In the states after the 2010 Tea Party wave elections, party leaders put even more pressure on undocumented immigrants. They sought to transfer enforcement of immigration laws from the federal government to the states, which would be more vigilant in chasing down undocumented immigrants and denying them access to schools, employment, and housing. These efforts were initially overturned by the federal courts, but more conservative justices would soon allow the Republicans more latitude to lead the fight state by state.51
When the House leadership was forced to debate immigration in 2018, a big majority of the House Republicans voted to reduce legal immigration. Remember, 1994.
THE GOP–TEA PARTY BATTLE AGAINST PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA
The election of Barack Obama as president of the United States was celebrated across the country and the globe, but his election brought to fruition the successive, escalating battles of the GOP against civil rights, abortion, and immigration. He embodied the political triumph of the New America and the Democratic Party that controlled all branches of government. This activism was resisted by the Tea Party that carried the GOP’s social mission into battle.
Newt Gingrich meant for the Gingrich Revolution to be as incendiary. Steve Kornacki writes of Gingrich’s unique contribution to our polarized politics: the GOP must embrace confrontation, fight back with every weapon, eschew bipartisan compromise, and expose the cozy corruption of Washington if they are to win control in Congress. They must expose the profound dangers that the country will face if New America gets to govern.52
The Kennedy School had to cancel its bipartisan orientation for new members because the Gingrich Republicans were more interested in crashing convention and learning about policy from the conservative Heritage Foundation.
The Gingrich Republicans insisted on passing a budget that balanced the federal budget in seven years that cut $270 billion out of spending on Medicare and pushed seniors into HMOS, while cutting the capital tax rate in half. The House Republicans were not shy about their intentions: making the program so unattractive it would “wither on the vine.”
President Clinton vetoed the Republican budget and for the first time in the country’s history, the federal government was shut down for a sustained time, thirty days in all. Essential services continued and people got their Social Security checks, but all government agencies were shuttered.
And the Republicans got slaughtered. The public predictably blamed the congressional Republicans by about a three-to-one ratio in some polls. They were forced to cave without winning anything. President Clinton’s job approval ratings began rising immediately thereafter, and Bob Dole, the Senate majority leader, won just 39 percent of the vote in the 1996 presidential election and Newt Gingrich was forced out as speaker after the disappointing 1998 off-year elections.
Newt Gingrich created the precedent for raising the stakes and shutting down the government, but he didn’t slow government or the growth of liberalism. Vice President Al Gore won a plurality of the vote in 2000 and probably a majority of the Electoral College as well. The New American Majority had won.53
That contrasts with the tsunami produced by the election of President Obama and the Tea Party revolt. They produced an explosive growth of racial and partisan polarization that put a Tea Party–dominated GOP in charge of most of the country for a decade. The GOP was angrily determined to stop Obama and the Democrats, big government, Obamacare, and immigration at all costs. The explosion produced the 2010 Tea Party wave election that gave Republicans control of the House and, in 2014, control of the U.S. Senate and half of the state governments, where the GOP was able to prevent government from performing its normal functions. The GOP worked to marginalize President Barack Obama, whom they hated. They were determined to stop everything the Democrats were trying to do. They tried to snuff out Democratic governance.
This put the GOP’s counterrevolution into a virtual war with multiculturalism and the New America.
Immigration was incendiary, as in 1994. The number of “illegal immigrants” grew every year under President Bush until it reached 8.3 million in 2010, when both the state crackdowns on undocumented immigrants and financial collapse stopped the rise. None of that stopped the proportion of Americans who were foreign born, which reached 13.9 percent and 40 million in 2010.54
Do not underestimate how important that change was and how much it disrupted traditional immigration patterns: fully 37 percent of the foreign-born population came from Central America; 30 percent from Mexico. In 2010, when the Tea Party wave hit, only 28 percent of those from Mexico spoke English well and only 24 percent had become citizens, one half the rate of prior generations. America was sounding much more foreign and that was not just a racist imagining. The Republican base resented that the elites did not mind the change or even notice.
The bailout of the Wall Street banks could not have been more incendiary. Wall Street excess took the economy off a cliff, and Democrats rightly came to the nation’s rescue by passing TARP. But the bailout of the banks was a searing event in America’s consciousness—and Democrats owned it. While President Bush and his Treasury secretary proposed the bailout, it was embraced by then-candidate Obama and passed with Democratic votes in the House and Senate. The bank executives got their bonuses and no bank official was prosecuted, while those facing home foreclosure got no relief whatsoever. That is why a year into the Obama administration, 57 percent of the public thought it was the “wrong thing for the government to do.”55 In fact, one year after the passage of the president’s own economic recovery plan, the majority of voters conflated TARP and the Economic Recovery and Reinvestment Act and thought the big banks, not the middle class, were the main beneficiaries—and the middle class was seething.
The crash in income and wealth was incendiary. In 2011, well into President Obama’s first term, “the real incomes of the middle class and working families was 8 to 10 percent lower than they had been in 2007,” Bartels writes.56 Their incomes did not get back to pre–financial crisis levels until 2016.57 And perhaps “the most shocking economic fallout” was the “massive collapse of ordinary Americans’ net wealth.”58 The median household’s net worth crashed immediately and by 2013, it was 36 percent lower than it had been years earlier before the crisis.59 Those on the bottom quarter of the income ladder lost over half their net wealth in 2013.60
In President Obama’s first term, the incomes of the top 1 percent grew by 31.4 percent while all the rest grew by only .4 percent.61 People were stuck, struggling, and angry.
The economists Alan Blinder and Mark Zandi concluded that the administration and Federal Reserve’s “stunning range of initiatives” averted “a Great Depression 2.0” and created 2.7 million additional jobs.62 Paul Krugman credits President Obama’s unique and brave response compared to those of the rest of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, where belief in austerity restrained the government response. Other developed countries struggled to lower unemployment, but in the U.S. Obama was able to get unemployment down to 4.5 percent by 2015.63 President Obama proposed more steps when the recovery slowed, but they were all blocked by the Tea Party Congress that embraced deficit reduction and austerity as the overriding priority.
President Obama never used his charisma and great communication skills to educate or mobilize the country around these unprecedented steps. That was incendiary, too. He did not define this extraordinary moment for the country or demand accountability and responsibility. He did not identify those who had done wrong and insist they pay a price. Instead, he told the country starting just one year after the crash that millions of jobs were being created and “the recession has been transformed into a dependable recovery” and the country is “on the right track.” The Republicans who created this mess were doing “everything possible to obstruct our progress.” That made Republicans even angrier, if that was possible, but those supporting the president wanted much more accountability, too.
That fail
ure of a Democratic president to build the case for his own bold policies and demand accountability diminished enthusiasm among people of color, unmarried women, and millennials, who were suffering profoundly, and pushed away the white working class, who could not believe what they were watching.
President Obama’s job approval rating fell abruptly by double digits in Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania by the beginning of 2010. The president’s disapproval rating with the Democratic base of African Americans, Hispanics, millennials, and single women rose to 40 percent in 2010, so it was a volatile moment.
The Democrats’ party identification advantage in President Obama’s first year fell off a cliff with white working-class voters—defined as those with some college, a high school education or less. In 2008, the Democrats had battled back to near parity with white working-class voters, but the Republicans’ party advantage soared to thirty points in 2010 and grew further in 2012.64 This realignment of white working-class partisan identity had a profound impact on the composition and attitudes in both parties, but particularly the Republicans because the white working class was so frustrated and angry with the choices elites made in this financial crisis.65
But President Barack Hussein Obama was perhaps the most incendiary element of all, bringing to fruition the building resentments.
In reality, his election represented nationally the triumph of a new diverse, educated, metropolitan, and younger America, and his reelection confirmed their ascendancy and the country’s acceptance of an African American as president of the United States. President Obama himself embodied everything that was happening at this explosive moment.
Whites had every reason to believe they were losing standing and power, perhaps moving to fear when they listened to Fox News, which widely reported the “end of white America” when the U.S. census projected America would be a minority majority nation by 2045. After President Obama’s reelection, Fox News glitterati hardly celebrated. “I went to bed last night thinking we’re outnumbered,” Rush Limbaugh lamented. “[All] of this discussion we’d had about this election being the election that will tell us whether or not we’ve lost the country. I went to bed last night thinking we’ve lost the country.” Bill O’Reilly focused on the changing demographics and that this victory meant, “It’s not a traditional America anymore.” That 50 percent not only won, “they want stuff. They want things. And who is going to give them things?” He concluded, “The white establishment is now the minority.”66
Not surprisingly, the importance of race, attitudes toward blacks and immigrants, and racial resentment hit the levels they had in the 1964, 1968, and 1972 elections when the country was on fire, literally.67 And that fiery shift became the new normal in this period.
The growth of immigration and foreign-born populations and the acceptance of multiculturalism had transformed the GOP’s counterrevolution. Up until 2012, a not inconsiderable 30 percent of Republicans in a survey said being white was “very important” to them, but that rose to 40 percent after Obama’s reelection.68 And when they were asked what aspects of American identity were important to them, being “able to speak English” and having “American citizenship” stood out from the other possible responses.69
Republicans, white conservatives, and born-again Evangelicals watched the growth and acceptance of multiculturalism, and they believed increasing racial diversity was shifting the political balance against whites, according to Pew.70 About 60 percent of Republicans, white conservatives, Evangelicals, and seniors (65+) believed that racial minorities were using their hold over government to discriminate against whites. But just a third of college graduates and millennials agreed with that at the end of Obama’s term.71 At the base of the GOP’s anger was the fear that the new electoral majority would use its political power to expand government and spending on behalf of racial minorities.72
But of course, Barack Obama was African American, and racial resentment was a huge factor in both of his elections. In 2008, those whites most resentful gave Obama only 20 percent of their vote, compared to 80 percent among those least resentful.73 And racial resentment was now as strong a factor in predicting Obama’s vote as party identification and George Bush’s job disapproval. President Obama changed what mattered.
The GOP was more impacted by the jump in white and racial resentment and strongly opposed Obama’s expansive use of government, which sent his job approval rating with Republicans plummeting.
The Tea Party movement was a big factor, as it was the organizational heart of the GOP. The Tea Party movement supporters scored very high on racial resentment measures and more than a few of their marchers and demonstrators sported signs saying OBAMA’S PLAN: WHITE SLAVERY and THE AMERICAN TAXPAYERS ARE THE JEWS FOR OBAMA’S OVENS.74 They helped produce an “extraordinary … hemorrhaging of Republicans,” Don Kinder wrote.75 Obama’s approval rating with them fell at three times the rate of his predecessors, finishing at only 9 percent on the eve of the midterms.76
The Tea Party 2010 wave gave the GOP the ability to stop President Obama from doing any further damage. No more initiatives, period. But at the state level, it was the GOP that could take the initiative. And immigration was the flashpoint. Governor Jan Brewer of Arizona signed S.B. 1070 during the summer of 2010, which required state law enforcement officials to detain suspects if there was reasonable suspicion that they were illegal immigrants. The law imposed penalties on those sheltering, hiring, or transporting “unregistered aliens,” and the stated intent was to achieve “attrition through enforcement.” Arizona passed the toughest immigration law in the country, and the Republican-controlled states of Georgia, Indiana, South Carolina, and Alabama were moved to act, too. Two years later, the Supreme Court overturned the Arizona law as an infringement of federal constitutional prerogatives regarding immigration, but the parties’ polarization on immigration was advancing.77
The Republican candidates in the lead up to the 2012 presidential election competed to be toughest on immigration. Mitt Romney won the 2012 nomination, promising harsh enforcement to get undocumented immigrants to “self-deport.”
President Obama was the only president in over a century to win reelection with a reduced margin from his original election. He won only 39 percent of the white vote in 2012, down from 43 percent in 2008. Racial resentment suppressed his job approval rate, according to the analysis by John Sides and Lynn Vavreck in their book The Gamble, and reduced his popular vote margin against Romney by up to four points.78
Those worrying about the demographic implications of 2012 accurately described the increased role of racial resentment and white identity, particularly for the Tea Party base who thought they were in a zero-sum competition for jobs and political influence.
They probably did not notice the Gallup poll in 2012, which showed the proportion wanting to decrease immigration had dropped to 40 percent, nearly its lowest, and the proportion wanting to “increase” immigration had visibly moved up to a new high at 33 percent.79 The conservative pundits’ fear that President Obama’s reelection in 2012 really did reflect a growing acceptance of a very different America was right. That is why GOP voters were at their wits’ end. How could they stop it?
That response foretold 2018, when more Americans wanted to increase rather than decrease immigration and the big majority that viewed President Trump’s handling of immigration as “too harsh.”80 The GOP’s battle against President Obama was backfiring as more and more people supported a multicultural America.
THE GOP AFTER PRESIDENT OBAMA’S REELECTION
After President Obama’s reelection, I conducted focus group discussions with people from different parts of the GOP base. They felt conservatives had lost control of the country and were increasingly powerless to change its course. They watched Obama impose his agenda, and Republicans in Washington roll over. The GOP saw a president who had lied, fooled, and manipulated the public to pass a secret socialist agenda.81
In President Obama�
�s second term, the GOP base thought they faced a victorious Democratic Party intent on expanding government to increase dependence and therefore electoral support. It started with food stamps and unemployment benefits; expanded further to legalize the undocumented immigrants; and finally, insured the uninsured through the Affordable Care Act, which would dramatically expand the number of those dependent on government. The GOP believed these policies were part of the Democrats’ electoral strategy—not just a political ideology or an economic philosophy. If Obamacare was fully implemented, they feared the Republican Party would be lost forever.
While few explicitly talked about Obama in racial terms, the base supporters were very conscious of being white in a country with a growing minority population. Their party was losing to a Democratic Party whose goal was to expand government programs that mainly benefitted minorities. Race remained very much alive in the politics of the GOP.
The Evangelicals and the Tea Party were the heart of the GOP base during President Obama’s second term. They were nearly 90 percent white in a country growing ever more racially diverse, and two thirds were married in a country where the types of families were growing ever more pluralistic. Nearly two thirds were working class at a time of gathering alienation from the elites, who embraced globalization and trade agreements.82
The religiously devout were the biggest bloc and encompassed nearly half of the GOP base voters in 2013, dominated by the Evangelicals, who comprised 29 percent of the base.
The Tea Party was powerful, too, comprising 25 percent of the base at the time, though their influence was multiplied by the intense support they won with Evangelicals. Evangelicals embraced the Tea Party because they fought the hardest against the trends in the country and against President Obama’s agenda.
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