Rip Gop

by Stanley B Greenberg

  GOVERNMENT

  The moderates are the only base group that supported a greater role for government.

  That started with the Second Amendment, which was so defining for the Tea Party. They were deeply upset about the mass shootings and gun violence against children. One woman even said she and her husband were unsure whether to have children because they worried they could not keep them safe today. Yes, they supported the Second Amendment, but said up front there should be limits: “The right to bear arms means that you have the right to defend yourself, does not mean that you have the right to carry a gun out in the open. Does not mean that you [have] the right to carry an assault rifle.”

  Moderates also “don’t think we do enough for our environment at all” and were concerned about the trend against environmental protections under Trump. “He’s doing things that worry me about the environment, rolling back things that are important to me,” said one moderate woman pessimistic about the future of the country.

  The GOP base was consumed by President Obama’s effort to guarantee affordable health care for all, but the moderates accepted with most voters that government should do more “in guaranteeing us that we have health care coverage.”

  Everybody else in the world has it. I don’t understand why we don’t have it for us. I think Canadians have their own health care system, is that right?… Maybe they started out bumpy, I don’t know, but how they got there, let’s try to copy or do the same process for us.

  My friend in England has it … and she’s got to wait sometimes a little bit, but at least she’s not saddled with a huge bill that can bankrupt her.

  And more in alignment with thinking outside the GOP, associations with CEOs of large businesses produced the normal negative reactions: “shady” and “greedy.” The conversation moved quickly to special treatment of politicians.

  I think that goes with anything that’s higher up like the president, well maybe not the president so much but maybe all of our senators that have all these benefits that are just absurd and that’s our tax money.

  I was just going to touch base on like the government shutdown and all the senators being paid their paychecks and here our military people, military families were going without pay even though they were all there for us.

  When the moderator asked the room why they directed the conversation this way, they explained, “I look at politicians as big CEOs of this country” and “they pick the candidate too.” They went to the corrupt nexus of politicians and business that President Trump no longer spoke about.

  TRUMP DIVIDING THE COUNTRY

  When asked about the future of the country, moderates used words like “very sad,” “worried,” “less hopeful,” and “unsafe.” They were uncertain about the country’s future because of the divisiveness produced by President Trump.

  I think not being together, being so divided. I know when Trump was elected, there was hope that he was going to bring this country together and I think this country is more divided than anything.

  Everybody’s just fighting about politics … and you can’t even have a conversation, say with a friend, without having an argument.

  It’s not just that we’re divided, people are willing to literally, physically fight because of difference of opinion. That’s not what this country is about. This country is about being free to argue and to be free to have that difference of opinion. People want to fight for it.

  The moderates alone in the GOP base blamed Trump for the polarization. When they watched his rallies, they saw a president who decided to push us as far apart as possible: “That’s what I think Trump’s about. He’s about stirring the pot and making people [upset] and that’s not how a president should be.” They saw him as so polarizing that they just turned his job claims into minimum wage jobs or ones that President Obama created.

  The moderates wanted strong control of immigration, but they did not accept his divisive formulation that precluded a multicultural America. When they watched the Coca-Cola ad featuring a multilingual version of “America the Beautiful,” they said:

  I like it.

  It was amazingly beautiful. I lack the words.

  It showed America as a melting pot, which is what we are.

  I thought it was nicely shown, all wanting and doing the same sort of thing in their own ways.

  And I think it shows … the people not speaking English that they are immigrants to the country and they are showing their pride for America by singing our national anthem in their own language.

  UNITED BY IMMIGRATION, DIVIDED BY FOX

  President Trump finished the 2018 off-year election with a venomous campaign against immigrants who murder the innocent and police officers. This is because he understood in his bones that the Republican Party had emerged as the party prepared to fight for white people who are losing standing as the country grows more immigrant and foreign and increasingly embraces its multiculturalism.

  These results are clear in the 6,069 interviews I conducted with self-identified Republicans between April 2018 and the off-year election; half were conducted in the final two months.

  All factions of the GOP base viewed immigration negatively, were uncomfortable with people not speaking English, and wanted leaders who look out for the interests of whites, including the conservative Catholics and ideological moderates. The moderates remain Republicans for a reason, though they are more modulated in their feelings and pushed away on other issues.

  President Trump was the dominant dimension in a factor analysis of Republicans and their attitudes and values presented in the graphs below. That is a shift from the factor analysis I conducted in 2013 when hostility to President Obama was the dominant dimension. Today, Trump has reshaped his party to make himself the powerful current, along with Fox News, the NRA, and tax cuts. That was consistent with Trump’s winning control from the GOP’s Tea Party base that gave the party the backbone to fight against President Obama and with how he wanted to change the country.

  President Trump held wall-to-wall rallies in 2018 after Labor Day, annoyingly interrupted by funerals for Senator John McCain and the eleven Jewish congregants in Pittsburgh, but our focus groups showed that watching the rallies put off all of the moderates and most of the secular conservatives. The polling database of Republicans shows that secular conservatives and moderates were not part of the Fox News loop. Less than half of the former and just 30 percent of the latter viewed them favorably. But don’t underestimate the powerful role Fox plays for the 58 percent of Republicans who are Trump loyalists for now: two thirds view Fox favorably, with 46 percent viewing it very favorably.

  The second most important dimension centered on the Republicans’ views on gay marriage, transgendered people, and feelings about mosques. That suggests a social conservative dimension in GOP thinking, rooted in Christianity and distrust of Islam. That was why President Trump was still getting a rise from his rallies when he mentioned President Obama’s middle initial, “H,” for Hussein.

  That demagoguery came with a price among the moderate GOP, who were socially liberal. Many of the women have left the party over the past five years but moderates still form a quarter of the GOP base. More accept than reject the notion of most abortions being legal, and a majority view gay marriage favorably.

  THE TEA PARTY VS. JOHN MCCAIN

  The Republican Party had been fractured by the Tea Party takeover of the party in 2010, and the gridlock and polarization were an affront to John McCain and his supporters, who viewed bipartisanship as a virtue. The GOP was painfully divided by the Tea Party–McCain struggle that President Trump tastelessly exploited. This was a Republican Party divided over the intense partisanship that Senator McCain hated and tried to have addressed at his funeral.

  What was this about? The Tea Party took on the GOP establishment that had fecklessly challenged President Obama and Obamacare. They forced government shutdowns that were hated by the GOP leadership. As a “birther” from the beginning, Trump quickl
y won the support of the Tea Party supporters and Evangelicals. The Tea Party fought the PC trends in the country. So, the Tea Party, Evangelicals, and, to some extent, the conservative Catholics loved the Tea Party and the fight they waged.

  The Tea Party had no fans among the moderates and secular conservatives: just 1 and 2 percent respectively viewed them positively. In fact, over a third of seculars and 40 percent of the moderates disliked the movement intensely. This coalition, which formed over 40 percent of the GOP base, was ambivalent or hostile to the Tea Party that threw away civility and bipartisanship to fight the current direction of the country.

  Senator McCain’s hope for a return to bipartisanship and civility was on full display at his carefully staged funeral. The Tea Party, which McCain had to defeat in his own primary challenge, represented an uncompromising conservatism that must defeat the other party at all costs. Despite such a momentous funeral, just a third of Evangelicals and under 30 percent of Tea Party supporters viewed McCain favorably. The latter viewed him negatively by a margin of twenty points.

  With the Robert Mueller report looming, President Trump for a week in March disparaged Senator McCain for passing a key memo to the FBI, sinking the repeal of the ACA with a thumbs down, and not thanking the White House for funeral arrangements in Washington.11

  Senator McCain was regarded favorably by a large plurality of both conservative Catholics and secular conservatives. Moderates revered him, viewing him favorably by a two-to-one ratio. That response suggests a longing across large parts of the party for a politics that could transcend the Tea Party revolt now led by President Trump.

  THE LIMITS OF TRUMP’S 2018 BASE STRATEGY

  President Trump and the GOP bet everything on a base strategy, infused with Tea Party and Evangelical energy, of the high-stakes fight against immigration, and the need to protect the forgotten Americans disrespected by the PC elites and liberal media. They took their case to the country with campaign rallies and Fox News.

  The verdict of my interviews was not encouraging for Republicans. President Trump drove up Tea Party and Evangelical intensity in their embrace of him and their determination to vote in the midterms. But approval of Trump for these two loyalist factions just matched the disapproval of the president among all Democrats. Critically, strong approval reached two thirds, well short of the 82 percent of all Democrats who strongly disapprove of Trump’s performance in office. Yes, President Trump had pushed up the determination of the loyalists to vote, but they fall short of the 62 percent of all Democrats who showed the highest interest in voting in the off-year election.

  Trump did own the Evangelicals and Tea Party, where over 90 percent approved his performance, more than two thirds strongly. The intensity, however, fell off to about 85 percent strong approval among Catholics and secular conservatives. And a third of moderates disapproved; just 31 percent strongly approved.

  The contrasting reactions to Trump play out on our scale for voters rating their interest in the election: “10” means “extremely interested.”12 President Trump had succeeded in pushing high interest among Evangelicals to 59 percent, to 57 percent with Tea Party supporters, and to 55 percent with Catholic conservatives. Only the Evangelicals came close to the level of interest expressed by Democrats: 62 percent said they were extremely interested in the upcoming election.

  Four in ten GOP base voters are secular conservatives and moderates, but only 46 percent of secular conservatives put their interest at the top of the scale and just 39 percent of moderates. Moderates and Evangelical conservatives each comprise about a quarter of the GOP base—and the turnout enthusiasm gap stood at twenty points before the election.

  Trump took his GOP into battle with a venomous campaign against immigrants and Democrats who supported open borders and endangered the country. It fell short and left President Trump and the GOP exposed and vulnerable.

  6   THE NEW AMERICA STRIKES BACK

  THE DEMOCRATS WON A SWEEPING VICTORY IN THE 2018 midterm elections. They won the highest share of the popular vote in any national election since 1946. They defeated the Republicans by 9 million votes and their 8.5-percent winning margin represents what Ron Brownstein describes as “the most emphatic repudiation of a president in modern history.”1

  The Democrats as a result picked up forty House seats—the biggest Democratic gain in House seats since Watergate, electing a record-breaking 102 women to the House, and flipping six statehouses, nearly four hundred legislative seats, and seven governors’ mansions. Democrats now occupy nearly half of the fifty governors’ mansions, including in all the Blue Wall states that allowed President Donald Trump to win the Electoral College. The Democrats’ winning House margin exceeded that for the Republicans in the 2010 Tea Party wave election. They shifted the average vote margin by ten points, compared to President Trump’s in 2016, though by fully twenty-one points in the seats that flipped to the Democrats. The enormity of this cannot be understated.

  This was an unprecedented off-year election. The turnout hit 50.1 percent, up a third from 2014 and the highest since 1914. Tea Party and Evangelical Republicans raised their turnout. But that was overshadowed by the surge in activism and fund-raising catalyzed by the Women’s March and response to Donald Trump’s election, and carried through by progressive groups, including the Women’s Voices Women Vote Action Fund (WVWVAF) and the Voter Participation Center that I worked with.2

  President Trump also went through what may be a realigning election. He nationalized the election around himself, producing an intense anti-Trump reaction that consolidated the Democrats and the “Rising American Electorate”—unmarried women, persons of color, and millennials—who demanded elected leaders be a check on Donald Trump. All varieties of women turned against the president. African Americans and unmarried women pushed the promise of the Rising American Electorate (RAE) to its highest off-year vote share and Democratic support. President Trump who promised to govern for the “forgotten Americans” lost a lot of white working-class and rural voters and fractured his own party. And President Trump declared war on immigrants and on multicultural America and lost.

  NATIONALIZED ANTI-TRUMP VOTE

  The shift toward the Democrats was produced in the first instance by an intense anti-Trump reaction among women, particularly those in the Rising American Electorate (minorities, millennials, and unmarried women) and in the suburbs, as the president nationalized the election around himself. Fully 46 percent of the country strongly disapproved of Trump—compared to only 34 percent who strongly approved. That intense negative reaction reached 84 percent with African-American women, 64 percent with millennial women, and 59 percent with unmarried women and college women.

  The president’s campaign raised his strong approval to 73 percent among Republicans, but that pales next to the 85 percent of Democrats who “strongly disapproved.”

  President Trump’s personalization and nationalization of the election succeeded in raising the stakes for parts of his loyalist base, such as white working-class men: two thirds said this off-year election was much more important than prior midterms. But Trump’s championing of white men proved an affront to college women and African Americans, who came to view the election as even more important than Trump’s strongest base supporters did. Trump’s provocations pushed Hispanics and unmarried women to the same level of urgency.

  The pro- and anti-Trump sentiment was so strong that three quarters of those voting for candidates for the House and nearly 90 percent of Senate candidate voters never considered voting for another candidate.

  The top reason that Democratic House voters gave to vote against the Republican and for the Democrat across the presidential battleground was to have leaders who would be a check on President Trump. That was also the strongest reason to vote for the Democrat in the U.S. Senate elections in those contested states. So, Donald Trump succeeded in making himself the most important factor in people’s vote, though not with the intended result.

  WOMEN<
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  Democrats won not just because white college women rebelled against Trump’s misogyny and disrespect of women. Nearly every possible category of women rebelled. Yes, House Democrats increased their vote margin nationally among white women with at least a four-year degree by thirteen points compared with the Clinton-Trump margin in 2016. But Democrats also pushed up their vote margin among white millennial women by eighteen points, white working-class women by thirteen points, and white unmarried women by ten points.

  In fact, the white college women who were supposed to be the “fuel for this Democratic wave” played a smaller role in the Democrats’ increased 2018 margin than white working-class women, because the former were 15 percent of midterm voters and the latter 25 percent.

  This gender dynamic produced a House Democratic caucus that was 39 percent women. It produced a House GOP caucus that was at least 90 percent white men.

  Unmarried women comprised 23 percent of the national electorate and played a decisive role in the 2018 wave. Like other women, many unmarried women decided early to oppose what was happening in the country, but some decided in the fall and as late as the final week not only to vote but also to vote out the Republicans, especially in the Rust Belt where Democrats made such big gains. We know this story because of the web panel that Democracy Corps conducted for WVWVAF, which interviewed the same respondents four times in the twelve states with competitive statewide races.3