As election results progressed, showing President Donald J. Trump gaining strong support from blue-collar voters in November, while suffering historic losses in suburbs across the country, Sen. Josh Hawley, Missouri, a Republican, declared on Twitter: “We are a working class party now. This is the future. “
And with other results revealing that Trump carried 40% of union families and made unexpected inroads with Latinos, other Republican leaders, including Florida’s Senator Marco Rubio, have touted a political realignment. Republicans, they said, were accelerating their transformation into the Sam’s Club party, not the country club.
But since then, Republicans have offered very little to promote the economic interests of the workers. Two great opportunities for party leaders to show their priorities have recently emerged without a nod to American workers.
In Washington, while Democrats are moving forward with an almost $ 2 trillion economic stimulus bill, they face universal opposition from Congressional Republicans to the package, which is fraught with measures to benefit workers struggling for an entire year in the US pandemic. coronavirus. The account includes checks for $ 1,400 for middle-income Americans and extended unemployment benefits, which are due to expire on March 14.
And at a high-profile and conservative decibel meeting in Florida last weekend, potential candidates for the 2012 presidency, including Hawley and Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, barely mentioned a blue-collar agenda. They used their shifts in the national spotlight to fan complaints about “culture cancellation”, to criticize the tech industry and to reinforce Trump’s false claims of a stolen election.
Inside and outside the party, critics see a family pattern: Republican officials, following Trump’s own example, are exploiting the cultural anger and racial resentment of a sizeable segment of the white working class, but have made no concerted effort to help them. Americans economically.
“This is the conundrum of identity that Republicans have,” said Carlos Curbelo, a former Florida Republican congressman, pointing to the universal opposition of House Republicans to the stimulus bill designed by President Biden and Democrats in Congress. “This is a package that Donald Trump most likely would have supported as president.”
“Here is the question for the Rubios, the Hawleys and the Cruzes and anyone else who wants to capitalize on this potential new Republican coalition,” added Curbelo. “Eventually, if you don’t take steps to improve people’s quality of life, they will abandon you.”
Some Republicans sought to resolve the strategic problem. Senator Mitt Romney, from Utah, presented one of the Republican Party’s most ambitious initiatives aimed at fighting child poverty, a measure to combat child poverty by sending parents up to $ 350 per month per child. But Republican colleagues dismissed the plan as “welfare”. Hawley combined a Democratic proposal for a $ 15 minimum wage, but with the proviso that it applies only to companies with annual revenues above $ 1 billion.
Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster whose clients included Rubio, criticized Democrats for not seeking a deal on the stimulus after a group of Republican senators offered a smaller package. “Seven Republican senators voted to condemn a president of his own party,” he said, referring to Trump’s impeachment. “If you are unable to include any of them on a Covid program, you are not trying too hard.”
While the Covid-19 aid package, rejected by all House Republicans, is making its way through the Senate this week, Republicans are expected to come up with other proposals aimed at struggling Americans.
Ayres said the Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando, Florida, last weekend, the first major party meeting since Trump stepped down, was a spectacularly missed opportunity because it did not include a meaningful policy discussion for voter workers. Instead, the ex-president waged an intra-party civil war by naming in his speech on Sunday a list of all Republicans who voted for his impeachment.
“You had better spend a lot more time developing an economic agenda that benefits workers than litigating a lost presidential election,” said Ayres. “The question is, how long will it take Republicans to discover that expelling heretics instead of winning new converts is a losing strategy at the moment?”
Separately, one of the highest profile efforts to raise blue collar workers in the country was underway this week in Alabama, where nearly 6,000 workers at an Amazon warehouse are voting if they want to unionize. On Sunday, pro-union workers received an incentive in a video by Biden. Representatives for Hawley – who has been a leading Republican advocate of working class realignment – have not responded to a request for comment on his position on the matter.
It is possible that Republicans who do not prioritize economic issues are accurately reading their base. A poll conducted last month by Republican pollster Echelon Insights found that the main concerns of Republican voters were mainly cultural: illegal immigration, lack of support for the police, high taxes and “liberal prejudice in the traditional media”.
The 2020 election continued a long-term trend in which parties basically switched voters, with Republicans winning over workers, while white-collar suburbanians turned to Democrats. The “Sam’s Club conservatives” idea, launched about 15 years ago by Minnesota’s former governor Tim Pawlenty, recognized an electorate of populist Republicans who advocated a higher minimum wage and government aid for struggling families.
Trump achieved historic levels of support for a Republican among white working-class voters. But, once in office, his biggest legislative achievement was a tax cut in which most of the benefits went to businesses and the wealthy.
Oceans of ink were poured over whether the white working class’s devotion to Trump had more to do with economic anxiety or anger towards “elites” and racial minorities, especially immigrants. For many analysts, the answer is that it had to do with both.
Its policy advance to benefit working-class Americans was often chaotic and left unsolved. Jobs in the industry, which have continued to recover slowly since the 2009 financial crisis, stalled under Trump’s command the year before the pandemic began. The ex-president’s bellicose trade war with China hit American farmers with such economic strength that they received huge bailouts from taxpayers.
“There has never been a program to deal with the types of commuting going on,” said John Russo, former co-director of the Center for Working Class Studies at Youngstown State University in Ohio.
He projects that as soon as the economy returns to pre-pandemic levels, American workers will be worse off, because employers will have accelerated automation and continued the workforce reductions adopted during the pandemic. “Neither party is talking about this,” said Russo. “I think that by 2024, that will be a major problem.”
Despite Biden’s campaign framing him as a “middle-class Joe” from Scranton, Pennsylvania, as a candidate he made only minor inroads in Trump’s support with white voters without a college degree, which disappointed Democratic strategists and party activists. In public opinion polls, these voters preferred Trump to Biden by 35 percentage points.
Among black voters without a college degree, Trump won one in four votes, an improvement over 2016, when he won one in five of his votes.
His foray with Latinos in South Florida and the Rio Grande Valley of Texas especially shocked many Democrats and spurred Rubio to tweet that the future of the Republican Party was “a party built on a multi-ethnic and multi-racial coalition of American workers”.
After Trump’s presidency, it is an open question whether any other Republican candidates can gain the same intensity of support as the blue collars. “Whatever his criticisms of Trump – and I have many – clearly he was able to connect with these people and they voted for him,” said Rep. Tim Ryan of Ohio, a Democrat from the Youngstown area.
Ryan is preparing to run for a 2022 Senate seat in Ohio. He agrees with Trump about taking on China, but blames him for not following his harsh language with sustained policies. “I think there is an opportunity to have a similar message, but a real agenda,” he said.
As for Republican presidential candidates who aspire to inherit Trump’s working-class followers, Ryan saw only bleak prospects for them, especially if they continued to reject the Biden stimulus package, which was passed by the House and is now in the Senate.
“The Covid-19 relief bill aimed directly at working-class struggles,” said Ryan, adding that Republicans who voted against the package “had a rude awakening.”
Possibly. A Monmouth University survey on Wednesday found that six out of ten Americans supported the $ 1.9 trillion package in its current form, especially checks for $ 1,400 for people at certain income levels.
But Republicans who vote against him may not pay a political price, said Patrick Murray, the poll’s director. “They know that checks will get to their base anyway and can continue to criticize Democratic excesses,” he said.
“There would only be a problem if they managed to sink the account,” he added.