The Republican Party Has to Choose Between Two Paths Forward

As the date on which the Electoral College results confirming Joe Biden's election gets closer and closer, as a piece in The Atlantic by a former Republican lays out, Republicans are approaching a point where they must decide between two paths going forward if they hope to avoid becoming a permanent minority party over the coming decade in all but the most rural backward states. One approach is more of the same with reliance on gerrymandering, voter disenfranchisement, and the structural defect in the USA's constitutional system that gives even the smallest, thinly populated states two U.S. Senators.  This approach allows minority rule of the majority - or at least until the majority revolts and a systemic change is forced through.  The other is to modernize and seek to appeal to the rapidly changing majority of the county which is increasingly racially diverse, less religious, and better educated than today's GOP base.  A party with a long term plan and desire to thrive would choose the latter.  Sadly, given the deplorables (e.g., white supremacists, right wing Christian fanatics and ever greedy wealthy) who make up the current base of the GOP than approach may be off the table.  Here are column highlights:

Since the election, some of Trump’s supporters have begun to ponder pursuing a “Trumpism without Trump,” crafting a Trumpist ideology severed from Trump’s self-harming personality and grudges.

There are at least two big problems with this concept.

First, it’s not at all clear that such a thing as Trumpism exists, apart from Donald Trump’s own personality and grudges. Subtract Trump’s resentments and the myth of Trump the business genius and what’s left? Are immigration restriction, trade war with China, and blowing up NATO really such compelling concerns? Are those goals what energized 71 million Americans? Would they energize voters to support Tom Cotton, Dan Crenshaw, Josh Hawley, or Marco Rubio? That seems unlikely. And while there are potential contenders for the resentment vote—the cable host Tucker Carlson, Trump’s son Don Jr.—they cannot offer the myth of business success. Worse, they overdo the resentment. That’s fine for carving out a cable-TV or Facebook-based business. But if resentment didn't work politically for George Wallace in 1968, it’s not going to work for George Wallace knockoffs in 2024.

The second problem is that Trump was felled by basic math. He polarized American society in a way that trapped him on the less numerous pole. The anti-Trump vote exceeded the pro-Trump vote by almost 3 million in 2016, by nearly 9 million in 2018, and by 5 million and counting in 2020.

Trump’s ego needs blinded him to that truth. He clutched a fantasy of his superb campaign and triumphant candidacy, and even now, he clings to the delusion that he did not really lose the 2020 election by a decisive margin. But Trumpism without Trump would face the challenge of reality. Trumpism minus Trump is Trumpism minus the excitement that mobilized Trump supporters, but still with many of the issues that repelled Trump opponents. Trumpism minus Trump has no idea how to shrink the gender gap among voters, no idea how to appeal to the college-educated, no message for the suburbs except more and noisier racism, nothing that can speak to the productive centers of the new American economy.

As for the idea of bypassing the college-educated, the suburbs, and the great majority of American women so that the party can reinvent itself as “a multiethnic, multiracial working class coalition,” in Rubio’s words—how can that fantasy come to life? The GOP has no coherent policy on health insurance or college-tuition costs. Trump appealed to less educated voters in part via his seething loathing of experts. But unlike his would-be successors, Trump meant it. He could feel smart only by dismissing everybody else as dumb, and the more expert those other people were, the more he needed to demean them. Some enjoyed that performance, more were appalled, but all could see it was real.

Trumpism is the political equivalent of losing money on every sale but hoping to make up the loss by volume. The harder you try, the worse you do.

All of which leaves Trump’s successors with only two practical strategies to follow. The first alternative is the one at the top of this piece: accept candidly that post-Trump Republicanism is likely to remain a minority party, and then maximize the powers of that minority.

As I write today, it looks like Republicans have actually strengthened their grip on the machinery of redistricting, enabling another decade of minority rule.

In cases from North Carolina and Wisconsin in 2018 and 2019, the Supreme Court greenlit partisan gerrymandering as long as those doing the gerrymandering take care to leave no evidence of racial animus on the record. Since the Court weakened the Voting Rights Act in 2013, enacting measures to suppress votes or to purge voters from the rolls has become easier, and if Republicans retain a majority in the Senate, they can ensure that no new Voting Rights Act supplements the old one.

Since the Senate map is becoming steadily less representative over time, this project of minority rule can be a robust basis of power for many years to come, even without the presidency. Better yet, as in the Obama years, if a Democratic president is nonwhite or female or highly educated or all three, cultural resentment of that president becomes a mighty weapon of partisan recruitment and media engagement.

The Republican future in this scenario replicates the southern-Democratic past. There is another way forward for the party, but it involves more change.  

This way begins with a basic fact: Over the course of the 2010s, the share of adult non-Hispanic whites with a college degree rose from 33 percent to 40 percent. That proportion will continue to rise in the 2020s.

It is education more than immigration that is making formerly red states purple, or even blue. In Texas, for example, the higher the proportion of college-educated adults in a county, the harder that county swung to the Democrats in the Trump era. One result, noted by The Texas Tribune, is that Dallas and Fort Worth are following Austin and Houston into the Democratic column—and in the six fastest-growing Texas suburban counties, Trump won by a cumulative total of a tenth of a percentage point, or 2,515 votes.

Similar stories can be told in Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina.

To compete, Republicans must adapt to the new American electorate: more secular, more diverse, more accepting of female leadership. And this is possible.

It may take time for Republicans to acknowledge to themselves the truth about the Trump years. But they can act on that truth even if they do not acknowledge it. They can begin by putting an end to Trump’s postelection tantrum and accepting without further weasel talk the reality of Joe Biden’s victory and his presidency. Then they can quit the gerrymandering business and recommit themselves to equal voting rights—competing to win over voters rather than disenfranchising them. Their goal should be creating a modern party of the center-right, redeemed from the squalor of the Trump era, unafraid of elections equally and fairly open to every adult citizen.

Otherwise, America is heading back to the politics of the Jim Crow era, with privileged minorities manipulating antidemocratic state rules to thwart democracy at the national level. This was wrong then, and it’s wrong now.