Rip Gop

by Stanley B Greenberg

  The despair with the politicians and the shutdown, however, did not produce despair with politics. Exactly the opposite. The first national poll looking at the 2020 general election found an electorate that was even more polarized, politicized, and determined to vote at levels never seen before in my polling. Just months after the midterm election, voters looked set to finish the job. Voters on both sides put their heads down and pushed forward to join what at least the resisters believed would be the ultimate battle to settle who will lead the country. President Trump has the support of 40 percent of the country no matter what.

  In my poll of 2019, 42 percent approved of his performance in the midst of the shutdown, and that has been his default number in nearly all my polls since the beginning of his presidency. The Republicans’ base of the Tea Party, Evangelicals, and conservative Catholics know the president was their last hope in the war against PC thinking and a multicultural, immigrant America. If a wall with Mexico is what he wants, then get out of the way.

  And the Trump base was determined to vote to defend their president in 2020. Over 80 percent put themselves at the very top of the scale on following politics, six points higher than for those voting for a generic Democrat for president. They were in the battle to the end.

  But the bigger bloc of voters was determined to resist and defeat Donald Trump’s Republican Party, and they were set to disrupt electoral certainties in their own way. Every group that became more Democratic in the 2018 blue wave—African Americans and Hispanics, millennials, unmarried women, and women college graduates—were even more Democratic in their voting intentions for 2020. That suggests the 2020 election could produce a historic result on an even greater historic scale.

  It is clear that voters of both camps have already fully polarized and nationalized their vote for the presidential election ahead. Nine in ten of those who voted Democrat for Congress in 2018 were by January voting Democratic for president. And nine in ten of those who voted Republican for Congress a few months earlier were all-in for Trump in 2020.

  Democrats prevailed by 8.6 points nationally in 2018, and in this first poll of 2019, the Democratic candidate for president was ahead by ten points, 51 to 41 percent, with 5 percent volunteering third-party candidates. (Just 3 percent were undecided in a generic presidential ballot against Trump.) That means the generic Democratic nominee could double President Obama’s margin in the landslide election of 2008. With Trump’s vote down from 46 to 41 percent, Democrats will not struggle to rebuild the Electoral College blue wall. Trump lost independents by nine points and a quarter of moderate Republicans.

  The Democratic presidential candidate in this first survey was pushed to even bigger margins by every member of the Rising American Electorate, ahead with Hispanics by 62 to 32 percent, millennials by 64 to 26 percent, millennial women by a daunting 79 to 16 percent, unmarried women by 71 to 22 percent, and even white unmarried women, by a two-to-one margin (62 to 30 percent).

  There were signs of trouble for President Trump in the white working class. He was trailing the generic Democratic candidate by only three points, 49 to 46 percent.

  What was most unprecedented was the historic level of voter engagement in the first month of this election cycle. Interest usually falls back after an election and builds back over many months, not even at peak right before the election the following year. However, the percentage who said they were following the election at the highest possible level was already higher than in the last months before the 2018 midterm election that produced the highest turnout ever. The remarkable level of engagement recorded in January 2019 for registered voters already exceeded what I found in my surveys of likely voters in the 2016 presidential election.

  The voters crashed my pollsters’ equation for determining who is a “likely voter” in a presidential election. It showed that virtually every registered voter was a likely voter. Did programming screw up? I asked. No. The year 2020 is sure to produce a second election with historic levels of voter turnout.

  The battle for 2020 will carry forward with an even more engaged, more realigned and politicized country that will finally settle the fate of the Republican Party and liberate the New America to govern and set the country’s direction. The GOP will only compete seriously nationally after a period of reckoning.

  So, it will not take late into the night before people realize just how big and shattering the election of 2020 will be. It will be clear early on that Ron Brownstein’s blue wall that crumbled in 2016 will look as impenetrable and “beautiful” as the one President Trump tried and failed to build on the border with Mexico. The states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota will not be close. Nor will Maine, New Hampshire, and Virginia. Iowa will be back in the Democratic column. And when John King on CNN pulls up the rural counties on his map of western Pennsylvania as well as the map of Maine’s 2nd Congressional District, it will be clear the Trump frenzy will have dimmed. The Democrats’ message on issues of corruption and draining the swamp and an economy rigged against the middle class will have gotten heard.

  The dynamic metropolitan areas, affluent suburbs, and women will so decisively repudiate Trump’s GOP that Colorado will look like a deep blue state and North Carolina and Arizona will tip late to the Democrats.

  The country will not know early whether the Democrats pick up Georgia, Florida, and Texas because Republican governors and secretaries of state, armed with new playbooks from the Koch brothers, will work passionately and creatively and without shame to disenfranchise as many black, Hispanic, and minority voters as humanly possible. In 2018, they purged about 700,000 registered voters in Florida, those who had not voted in the prior presidential election. In Georgia, the NAACP estimated the shortening of the early voting window and the closing of polling stations may have cost Stacey Abrams upwards of hundreds of thousands of votes. Both states were stolen from the Democrats, who had lost them by about fifty thousand votes.

  The stakes are even higher in 2020, and the U.S. Supreme Court will give GOP state election officials wide latitude to suppress the vote and steal the election.2

  A divided GOP will make the election even more shattering. There will be no shortage of Republicans who challenge President Trump and his Tea Party politics in the primaries, even though the Republican National Committee will do everything possible to rig the game. Donald Trump has no shame. The anti-Trump candidates will be humiliated in the primaries against the pro-Trump forces, which are dominant, loyal, and vengeful. And you will know something unique is happening when you see the more affluent, college graduates, and independents showing up to vote in the Democratic primaries, where they are welcomed.

  Republicans could very well lose Florida if John Kasich leads a third-party ticket. He would play the role of Ross Perot in 1992, whose voters were mostly disaffected Republicans, or Ralph Nader in 2000, supported mostly by disaffected Democrats. Nader won 76,000 votes in Florida.

  The former Republican governor has called out the incivility, the lack of morality, the tolerance of racism and sexism, the lack of concern for the poor, and most of all, the Tea Party ethos that rejects the idea that the two political parties can work together to advance the common good. In my polls in 2018 and 2019, 10 percent of Republicans supported Kasich on a third-party ticket.3 One third of moderate Republicans broke away to support him, and Kasich could well make inroads with observant Catholics and secular conservatives, who hate the tone of this Tea Party–dominated party.4

  By contrast, the Democrats will be united and consolidated, substantially increasing the chances of even bigger down-ballot gains. Commentators forget how divisive the 2016 Democratic primaries between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders were, when 20 percent of his voters failed to vote for Clinton in the general. President Trump has unified Democrats for now. And while the prospective nominees vary in their boldness, the Democratic base is unified in its support for bold changes, as you will see later in this chapter.

  In my polls in 2019,
the Democratic presidential candidate won the support of 95 percent of self-identified Democrats, who were determined to support a Democrat at every level because of the stakes. That will allow the Democrats to protect or grow their House seats and to sweep every competitive Senate race to win back control. In the states, the Democrats could net another four hundred state legislative seats in the malapportioned districts that were meant to be a firewall against such an eventuality.

  This final battle has to be joined in 2020.

  Donald Trump has never given up on the Tea Party–Evangelical coalition that is his base. The Trump administration every day further brands the GOP as a socially conservative, anti-immigrant, and America First party. The Republicans will go into battle as Donald Trump’s party and never acknowledge the midyear repudiation of Trump and never challenge the president, even after he left them hanging during the longest government shutdown in the country’s history. In my polls as the nominating began, two thirds of Republicans wanted the party to continue to move in the direction set by President Trump.5

  After Attorney General William Barr’s controlled release of the Mueller report, President Trump, in full victim mode, told Trump voters, “defend your vote” from the liberal media who have tried to steal the election from you.

  The Republicans could easily nominate at some point a ticket with Vice President Mike Pence and Senator Tom Cotton running for president and vice president respectively.

  Mike Pence is deeply religious and a social conservative to his bones, who as vice president has delivered the socially conservative Supreme Court President Trump promised. He has also led the administration’s campaign against China, in the trade war and sanctions against Chinese companies. He called out China for “employing a whole-of-government approach, using political, economic, and military tools, as well as propaganda, to advance its influence and benefit its interests in the United States.” He’s accused China of Russian-like political chicanery to hurt Donald Trump, an argument the White House has unsuccessfully advanced. And he spotlighted China’s plan to control 90 percent of the “world’s most advanced industries.” That scale of threat required that the United States and our allies demand major structural changes and refuse Chinese investment and simply choose sides.6

  Senator Tom Cotton is one of the strongest defenders of the Donald Trump project in the Congress, including using whatever leverage is needed to build the wall, but he is a lot steelier on immigration than the president. Cotton’s immigration plan reduced legal immigration, and he was one of two senators to vote against Trump’s shutdown plan because it granted “amnesty” to Dreamers. Cotton was an early sponsor of legislation to bar the giant Chinese telecommunication company Huawei from operating in the United States. And when President Trump talked about reopening discussion of America’s “One China policy,” Cotton agreed that Chinese leaders “need to remember that we are the world’s superpower and they are not.”7

  So until there is a reckoning, the Republicans will run nationally as a party fearful of the New America and even more determined to stop them from governing. The GOP will be committed to reducing immigration and building the wall. It will promise to respect the sanctity of life and Christian values. It will be unabashedly pro-business that must be freed from regulation. It will deny the climate change scare stories so the oil and coal companies can keep us fossil fuel dependent. It will cut taxes again and slash government spending and rein in entitlements. It will promise to carry forward President Trump’s economic cold war with China and trade agreements that failed to protect American jobs. America will no longer carry the weight of the world on its shoulders. “We’ll not be saps. We’ll put America first.”

  That Republican Party will be shunned by the affluent, college educated, and professionals and in the suburbs. Many Republicans will defect. Democrats will be engaged to defeat it as never before. Millennials and the generation behind them will exceed the baby boomers in their vote share, and, for them, Republicans might as well be lepers.

  Will the party be so shattered that the Republican National Committee dare not conduct a postmortem as it did in 2012?

  Today’s Republican Party cannot be saved unless it stops being an anti-immigrant party in an immigrant country. That was obvious to all in 2012 when the party establishment and Fox News accepted that conclusion, but the GOP establishment was quickly sidelined by the dominant forces in the Republican Party that were still in full revolt against the New America. They were ultimately led by Donald Trump.

  And when President Trump demanded the country in 2018 and 2019 find the money to build a thirty-foot concrete wall on the Mexican border, the president was giving the finger to those caravans of dark people hiding their Muslim terrorists ready to kill you.

  This GOP can’t reform itself because defeat in this battle against growing immigrants only confirms that Democrats were right. President Trump’s brand of conservatism is California’s: he cannot give up his fear of demography and the battle against immigrants. They are one and the same, writ large. President Trump would no more stop worrying about demography and immigrants than get on television without any clothes.

  As we saw in chapter 4, “The Tea Party–Trump Decade,” California’s GOP faced demographic changes early on that led to the Tea Party and Trump’s GOP’s disastrous last battle against immigration.

  The total repudiation of the GOP in California in 2018 tells you that shattering defeats don’t push leaders who will reform the party to the fore, but instead leaders who will make it irrelevant. That is the term serious journalists used after the 2018 debacle. The California Republican Party “is teetering on the brink of irrelevance,” Adam Nagourney wrote in The New York Times. Mark Barabak and Michael Finnegan’s article in The Los Angeles Times was titled “California Republican Party Drifts Closer to Irrelevance.”

  President Trump got 32 percent of the vote in a state that used to elect Republicans statewide in 2016. The GOP gubernatorial candidate, who fully embraced President Trump, got 38 percent of the vote and even lost Orange County in 2018. He only got on to the general election ballot because so many Democratic candidates had divided up the first-round vote.8 Republicans lost every statewide office, and Democrats won three quarters of the seats in the state assembly, the biggest margin in one hundred years.

  The California Republicans were left with only seven House seats in the fifty-three-member delegation and lost every seat in Orange County, home of the tax revolt and Ronald Reagan. Republican registration fell to under 25 percent, below that of those with no party affiliation.9

  Ron Brownstein was puzzled after the 2018 election on why California’s Republican House incumbents didn’t show any signs of independence from the president, unlike endangered House members in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Florida. They all voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act without a replacement in a state that had fully implemented the law. They all voted for the corporate tax cut law that raised taxes on homeowners in high-tax states like California. They all voted to allow permit holders from open-carry states to preempt California’s strong gun regulations.10

  Brownstein observed, “As the California GOP has contracted, it has generally positioned itself more overtly against these rising populations, both by maintaining [a] staunchly conservative agenda on social issues and also embracing Trump’s open hostility to immigration.” After the election debacle, the GOP Senate members elected a new leader who believes that “God’s hand” should have a bigger say in legislating. Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy chided House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for blocking the wall.11

  The GOP can’t rescue itself because its struggle against the New America began in California and was nationalized by a Tea Party–dominated GOP that elected Donald Trump as president. The prospect of their losing only increases their certainty of a take-no-prisoners battle against a multicultural America.

  The GOP can be saved only by the Democratic Party that will lead this era of reform.

  HOW
WILL THE DEMOCRATS RESCUE THE REPUBLICAN PARTY ON IMMIGRATION?

  Republicans cannot become a nationally competitive party unless they become less toxic on immigration. Through decades of battle against immigration and the “demographic issue,” the party has been deeply branded as not just anti-immigration. It is palpably racist and set against America’s growing foreignness, diversity, and multiculturalism. How do you break the fever when it is the one issue that all factions of the GOP agree on and when successive electoral defeats only confirm you are right about the consequences of demographic change?

  The Republicans’ report after the 2012 election was on point about comprehensive immigration reform being the big federal action that could change electoral dynamics in the country. They’re wrong to think this party and a Republican-led Congress could pass the reforms. So much internal blood has been shed since that the torch has been passed to the Democrats. Ironically, I believe the America adopting the U.S. Senate version of comprehensive immigration reform would prove as electorally significant for the Republicans as enactment of welfare reform was for the Democrats in 1996.

  I was Bill Clinton’s pollster and the guardian of his political project to modernize the Democratic Party and make it a successful national party again. The Republicans had won the White House in every election since 1964, with the exception of the election of Jimmy Carter after the Watergate scandal.

  Then Governor Bill Clinton headed up the Democratic Leadership Council in the year before he announced for president. It had retained me after I had publicized my work on “Reagan Democrats” in Macomb County—offering recommendations that were not very popular in Democratic establishment circles. I argued, first, that Democrats needed to respect these working-class voters and listen to why they felt betrayed, even those who were virulently racist. Second, I observed they were open to returning to the Democrats if the party respected work and personal responsibility, and those values undergird everything the party does. Third, I reminded people they were still New Deal Democrats in their bones and embraced an economic plan that guaranteed health care for all. That showed the Democratic Party was trying to make the government work for all.12