people’s problems and to demonstrate that we have a solution to their problems has become a big challenge.”
