What’s Next For the GOP?
As the GOP inches closer an closer towards the cliff, will it fall off the edge ?
Despite a very poor handling of the COVID19 pandemic, a crumbling economy, a sudden fall of his approval ratings nationally and failed election messaging, Donald J. Trump still seems to maintain an almost unbelievably tight hold onto its base. According to the latest Morning Consult/Politico poll of 653 republicans taken on June 17th 2020, more than 80% of them still approves of his record. In an era of hyper-partisanship and hyper-polarization this is not surprising but it is extremely concerning for the future of the party as it reveals that the GOP is becoming — slowly but surely — more extreme, more hostile, less approved and less democratic election cycle after election cycle.
40 years ago, Ronald Reagan won his Party’s nomination and the Presidency with a simple slogan: “Make America Great Again”. How? By running on the fantasized notion of a glorious and unsullied past but also by riding the wave of a new rising type of conservatism that he helped to popularize after his first failed Republican presidential primary campaign back in 1964. This conservatism model is one that is more local or grassroots based, more extreme, more outspoken and less constrained by the current establishment, one in which the perpetual challenge to the status quo is considered the essential condition of real American conservatism. in 1988, Reagan even labeled himself and other GOP officials elected back in 1980, as “revolutionnaries”. To illustrate, his presidential campaign ran on issues spanning from major tax cuts and deregulation policies, wedging a full on (racially charged) war on drugs to advocating for state’s rights, for the pro-life movement and in favor of the STOP ERA movement. The southern religious right, rural America and white suburbia throughout the US ultimately pushed him over 270, two consecutive times.
Sounds familiar? It’s because todays’ Trumpism is nothing more than the logic continuation of the rightward radicalization of the Republican Party since Reagan.
Fifty to fourty years ago, movements such as the Civil Rights, Women’s Rights, Gay Rights, Anti-war and the ERA — to quote a few — gained momentum and began their rise into the political and media mainstream. Through the 60’s to the 80’s, the Democratic Party began to advocate for and align — part of — it’s policies, leadership and platform planks to meet those movement’s numerous claims and desire for political representation and legitimacy. As Democrats began their move further to the left on numerous social issues, right-wing republican organizations took this opportunity to push the GOP even more rightward on the same set of social issues in an attempt to set themselves apart as the party of morality, values, family, law and order, states rights and religious liberty in order to solidify their position among key republican leaning groups at the time. Indeed, groups such as the religious right, southern disenfranchised white democrats and white suburbanites were heavily targeted as they began to back away from the Democratic Party and appeared to start leaning more heavily onto the GOP.
It was the right-wing activists who founded and funded organizations such as the John Birch Society, the Eagle Forum and ALEC. It was them who also fueled movements such as STOP ERA, the Pro-Life, Pro-Family and Anti-Civil Rights movement. And it was them who organized, linked and coalesced numerous religious groups such as the Baptist and Catholic Church in the south , which revealed to be a crucial step for the implementation and solidification of the Southern Strategy later on, at the end of the 70’s.
Ultimately, it was those right-wing grassroots based groups, scattered across the country but mainly the south, who advocated for and supported republicans in the likes of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. They put those republicans on the map, offered them a huge platform and helped them win over crucial republican constituencies in primaries as well as the general.
They began the never-ending extremist-ward push of the GOP.
20 years after Reagan, in 2000, George W. Bush was elected President. He was a firm believer in what he referred to as “compassionate conservatism”. Compassionate conservatism was essentially a branch of the conservative political philosophy which stated that through the use of traditional conservative political beliefs, the general welfare of society would improve. The terms origin is credited with the US politician Doug Wead, who coined the term in 1979 during a speech. It is the belief that Republicans should be motivated to change the status quo of American society, and that the efforts required to do that should be driven by compassion above all else. Wead’s belief was that the general electorate would not support Republican policies, even if they worked, if the party implementing those policies was perceived to be uncaring first and foremost. Some even suggested that the greatest use of compassionate conservatism occurred under the Presidency of George.W. Bush who stated that “It is compassionate to actively help out citizens in need. It is conservative to insist on accountability and results”. However, the belief is often criticized for sugar coating a harsh conservative approach to government. In 1999, President Bill Clinton gave a scathing attack on compassionate conservatism in which he summarized the approach of saying conservatives ‘would like to do something, but they can’t’.
Bush was looking at shifting the narrative around conservatism as a whole. Compassionate conservatism was a way to soften the mainstream GOP’s brand and show that 21th Century’s republicans were ready to try and act as something different.
the 2000’s was a period during which the GOP showed some kind of motivation, at least on the surface, to acknowledge and hold itself accountable to its past. Something that would’ve seem inconceivable today. In 2005, RNC Chair Ken Melhman, apologized — on the behalf of the GOP — for the implementation of the Southern strategy during the NAACP National Convention. Republicans also showed some will, again, on the surface, by rebranding their platform as more compassionate and more bipartisan as a way to appeal to right-leaning independents, moderate white voters, more NBPOC and Women. At this point in time, the GOP had no hope of ever appealing back to the African American electorate, but at that moment, another demographic group — Hispanics — was starting to gain more electoral maturity as it became a bigger and bigger slice of the eligible voting electorate in crucial battleground states of the 2000’s : Florida, Colorado, Nevada, Virginia and New Mexico. Hispanics, as an electoral group, leaned more older, socially conservative and religious than the national average. This electorate seemed to share a lot of characteristics with the White electorate, the heart of the GOP. Republicans therefore perceived Hispanics as a potential electorate they could make very competitive or even solidify in incoming elections. The GOP wanted to expand in those states and make Hispanics and Women a key constituency of the Republican Party.
But, at its core, the GOP had not changed. Goerge W.Bush continued to support stricter immigration enforcement laws at the border, a free market healthcare system and privatized Social Security. He also wasn’t shy about his advocacy for the Pro-Gun and Pro-Life movement, for the Iraq War and for the Death Penalty and anti LGBTQ+ rights.
After Bush’s win in 2004, the GOP had high hopes.
That would be crushed later on.
4 years later, McCain lost in a landslide.
Then came the 2010’s. Romney also lost.
from a 2000’s perspective, 2004 was the last presidential election that republicans would win for the next 12 years and 2000 would also be the last presidential election in which republicans actually won the popular vote in a presidential election. During this decade, the “compassionate conservatism” philosophy fell into decline with the end of the Bush administration in 2009, eclipsed by the Tea Party era of radical right wing conservatism and activism that was already half a century in the making.
The establishment was beginning to face a lot of resentment after Romney’s defeat. During this decade, the Tea Party, a new movement decades in the making, was born. Fueled by exacerbated right wing activism, hyper-partisanship, polarization, and a volatile political climate, this movement threw away the Neo-Conservative Bush establishment trope and coalesced behind a more populist, anti-system/anti-establishment and extreme type of conservatism. It obviously shared a lot of similarities with right-wing movements of the 70’s and 80’s.
This movement naturally flourished at the end of the 2000’s and the beginning of the 2010’s. The compassionate conservative approach the GOP had tried never actually worked and only achieved to frustrate the base and stimulate right-wing activism within conservative communities and media.
The 2010 midterms were then, the movement’s first contest. It didn’t exactly made a lot of breakthroughs with the candidates that aligned the most with it but showed — during the primaries — that the right-wing of the party was a force to be reckoned with. On election night, the GOP was projected to have gained 60 seats in the House, mainly thanks to crucial Tea Party local grassroots efforts. Many observers credited this performance to the interest and enthusiasm generated by the Tea Party. Over the next two to four years, recognizing its electoral potential, the Republican Party endeavored to bring Tea Party supporters into the Republican mainstream by shifting even more to the right.
Three years after the Tea Party 2010 midterms’ success at perpetuating the rightward descent of the GOP, the Republican Autopsy Report came out. The Report hinted at key elements of the 2012 republican presidential campaign to assess what went wrong. It was an unusually startlingly frank document — especially coming from Republicans — that looked towards the long-term health of the party and advocated for major and fast changes in how the party addressed minorities, women and its own campaign processes if it wanted to stay competitive in future elections, federally and locally. In a nutshell, this report showcased the potential long- term benefits linked to essential changes to the GOP platform such as promoting comprehensive immigration reform, comprehensive gun control legislation, bipartisan legislation and fast and heavy outreach meant at turning out NBPOC ( Asians and Hispanics mainly), Women and Younger voters (Millennials + Gen Z) in favor of the republicans.
But this report was never really implemented. Especially after the 2014 midterms when Republicans registered one their best midterm performance in decades.
In 2014, despite heavy losses for Tea Party candidates, it seemed that across the country, establishment Republicans, many of whom had ticked right to embrace elements of the Tea Party platform, won nominations in closely watched races. In November of that year, Republicans made sizable gains, winning a majority in the US Senate and retaining control of the House. In addition to capturing both chambers of Congress, the GOP won numerous state governorships, along with maintaining and winning control of many crucial state legislatures. Neo-Conservative establishment republicans viewed the result as a return to prominence for the party’s mainstream but Tea Party activists saw it — instead — as a maturation of the movement. Tea Party challenges at the primary level had in fact, pushed many of the eventual Republican nominees to the extreme. As more and more right-wing activists ran for elected office and organized to elect their own and to promote their agendas, the GOP was beginning to shift further and further to the right in what seemed at the time a sudden shift but was actually just a continuation — on an upward trajectory — that began 40 years ago, just after the election of Ronald Reagan.
After experiencing one their best performances in decades, the GOP’s shift rightward, coupled with more populist, white identity politics, anti-establishement and socially conservative rhetoric, was perceived to be a brilliant and efficient electoral strategy on which to base future Republican presidential campaigns. The 2010 and 2014 midterms were a sneak peak at what would inevitably come next.
In 2016, the GOP had transformed. Most of the prominent and long standing republicans in the House and Senate, such as Congressman Ted Yoho (R-FL), Congressman Steve King (R-IA), Sen Ted Cruz (R-TX), Sen Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnel (R-KY), were now members or closely aligned with Tea Party beliefs, electoral strategy and campaigning methods/rhetoric.
The 2016 Republican Primary began with the announcement of two consequential figures of the Tea Party movement and potential front-runners, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio. Meanwhile, other popular GOP governors such as the Former Governor of Florida, Jeb Bush and Former Governor of Ohio, John Kasich, ran.
Donald Trump took the primary by storm when he declared his candidacy on June 16th 2015. His character coupled with his outsider status and anti-system rhetoric made him a very unique and appealing candidate for right-wing extremists and far-right media. As Trump gained steam in the primary and as mainstream media began to heavily cover and normalize his campaign, his candidacy rose to co front-runner status beside Cruz and Rubio, in a matter of weeks. He ran a primary campaign based on white identity politics, anti-establishment rhetoric, on his businessman record, on Pro-Life and hard-line immigration rhetoric and played onto the economic and cultural anxiety of the evangelical, rural and white non-college educated electorate. Just like Ronald Reagan, he also ran with the timeless slogan :“Make America Great Again”. Tea Party supporters quickly rallied around his campaign and gave him an edge in a historically crowded Republican Primary that allowed him to stand out from the rest of the pack.
After a promising second place in Iowa, he then crushed the other contenders in the New Hampshire primary and rose to front-runner status instantaneaously. He then went on to dominate in almost every other state primaries and clinched the Republican nomination on May 27th 2016.
During the general election, Trump followed the exact same path that got him the nomination. The same path that got Reagan, the White House, 40 years ago.
Instead of running a presidential campaign conscious about modern demographic trends and cultural shifts, he focused on an electoral strategy (also supported by the 2016 GOP’s platform) designed at boosting turnout among disenfranchised rural and suburban, older and white non-college educated voters. His strategy also relied on voter suppression and voter misinformation enabled by right-wing grassroots activists, statewide elected officials and right-wing propaganda from conservative media.
This strategy was as effective as it was back in the 80's. Trumpism knew how to tap into and profit off white nationalistic sentiment and white anxiety, because they followed the same playbook that Reagan and other republican presidential candidates have publicly or secretly been following for decades. For context, the 2010’s was already a decade ridden with economic and cultural anxiety. This, coupled with a very polarized political climate and growing right wing sentiment plaguing the republican electorate , eventually set the stage for Trumpism to assert itself and thrive in.
From 2009 to 2019, while the economy was still in recovery mode and while unemployment was dropping, hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs — especially in the Midwest — would never be recovered, leaving millions of previous white non-college educated Obama voters, alienated. They would later switch to Trump. On the same period, the Tea Party aggressively pushed the GOP’s platform and base to the right of numerous social and economic issues and popularized the distrust of large liberal/mainstream media creating and reinforcing a cycle where the republican base would, over time, only deem legitimate, information supported by the GOP or coming from conservative media such as Fox News or conservative youtube talk shows. In 2014, the movement Black Lives Matter rose to prominence and with it, the conversation about race and policing in America. This movement highlighted the growing tension between Black/Brown and White America, the growing divide between white college educated and white non-college educated voters and the growing divergence between suburban and rural America on issues such as systemic racism, policing, immigration etc.
As this decade progressed, the GOP embraced its true heritage. Trumpism isn’t something new or separate from the Republican Party, it is the Republican Party. It is the fulfilment of more than 40 years of rightward push on economic and social issues and of unchecked radicalization from the base to the top, enabled and empowered by both, liberal and conservative media and by right wing organizations such as the NRA and conspiracy theories such as birtherism and QAnon. Ultimately, Trump’s popularity and strength among the base can be perceived as the unmasking of how the Grand Old Party devolved from a business-centered, small town, white protestant set of beliefs from the beginning of the 20th Century, into a party which feeds and thrives on white identity politics, misogyny, racism, right-wing propaganda, fear-mongering, anti-science beliefs and rethoric, voter suppression, gerrymandering, unaccountability, socialism for the rich and so much more.
For all intent and purposes, even if the current president isn’t in the White House next year, Trumpism will be alive and kicking both inside congress, party leadership and in state parties and legislatures. It’s a vicious cycle. From the 1980’s to the 2010’s, the descent into extremism in the GOP would beget numerous retirements of old incumbent republicans and enable competitive primary challenges to less ideological and more establishment republicans at the local and then nationwide level. It began silently with the takeover of party committees, state committees, state senate and house districts by candidates funded and supported by right-wing grassroots activists and it expanded quickly and more loudly — with the rise of the Tea Party movement and the growing distrust of mainstream media— in congress, at the house and senatorial level .
Forty years of unchecked and unpunished extremism therefore enabled right-wing activism, organizations, movements and candidates to clear up the last of the less ideological and more institutionalist wing of the party and replace them with far-right republicans. This cycle allowed for far-right politics and leadership to take root and thrive in GOP state parties at first and then at the statewide and national level today. The days when the GOP was still a party interested in governing and was only trying to appeal to far-right movements and activist as a near term electoral strategy to advance their own pro-system/establishement agenda are long gone. Right-wing national figures, politics and discourse have now took center stage of the party’s platform, leadership, electoral and communication strategy.
Trumpism is for all account, the inevitable fulfillment of the rise of right-wing extremism in the party and the death wish of the GOP.
From the 2000’s to the 2010’s, as the GOP moved rightward both in leadership and on political issues, the party became less and less interested in governing and figured out that there was an extra reactionary element to be gained from tapping into racism toward Obama, sexism to Pelosi and xenophobia to latino immigrants. They realized they could simmer it, stoke it, manipulate it and that it could be mined for voters and for viewers and it worked. Both came. The voters to the midterms and presidential election, the viewers to the right-wing media machine.
Trump, former reality TV star, has time and time again, demonstrated his — franckly frightening — ability to know how to talk to the cameras, how to manipulate an audience and how to twist the truth.
Today’s GOP has transitionned from a governing institution into a political entertainment complex. It is a post-policy party. On issue after issue, republican leaders have abandoned policy details for campaign rhetoric relayed and exacerbated by conservative media such as Breitbart or Fox News. They also have dismissed scientific evidence, eschewed substantive analysis and placed political point-scoring above leadership. It has been almost 4 years now that the Republican Party has held the power of the presidency as well as a senate majority but have yet to write or propose any concrete bill or hold a vote on a bill that would actually benefit the majority of the American people and not their lobbyist. Despite having a republican president coupled with a republican senate, the GOP still finds a way to act and behave like a minority party, because it’s all they know how to do. The GOP is not interested in governing or leading the country anymore. In the contrary, this party seems to have abandoned any attempts at finding middle ground with democrats or at establishing and pursuing any long-term electoral strategy.
Entertainment is the only reason as of why the GOP is still relevant today. It deflects from their total lack of governing and leadership skills and it shifts the electorate attention away from real problems that republicans and their lobbyist don’t want to deal with such as healthcare, taxes or climate change to GOP-made cultural and ideological wars meant at fueling an endless cycle of news entertainment in which voters, pollsters and elected officals get sucked in. Entertainment keeps the GOP’s base enthusiastic and oblivious to reality while it just stokes more backlash from the left which in turn, reinforces republican’s already engrained set of beliefs that the left is out to end their way of life, to take away their freedom (privileges) and to challenge their status in American society.
This strategy is aimed at stoking constant ideological warfare that’ll eventually help to polarize the electorate in a way that’ll enable republicans to tap into their crystallized base to hold onto power even if they are the minority party. Republicans have real interests in keeping the country from becoming a real democracy, because their rule depends entirely on hyper-polarized and hyper-partisan politics. It almost entirely explains this shift towards hyperpartisanship that we’ve been witnessing since the beginning of the 21st Century, which has reached an inflection point today. Trumpism puts it bluntly that what republicans strive for is not governing for the many but power to maintain the status-quo for the few.
And that doesn’t bode well for the GOP.
Previously, i mentionned that Wead’s belief — about the governing methods of the GOP— “was that the general electorate would not support Republican policies, even if they worked, if the party implementing those policies was perceived to be uncaring first and foremost”. Not only have republicans abandoned any type of governing but they’re also actively undermining the common good’s interest. They have shown time and time again their true colors. From passing plutocratic policies and thriving on white identity politics to actively trying to undermine the democratic process and its institutions. Ultimately, People are waking up and are rapidly beginning to understand that the GOP never has and never will, act in the their economic or social interest.
The shifting electorate’s perception towards trumpism and the GOP is far from the only backlash or challenge that’ll inevitably make the party and the leadership implode on itself.
Fisrt and foremost, i want you to keep in mind that the 4 decades ahead of us are going to be wild. It’s going to be a period during which a major demographic shift will undoubtedly completely reorganize both the electoral map and the balance of political power between minorities and white people, young and old , cities and rural areas and consequently, the left and the right.
Since the 2000’s, this shift has been silently happening but not happening fast enough for republicans to categorize it as a threatening trend back then. The GOP felt like it could just ignore the demographic trends and continue on with their same old near-term strategy aimed at mustering and exploiting white resentement and anxiety. White identity politics was a winning strategy both in 2014 and 2016 but for how much longer will it stay a winning electoral strategy if it isn’t based on long-term trends?
This strategy proved its limits during the 2018 midterms. The GOP lost a senate seat in Arizona of all places, lost a lot of ground in previously republican friendly suburbs and came very close to losing Texas and Georgia on the senatorial level. Both historically reliable red states but both experiencing a major influx of more educated, more diverse and younger people. This presidential cycle, Virginia, Nevada, Colorado and Minnesota, 4 states previously labelled as swing states back in 2012 and 2016 are now likely blue due to their more suburban and diverse population. On the other hand, Arizona, Texas and Georgia are now widely considered as swing states because of a population that is rapidly growing more diverse, more younger and more left leaning. It’s not just those states though, it actually seems like the whole Sun Belt region is experiencing or soon going to experience a transforming demographic shift as it is going to be the fastest growing region in the US for the next three to four coming decades.
Remember, the correlation between a higher non-hispanic white share of the population of a certain state and this state’s voting pattern is unequivocal. States with a higer non-hispanic white share of their electorate are likelier to vote in favor of the GOP. On the other hand, states with a higher minority share of their electorate are likelier to be more competitive and even favor the Democrats. Voting patterns still remains very diverging between white college educated and white non- college educated voters. It does explain why some northeastern white states vote heavily in the favor of democrats and why southern and midwestern states, on the contrary, vote heavily in the favor of the GOP. But it’s all going to change in the coming decades. As the white share of the electorate in southern states is going to shrink the region will begin to consists of “majority-minority” states as soon as 2030.
The US population as a whole is projected to become more diverse, as seen in the projected increases in the percentage of the population that is a minority (groups other than non-Hispanic White alone). By 2044, the United States is projected to become a plurality nation. While the non-Hispanic White alone population will still be the largest, no race or ethnic group is projected to have greater than a 50 percent share of the nation’s total. Shifts in the racial and ethnic composition of the future population are projected to occur primarily within the native population, which will become majority-minority by 2044. The child population within the United States is even more diverse and is projected to experience the majority- minority crossover in 2020, this year.
With the crossover into a majority-minority nation bound to happen as soon as this year for the younger population and as late as 2044 for the older population, the electoral map will undoubtedly shift in the democrats favor. Especially when you take into account the fact that today’s younger generations are much more diverse and way more left-leaning than their older counterparts but that they’ll also replace the current older generations in the coming decades.
Electorally, the new south and sun-belt’s future demographics will eventually render the traditional southern strategy totally impracticable for republicans making them lose their regional and structural advantage where they once dominated.
These projections just shows how quick the demographic shift is going to happen and how little time the GOP has to fundamentally change.
To put it bluntly, the GOP has major and most undoubtebly, fatal, flaws. Demographically, it is the party of white people and more precisely, old, rural and non college educated white people. Ideologically, it is the party of right-wing extremism and white identity politics. The base on which they rely on is not only stagnating but is set to shrink drastically in the next two decades. Ideologically, right-wing extremism and white identity politics will quickly lose their relevancy as successfull electoral startegies in a younger, more left-leaning and (very) soon to become majority-minority country.
Not only did the GOP ignored — and still ignores to a degree — demographic trends for decades and stopped caring about national interests but it has also actively — throughout decades of voter suppression, gerrymandering and red lining — disenfranchised and built an intergenerationnal distrust into black and brown voters. The kind of resentment felt by black and brown voters towards the GOP is now beginning to be shared by white people and by younger generations (millennials and Gen Z).
Realistically, the Republican Party doesn’t have two decades to act. At most, the party has a decade to fundamentally change its public perception, its electoral strategies and its platform — if it has one. That’s if they begin now. But we know they won’t.
The GOP is not at a crossroads anymore, it’s now on the cliff’s edge. Barring any new major developpement or any genuine backtrack attempts, the GOP is already burning from the margins and it’ll soon reach the core of the party. Something much more dangerous, less entertaining and toxic to Democracy will rise from its ashes.