By Josh Hammer
In the 2016 Republican Party presidential primary, decades of dissonance between the party’s aggrieved grassroots and its blinkered elite spilled out into the open. For years, the chasm widened between the GOP’s heartland base, the river valley-dwelling “Somewheres” from David Goodhart’s 2017 book, The Road to Somewhere, and the party’s bicoastal “Anywhere” rulers. The foot-soldier Republican “Somewheres,” disproportionately church-attending and victimized by job outsourcing and the opioid crisis, felt betrayed by the more secular, ideologically inflexible Republican “Anywheres.”
Donald Trump, lifelong conservative “outsider” and populist dissenter from bicoastal “Anywhere” orthodoxy on issues pertaining to trade, immigration, and China, coasted to the GOP’s presidential nomination. He did so notwithstanding the all-hands-on-deck pushback from leading right-leaning “Anywhere” bastions, encapsulated by National Review magazine’s dedication of an entire issue to, “Against Trump.” Trump’s subsequent victory in the 2016 general election sent the conservative intellectual movement, as well as the Republican Party itself, into a deep state of introspection.
Trump’s victory was primarily propelled by a white working-class revolt, but the emergence during his presidency of a deeply censorious and anti-American left—epitomized by the Democrats’ outrageous conduct during the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court confirmation battle and the destructive “1619 riots” last summer—opened the door for a broader working-class, pro-America political coalition. By Election Day 2020, that multiethnic, working-class conservative coalition had begun to take more definite shape. Trump lost a nail-biter of an election, but the GOP made massive inroads in crucial black and Hispanic communities, such as Florida’s Miami-Dade County and the heavily Mexican counties dotting Texas’ Rio Grande Valley.
Now over a year removed from the 2020 presidential election, as Joe Biden’s poll numbers plummet and frantic Democrats gird themselves for a 2022 midterm election shellacking, data continues to trickle in supporting the emergence of a “Somewhere”-centric, multiethnic, working-class Republican coalition. In Texas, where former Democratic Representative Beto O’Rourke lost to incumbent Republican Senator Ted Cruz by less than three points in 2018, a new Quinnipiac University poll finds Republican incumbent Governor Greg Abbott, up for reelection in 2022, leading challenger O’Rourke by a whopping 15 points. Abbott outright leads O’Rourke among Texas Hispanic voters, 44 to 41, and Texas Hispanics disapprove of Biden’s job performance by a massive 27-point margin.
A new Wall Street Journal national poll evinces much the same trend. On a generic Republican versus Democrat ballot, the WSJ poll shows Hispanics evenly split 37 to 37. Nationally, Hispanics disapprove of Biden’s job performance by 12 points, and they support Biden over Trump in a hypothetical 2024 presidential rematch by a razor-thin 44 to 43 margin. Nor, of course, is the GOP’s good news with Hispanic voters limited to Texas; in Florida, the state’s growing conservative-leaning Cuban and Venezuelan populations make Republican incumbents Governor Ron DeSantis and Senator Marco Rubio heavy favorites for reelection next fall.
If the trendlines continue, the Democratic Party could end up as a parochial regional party with extremely limited statewide appeal outside the Northeast and the West Coast. But the trendlines are not guaranteed to continue; the onus is now on Republican leaders to ensure the party’s new coalitional inroads are nurtured, not squandered.
The woke Left’s dramatic cultural excesses, especially on such issues as policing, critical race theory and gender ideology, have already paid some handsome dividends for the GOP—just look at Virginia Governor-elect Glenn Youngkin. And because the Left has overstepped so much on bread-and-butter cultural issues, the temptation will be strong for the Right to exclusively focus on that fertile terrain.
This would be a mistake; the Right can and should aggressively fight the culture war with the aim of victory, but it must not lose sight of the economic issues that helped propel Trump’s insurgency and the subsequent emergence of the GOP’s multiethnic, working-class coalition. That coalition is deeply discomfited by the wokesters’ anti-American cultural assault, but it is also turned off by the old Republican guard’s dogmatic commitment to laissez-faire absolutism. Immigration restrictionism, trade pragmatism, total disentanglement from China and the prudential use of antitrust against the Big Tech giants and other woke corporate miscreants must become part of a standard “common good capitalism” Republican economic repertoire.
The median voter is culturally commonsensical (respecting the flag, saluting the troops, appreciating the police) and economically pragmatic. The Republican Party has a golden opportunity to attract and maintain the support of that crucial bloc. It must not blow it.
特朗普的胜利主要是由白人工人阶级的反抗推动的,但在他的总统任期内,出现了一个高度批评和反美的左派,民主党在布雷特·卡瓦诺(Brett Kavanaugh)最高法院确认战期间的无耻行为,以及去年夏天破坏性的“1619骚乱”,为更广泛的工人阶级亲美政治联盟打开了大门。到2020年选举日,多种族、工人阶级的保守派联盟已开始形成更明确的形态。特朗普在一场激烈的选举中失利,但共和党在关键的黑人和西班牙裔社区取得了巨大的进展,比如佛罗里达州的迈阿密-戴德县,以及散布在德州格兰德河谷的墨西哥人聚居的县。
现在距离2020年总统大选还有一年多的时间,随着乔·拜登(Joe Biden)的民调数字大幅下降,以及疯狂的民主党人为2022年中期选举的失败做好了准备,支持以“某处”为中心、多种族、工薪阶层的共和党联盟的数据继续在慢慢增加。在德克萨斯州,前民主党众议员贝托·奥洛克2018年以不到3个百分点的差距输给了现任共和党参议员泰德·克鲁兹,昆尼皮亚克大学的一项新民调发现,共和党现任州长格雷格·阿博特有望在2022年连任,他以15个百分点的差距领先于挑战者奥洛克。在德州的拉美裔选民中,阿博特以44比41的支持率遥遥领先奥洛克。德州的拉美裔选民对拜登的工作表现表示不满,两人的支持率相差27个百分点。
《华尔街日报》(Wall Street Journal)一项新的全国性民调也显示了大致相同的趋势。在共和党和民主党的投票中,《华尔街日报》的调查显示,拉美裔选民的支持率为37比37。在全国范围内,西班牙裔对拜登的工作表现不满意的比例为12个百分点,在假设的2024年总统大选再战中,他们支持拜登的比例仅为44比43。当然,共和党对拉美裔选民的好消息也不仅仅局限于德克萨斯州;在佛罗里达州,该州倾向于保守的古巴人和委内瑞拉人越来越多,这使得现任共和党州长罗恩·德桑蒂斯和参议员马可·卢比奥成为明年秋天连任的热门人选。
如果这种趋势继续下去,民主党最终可能成为一个在东北和西海岸以外的全州范围内的吸引力极其有限的地区性政党。但这一趋势并不能保证会持续下去;现在,共和党领导人有责任确保该党新联盟的进展得到培育,而不是被浪费。
觉醒的左派在文化方面的过分行为,尤其是在治安、批判种族理论和性别意识形态等问题上,已经给共和党带来了可观的回报——只要看看当选弗吉尼亚州州长的格伦·杨金就知道了。而且,由于左翼在面包和黄油的文化问题上已经越界太多,右翼将会强烈地将注意力集中在这块肥沃的土地上。
这可能是一个错误;右翼可以也应该以胜利为目标,积极开展文化战争,但他们绝不能忽视经济问题,正是这些问题推动了特朗普的叛乱,以及随后共和党多种族、工人阶级联盟的出现。工人党的反美文化攻击让这一联盟深感不安,但老共和党人对自由放任的绝对主义的教条承诺也让这一联盟受挫。移民限制主义、贸易实用主义、与中国彻底脱离关系,以及对大型科技巨头和其他觉醒的企业恶棍谨慎使用反垄断手段,必须成为共和党标准的“共同利益资本主义”经济曲目的一部分。
中间选民在文化上是明智的(尊重国旗、向军队致敬、赞赏警察),在经济上也是务实的。共和党有一个绝好的机会来吸引并保持这一关键阵营的支持。一定不能搞砸了。
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