The GOP Is Voting Against Its Base's Economic Interest

For decades the Republican Party has used the so-called culture war and stirred up emotion over god, guns and gays - plus a fear of racial minorities - to induce its non-wealth base to vote against its own best interests.  Over this time period, the true love of the GOP - the very wealthy and large corporations  have amassed more even wealth as middle and working class Republican voters have seen their economic situation stagnate or worsen.  Most of the time these middle and working class Republican voters let themselves be played for fools and wrongly blame minorities and "liberals" for their economic plight when in reality they need to take a good look in the mirror to see those responsible for their economic decline or treading water financially. Now, with the Biden/Harris infrastructure plan, the GOP is going to go full bore and oppose a plan that would do much to improve the lot of their base.  Expect to hear the racists at Fox News, especially Tucker Carlson who wants to be the new Rush Limbaugh, blather endlessly about immigration and other distractions to once again play the GOP base for fools.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at this new GOP assault on its own base.  Here are excerpts:

With their opposition to President Joe Biden’s infrastructure plan, Republicans are doubling down on a core bet they’ve made for his presidency: that the GOP can maintain support among its key constituencies while fighting programs that would provide those voters with tangible economic assistance.

Last month, every House and Senate Republican opposed Biden’s massive $1.9 trillion stimulus plan, even though it delivered significant benefits to working-class white voters, the GOP’s foundational voting bloc, including increased health-care subsidies and expanded tax credits for families with children. That pattern is repeating with the infrastructure plan, even though it directs billions of dollars to rural communities, which are indispensable to Republican political fortunes.

That resistance represents a political gamble, because the proposed benefits—including $1,400 stimulus checks, and rural broadband in the infrastructure plan—are large enough and visible enough that voters may be more likely to feel them in their daily life than most legislative actions.

For now, at least, the GOP appears utterly undeterred. Republican consultants I’ve spoken with express confidence that, despite the two plans’ benefits, they can discredit them—either by focusing on elements of the plans that may be unpopular with conservative audiences, or by changing the subject to culture-war confrontations, such as the surge of undocumented minors at the border.  

Biden “is going to be disappointed” in how GOP-leaning constituencies react to these programs, David Kochel, a veteran Republican consultant based in Iowa, told me. “All of the negative partisanship and cultural motivation is going to be out of his control, and Republicans and the conservative-media machine [are] going to continue to fill” GOP voters’ heads “with all of these left-wing priorities” that are part of these packages.

Republicans may not immediately suffer for opposing these initiatives. But longer term, Democrats see more of an opening because assistance will be flowing so visibly that voters may note tangible effects contradicting the negative portrayals from GOP leaders and conservative-media voices. When policies are still being debated and “we are talking about hypotheticals, it is very hard for Democrats to get past the right-wing media landscape,” says Matt Hildreth, the executive director of RuralOrganizing.org, a group that argues for progressive causes in rural America. “After things pass, I think [it’s] a fundamentally different thing, especially when we are talking about policies that will impact people in their daily lives.”

Both the stimulus package and the infrastructure proposal are so expansive that they essentially replace “either/or” politics with “both/and”: They provide large-scale benefits to traditionally Democratic groups as well as to Republican communities and constituencies.

Low-to-middle-income white Americans, many of them without college degrees, will be among the major beneficiaries of those programs, social-policy analysts predict. According to an analysis provided to me by the Center on Poverty and Social Policy, at Columbia University, 95 percent of children in families headed by a white parent without a college degree will receive benefits from the expanded child tax credit. The average benefit for those families will be more than $1,800 over the next year. That’s a higher share of beneficiaries than among white people with a college degree—and a larger benefit.

The expanded ACA subsidies likewise substantially reduce premium costs for low-income working families, many of them white Americans without a college degree.

[T]he infrastructure plan that Biden unveiled last month shows the same expansive reach, channeling substantial aid to both Democratic- and Republican-leaning places. Mark Muro, the policy director at the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program, told me that it would provide an enormous boost for the country’s major metropolitan areas, which have become the backbone of the Democratic coalition in virtually every state.

At the same time, many other measures are structured to “help heartland midsize cities gain traction,” Muro told me. Biden’s plan includes a Great Society–style alphabet soup of programs to promote innovation and community development in rural areas (such as new regional innovation hubs outside major population centers), and huge sums for big, New Deal–style rural public-works projects: $10 billion for upgrading water systems in rural or tribal communities; $2 billion for affordable rural housing; and $20 billion for fixing smaller, rural bridges.

Towering over all those commitments, the bill’s most visible component in rural communities is likely to be Biden’s call for spending $100 billion to ensure 100 percent broadband access, which is now completely unavailable for about one-third of rural residents and spotty for many more. Although local-government officials in rural America have long lamented the lack of broadband access, the deficiencies have become more glaring since the coronavirus pandemic forced businesses to shift their operations online and forced kids to learn remotely. “It’s a huge issue,” says Link, who is based in Des Moines.

Even that doesn’t exhaust the list of potential benefits for rural places in the two big economic plans Biden has announced so far. His call for requiring all utilities to generate 100 percent of their electricity from carbon-free sources would spur huge investment in solar and wind power, much of which is in rural communities and has already become a major source of income for farmers in states such as Iowa and Kansas. The second half of his jobs plan, which will be released sometime this spring, is expected to fund two years of tuition-free community college, a crucial source of economic advancement in many small towns.

The question for Democrats is whether all of these programs build a ladder tall enough to lift them from a very deep hole in rural America. . . . . as debate over the infrastructure bill intensifies in the weeks to come, Republicans may focus less on trying to discredit the proposal than on diverting their voters—by keeping their attention on disputes that widen the cultural gulf between them and the Democratic Party, such as undocumented immigration and police reform. “Don’t underestimate the power of conservative media to shape this into a [cultural] narrative Biden cannot fight,” Kochel told me.

One asset Democrats have in this struggle is time. However successful Republicans are at tarnishing Biden’s programs at the outset among core GOP voters, Biden has an opportunity to change those perceptions through the actual implementation of his plans.

[I]f Democrats can pass Biden’s infrastructure program this summer, that will leave plenty of time before the next two elections to start repairing bridges and roads, and to break ground on new water systems, new wind and solar installations, and new broadband facilities. Even small gains in nonurban areas from such initiatives would fortify Democrats’ position in states near the tipping point of American elections, including Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Georgia, Hildreth told me. “I think we are maybe a decade from having a majority in critical rural counties, but we just need to cut margins right now,” he said. “Literally the motto is ‘Lose less.’”