The Dispatch Podcast - A Party in Trump's Image | Interview: Patrick Ruffini

Episode Date: November 22, 2023

Andrew Egger is joined by Patrick Ruffini, a Republican pollster and co-founder of Echelon Insights. The two discuss the shift in non-white voting habits, how Trump activated the populist coalition on... the right, and the role of pro-life politics in that coalition. Show notes: -New York Times/Siena Poll -Patrick Ruffini's profile at Echelon Insights Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 Hello and welcome to the Dispatch Podcast. I'm Andrew Eger, editor of our Dispatch Politics newsletter, and I'm joined today by Patrick Rafini, founding partner of the GOP polling firm Eschelon Insights. He's the author of a new book, Party of the People, Inside the Multiracial Populist Coalition, remaking the GOP, which I'm very excited to spend a little time talking about with him today. Patrick, welcome to the Dispatch Podcast. Andrew, good to be here. So this is a book that exists in large part to take a stab at answering a question.
Starting point is 00:00:44 I think a lot of people had after the 2020 election, which is, how is it that Donald Trump, despite throwing out the previous conventional wisdom that Republicans needed to soften their message to appeal more to non-white voters, sparking a whole political movement essentially based around, running up the score among the white working class suddenly turns around in 2020 running against Joe Biden. And although he ultimately loses, he manages to pull away more non-white working class voters than any Republican in a generation. So can you walk us through how you approach tackling that question and essentially give us the elevator pitch of the thesis you hit on?
Starting point is 00:01:18 So I work in Republican politics and I remember the aftermath of the 2012 election. And, you know, Mitt Romney is kind of treated as a hero now, right, to many. of his former critics for the way he's criticized Donald Trump. But the verdict on his campaign after 2012 was pretty scathing. You know, we've seen that once out of touch with both working class voters, there was infamous 47% comment. And with non-white voters, with his comments about self-deportation, really trying to move to the right on immigration to shore up his base in the primary, as we saw, you know, kind of reacting to the same forces that nominated Donald Trump and the, a really strong focus on immigration in primary or electorate.
Starting point is 00:02:04 But, you know, it doesn't, you know, Romney's immigration necessarily doesn't land in the same way that Trumps does because, you know, he loses, he loses an election decisively, and he loses despite seemingly doing better among white voters. He loses, despite the exit poll saying he won more than six and ten white voters because non-white voters broke against him by 80-20. and Republicans project, can do math. They project this forward, and they say, well, wait a second,
Starting point is 00:02:35 if this country's becoming more diverse over time, we can't keep losing this community, these communities by 80-20, or else we'll go extinct, basically. So the autopsy is a really, a really bracing document in the sense of, I don't think we've ever seen a formal party committee, you know, put out a document like this. That isn't just kind of a circle the wagon. after the election, right?
Starting point is 00:03:01 I mean, every now, it has become deregore to do autopsies, but they're all kind of circled the wagon documents that don't really admit fault. This one admitted fault, and it specifically said the party should moderate on immigration issue. Now, Trump takes that and does the very opposite in 2016, and he wins. And he wins despite, you know,
Starting point is 00:03:22 he wins despite calling Mexicans, rapists, and bringing drugs, bringing crime, insulting the Mexican-American drug judge, and he does no worse, really, that Romney did among Hispanic voters, which is a surprise to many people reading that. So that, in and of itself, suggested that there was an undercurrent sentiment that, yeah, I think probably Trump's rather occurred him to some extent, but it was, I think, to some extent, counteracted by maybe a sentiment in those communities that maybe preferred a more tough guy, populist style of Republican candidate, as opposed to that kinder, gentler version
Starting point is 00:04:00 that the Republican establishment was trying to put forward after 2012. Yeah, and so then you fast forward for more years to 2020. Ultimately, not an election. Donald Trump ends up very happy with the outcome of, but he does better than just, you know,
Starting point is 00:04:16 breaking even relative to Mitt Romney with a lot of these people. He significantly overperforms with some of these populations and particularly concentrated in a few places geographically. Can you just talk about what happened there? Was that expected, and what have you made of it? It was expected to the extent that you did see in some pre-election polling
Starting point is 00:04:34 that Trump seemed to be holding up pretty well among Hispanic voters and black voters. That actually, like, I kind of started to notice this in the summer of 2020. And it was notable in the light of the George Floyd protests then unfolding at the time, that, you know, in the numbers specifically among black voters, the only group he seems to be losing support in his white voters. And that's frankly when I really had the idea that maybe I should write a book, right? Because it does seem like this populist coalition that Trump created is becoming a multiracial one in the sense of he's winning more non-white working class voters, especially among black and Hispanic. The vast majority of those communities are working class in the sense of not having a college degree.
Starting point is 00:05:18 So this sort of populist working class populism does seem to extend across racial lines. I kind of shelved the idea, right, throughout the remainder of the 2020 election because really didn't look like Trump was going to win. You know, you could lose by almost double digits. And, you know, this sort of multiracial aspect could be but a footnote in the story of the 2020 election. Fast forward to the actual election result. And 7 o'clock in election night, you see the numbers from Miami-Dade County come through and he only loses the county by 7 points after losing it by 29 points.
Starting point is 00:05:52 and it causes maybe a little bit of a political earthquake, at least for a couple of hours, when people really are wondering, is this 2016 all over again? And Miami obviously sent biggest Hispanic metropolis in America, the center of the Cuban-American community. So, you know, certainly it made the election very close. It made it such that, you know,
Starting point is 00:06:15 perhaps he is able to convince the majority of Republican voters that, you know, in his view plausibly, that he really won the election and positions him for a comeback in 2024. So a big part of the kind of data-driven thrust of your book is this notion that we've long kind of considered these political lines of race and class as being fundamental. But that increasingly a thing we need to be looking at, as you mentioned, is educational attainment, you know, voters with versus voters without a college degree, even cutting across racial and income lines. Obviously, that correlates with both class and race. But can you talk a little bit
Starting point is 00:06:51 about this focus on educational attainment and why it differs from kind of the historical way we talk about class in politics? Yeah, so it used to be that really income was the big dividing line in the country, and partly because education wasn't useful as a dividing line in the 20th century because really few Americans went to college, particularly in the mid-century period. So, you know, white voters, it was particularly like a split among white voters where this is most useful. We're really divided along class lines. You have measures of socioeconomic status in analysis of elections from the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. And then I think after 2000, it starts to become a little bit more useful as a dividing line because it's a rough
Starting point is 00:07:41 among whites. And it really is a white education polarization more so than an overall education polarization question in the 2016 election. There's a rough parity between these two groups. And you've had more people kind of go through what I call the education sorting machine. You know, have made the choice of going to college or not going to college, whereas, you know, for an older generation, they just didn't go to college. So it's not really useful as a dividing line. Everyone is in that non-college group. You have fewer and fewer voters in those cohorts.
Starting point is 00:08:15 So as a result, it really is polarized along educational lines. I mentioned in the book right up front that in 1996, there was a 47 point gap in the margins for Bill Clinton and Bob Dole between the richest voters and the poorest voters. In 2020, there was still a gap that benefited Joe Biden among the poorest voters, but it was only eight points that collapsed. Meanwhile, white education polarization, which is basically at zero. So white college voters, white non-college voters voted the exact same way in the 1996 election was at 39 points in 2020. So it's really just replaced the old income divides, and it's really made it so that more people in the lower end of the economic spectrum
Starting point is 00:09:07 are in the Republican coalition, more people on the high end are in the Democratic coalition. And you essentially attribute this, you know, to the degree, that that sorting along these educational attainment lines is now seemingly becoming a thing that cuts across income and across racial lines, you attribute that at least in part to the fact that there is, is this kind of growing entrenched coalition of college educated white people kind of holding the reins of the Democratic Party and pushing in more and more of a direction of the issues that they care about, which are largely these sort of like social identity type issues rather than
Starting point is 00:09:49 rather than economic matters. Yeah, and you see that in the focus, right, on abortion, democracy, right? I mean, those are the messages that Democrats are pushing forward that are really over-index pretty strongly among college-educated voters.
Starting point is 00:10:04 Now, that's not to say that there isn't some political benefit to them, running on the abortion issue. We've seen that in state after state, but it really shows, you know, to some extent, it's not that it has an hurt to them to run on economics or try to, you know, really try to, you know, appeal to the working class on economics. It just doesn't feel like they have a very good story to tell voters
Starting point is 00:10:29 right now on the economy. So no matter how much they say the word, Bidenomics, people aren't buying it, you know, kind of liberal polling outfits like data for progress going to the White House saying, you know, the more we say binomics, the worse it is for us. And people just don't believe that Biden really has brought down inflation, right? You know, let's, you know, to some extent that you have to kind of set aside, you know, what are the actual economic statistics with the economic perceptions are absolutely horrendous for the Biden White House. And that's really fundamentally, I mean, you know, when you look at the polls right now, you see a massive erosion in non-white working class support even far beyond 2016 or 2020, where, you know,
Starting point is 00:11:16 you know, Joe Biden in the latest in New York Times, Sienapult, is only up by 16 points among what, among the non-white working class. He won that group by 48 points in 2020. Barack Obama won it by 67 points. So even if only part of that shift materializes, that would be pretty significant. Yeah, yeah.
Starting point is 00:11:37 It's interesting to me that you brought up abortion as kind of a tip of the spear issue here, because I definitely want to talk about that in a bit. But I did want to bring up one of the, thing specifically from the book because I one thing I really enjoyed was the kind of historical walkthrough that that you do kind of pointing out that that this class shift or rather this well yeah throughout the 20th century it is more of a class shift of kind of working people ascending up into the lower middle class and kind of acquiring more bourgeois values and then
Starting point is 00:12:07 the the upper middle class in this new knowledge economy more recently kind of ascending into a upper middle class, and that it's all kind of one story of this rising economic tide that ends up creating these kind of cultural differences and realignments that play out in interesting ways in kind of the 60s and 70s. Can you just talk a little bit about that? I just found that really interesting when I was reading it. Yeah, so this idea in academic literature called postmaterialism, the idea that as you move out the economic ladder, as you become wealthier, as society becomes wealthier, that voters can afford to some extent to disregard their immediate economic fortunes when they vote.
Starting point is 00:12:55 So this is an idea first developed by political scientists named Ronald Engleharton in the 1970s. And he was looking at the post-war economies in Europe and the Nordic countries and was really seeing how a really big generational divide in terms of how, how people viewed issues and what issues people prioritized. So you had younger people kind of prioritizing, you know, let's say cultural issues, free speech, the environment, things that were not really about kind of economics. You know, older generations focused on the so-called material, material issues.
Starting point is 00:13:36 You know, where, you know, making their next paycheck, you know, where's the, where's my next meal going to come from? everything from the sort of basic bread and butter economics to questions of security, crime, and the like. So that has played out really pretty strongly across the Western countries. And what happens is you had parties of the left in the mid-20th century who had a strong appeal, who those working class voters, who could say, well, we will create a safety net. We will create programs that will make sure that your base. material needs are met. And the parties are right, we won't do that. They stand for big
Starting point is 00:14:19 business. They stand for the rich. That's not only a narrative in America. That's a narrative in, you know, across the Western world. And you see that version of the left really kind of, that identity really go away, right? It's not that they don't know. That's not part of their platform. That's not the ideology that that exists on the left. But it is just much less emphasis, emphasized across, across the Western world. And it's as well, I mean, I think you've seen many of these old labor left parties decline in relevance over time in a lot of these Western countries. You see the rise of more culturally driven far right in Western democracies. You don't really see that here until Trump, right? But you see it really happened with the rise of Le Pen
Starting point is 00:15:03 in France and, you know, in the Brexit in the UK. So really parties are fighting it out based on cultural issues because society is wealthier now. They can afford to do it. But what you mainly have is wealthier voters really prioritizing more and more those cultural issues especially and almost disregarding kind of their own, let's say, economic self-interest as being wealthier member society should not want their, you know, kind of riches taxed away. They're able to disregard that and vote more on their values. And I think that, That was probably something that was activated by Donald Trump in a way that we haven't seen before. And that kind of brings me back sort of to the initial question of when you see these right-wing movements,
Starting point is 00:15:56 Le Pen and France or Donald Trump here or whatever, there is a real kind of racial discord component to a lot of that. And one thing I found very interesting when you were walking through kind of the politics of the 60s and 70s in your book is you said, you know, there kind of maybe was a bit of an opportunity for working class people who had kind of become more like lower middle class, acquired some of these bourgeois values, to kind of start drifting rightward in a sort of multiracial way, except for the fact that the politics of race were so strong in that era. And it kind of ended up in a situation where you had the white working class and the nonworking class pitted against each other in a lot of ways, a lot of that internal animosity. And so at that time, really only white working class people end up drifting
Starting point is 00:16:42 rightward. So if we're, if race kind of gets in the way then, and we're still at a very racially charged political moment now, what's different about about the current moment that has, that has allowed this, this shift to take place that we saw in 2020 with, with non-white voters? Yeah, I mean, it's, it's, it's quite a bold prediction to say, for instance, that if, you know, perhaps if a black but were to shift in a pretty significant way for Republicans. First of all, you know, there's probably a fair amount of that that would probably come across as wishcasting from a Republican standpoint because, you know, we've been talking about that forever, a conservative and trying to will that into existence forever, and it hasn't happened. There's a really good book
Starting point is 00:17:28 on this topic called Steadfast Democrats. I had the chance to catch up with one of the authors to talk to her about her book and, you know, mentioned a lot of that work in party of the people. But really, I think, you know, they really kind of, you know, really document this trend among black voters and really note how exceptional it is
Starting point is 00:17:55 that it has lasted for a really long period of time. So you really, really, really very strong racial polarization, especially in the south, but spreading to the north in throughout the 1960s, leading up to the 1960s. You had very strong geographic polarization. You had, you know, inner cities that were, you know, very, you know, very heavily, majority, minority, and suburbs. The suburbs right on the other side of the street were 100% white. And you saw this in places like Chicago, Milwaukee, right? Big cities. And that is, faded over time, right? Those lines have faded over time. A lot of the circumstances,
Starting point is 00:18:37 public opinion has changed over time. So about 10% of the black vote was self-described conservative in 1970. That was up to 30% by 2008, yet nothing really changes about that democratic identity. And, you know, I think the authors argue that it's something beyond both material concerns, it's something about, it's something beyond, I'd say, ideology that's really driving that. It really is a social. taboo against defection from the dominant political group that, you know, in their view, has created political power for black Americans. And now you have 57, I believe that in last Congress, maybe 57 African American members of Congress, which is, I believe, the same or more
Starting point is 00:19:26 than their representation in the population. Most of them being elected from majority of white district. So it clearly has secured, you know, a great deal, a good amount of political power, right, that unity within the Democratic Party, but you also see more and more black Republicans, too, a smaller, a smaller number still, but an increasing number of black Republicans get elected. So why now? Why might there be a realignment now? Well, in the latest New York Times in a poll you had Trump up to 22 percent among black voters, which is pretty unprecedented, and you see this across polls. You see this, by the way, regardless of Republican candidate or regardless of the match.
Starting point is 00:20:04 That it doesn't change very much. And it seems to me that, you know, to some extent, you know, if, you know, you don't know exactly until 20, until 2024 happens, if this will break down. But like a place like West Virginia, once kind of the damn breaks, right, once the social taboo, once this sort of habit of voting in one direction, it can move pretty quickly. We saw this really in a big way along the Rio Grande Valley in Texas, right? You had some counties that there were 12 people had voted in a Republican primary. And I went down there and talked to folks.
Starting point is 00:20:42 And they said, yeah, nobody could really. There was no Republican party. People are ostracized. If you're, call yourself a Republican, we all have to kind of walk around in a secret society. And we couldn't express ourselves openly until 2020. And then the dam broke and all of a sudden you have a vibrant two-party system. down there. So I would be presumptuous for me he to predict that like a 60-year pattern in 20, we'll break in 2024, but it seemed, there seemed to be signs happening at least in the
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Starting point is 00:23:16 And when you're ready to launch, use offer code dispatch to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. So obviously there's a lot for Republicans to like in the narrative you've put forward here. You also caution that kind of a central characteristic of the non-college educated, non-white voters that you spend all this time talking about is that they are dispositionally and even ideologically relatively moderate and you characterize them as being up for grabs. And you say you don't mean by that that they're centrists in the way that, you know, people who work at think tanks can. be moderates trying to get between the two parties on issues, but that they are holding more eclectic views, they're not necessarily ideologically sorted very, very efficiently. So can you talk a little bit about what you see as the challenges and opportunities that that presents for the Republican Party in the next several elections? Well, the challenge is really, really many of the
Starting point is 00:24:14 challenges are around Donald Trump, because, you know, he was this political uniform and realigned big segments of the American elector in 2016 and, you know, was able to win, perhaps when no one else could have won. I mean, I think that that's up for debate in that, in that year. Based on the coalition he put together, like who else would have flipped Michigan, for example, right? So that's a pretty big deal. But obviously the evidence for his contribution recently is mixed, to say the least, when he lost the 2020 election, when I think any Republican president would have won that election,
Starting point is 00:24:48 given the track record on the economy prior to COVID, which I think was, at least somewhat significant in keeping the election closed. You saw it in the 22 and two midterms. You see a lot of losing, perhaps, from Republicans. And really, like, what is going on here, right? I mean, I think there's two things. Two things are true at once. One is that the Republican coalition is just very different
Starting point is 00:25:11 than what it used to be, which means, you know, it's not necessarily, it doesn't mean we're all going to be carrying union cards around. But it does mean that the party, overall, and the Trump years had moderated significantly on economic issues. The old debate about the role of government is no longer really central to economic policy in the same way that, you know, I came of age politically during the 1990s and the contract of America. And that was like the real dividing line, right, was from Democrats.
Starting point is 00:25:42 And you don't really see that argument being made in any kind of a serious, at least ideologically consistent way, right? I mean, I think there is some move to cut spending that I don't think, like, I think the heft and the seriousness behind those moves are not quite used to what you saw in the contract with America games. So, yeah, I do think that, you know, we have a challenge specifically around Donald Trump. You know, he realigns the electorate. But, you know, he also seems to be across the bar drag on Republican performance such that, you know, that majority coalition that should be possible never quite emerges. So I think, you know, a possibility I read about in my book a lot. in a possibility I contemplate
Starting point is 00:26:24 is that maybe it doesn't necessarily take the person of Donald Trump to activate this coalition and in the same way that, you know, you've had Richard Dixon, right, historically,
Starting point is 00:26:40 if you want to look at history, right, there was a realignment in the 1960s and Richard Nixon was on both sides of that realignment. He was on the side in the 1960 election, right? against most working-class voters. Most working-class voters voted for JFK in that election.
Starting point is 00:26:58 Obviously, he was a Catholic, so that helped. And then the country realigns in 1964, 1968, around the issues of war and culture and protests. And 1972, Nixon is a huge beneficiary of this realignment in American politics, and, you know, in 1970 as well, right? So, you know, I would say that, like, you know, how much does the individual candidate matter, right? I mean, I think there are events, this, you know, kind of events, singular events throughout history that caused this realignment.
Starting point is 00:27:34 There was a realignment in the 1960s, same as there was a realignment in 2016. Now that we're on the other side of it, you know, could there be a better Republican candidate who can still activate this populist coalition? I think there probably would be, actually. So I wanted to drill down a little bit on a couple of specific issues, you know, as they now appear, kind of on the other side of that realignment. And, you know, you mentioned that a big part of this shift has been this shift to cultural issues, that progressive Democrats find themselves in a smaller tent than they thought they perhaps would when cultural issues are at the fore. But one obvious major complication for that in just the last couple cycles has been abortion since, since Dobs v. Jackson, which has emerged as a huge, seemingly cross-class issue benefiting Democrats everywhere. So I'm just curious, first of all, with that at the forefront as kind of one of the biggest, if not the biggest cultural issues that voters are thinking about right now, how does that complicate the picture that you're talking about? And is there a need, I mean, you talk about Republicans moderating on economic issues to kind of capture this coalition, is there a similar path forward for them on abortion?
Starting point is 00:28:52 Right. So I think in some sense, Trump, right, is encapsulates, you know, the arc of Trump appeals to the Republican Party encapsulates this whole story, where it is in 2016, it was very clear that he was a candidate who did not really. want to talk about social issues and try to present himself as a more moderate, more reasonable on some of, let's say, these old school moral majority religious right type issues. You know, you had him waving the gay flag. You had, you know, him saying, I have no problem with transgender people using restrooms in Trump Tower. Right. So, you know, so, you know, you had He clearly tried to redefine the cultural issues away from the traditional religious right issues. And he won the Republican primary, right?
Starting point is 00:29:48 He run the Republican primary really above, you know, the gatekeepers in the religious right, who were thought to hold kind of a stranglehold on the Republican nominating process. Now, he himself obviously claimed he was pro-life. So in order to do that, he agrees to appoint. Supreme Court justice is off a list, right, developed by the Federalist Society, right? That was sort of the bargain that he made, but it was very clear that, you know, he shifted.
Starting point is 00:30:18 And I think that shift was a huge success. It was a huge success not only in terms of it working, right? He shifts the cultural debate onto just general kind of, I'm not going to be politically correct, onto immigration. In 2020, it's more about prime. This is sort of like the kind of politics, right? the kind of right-wing politics you would see in a place like New York City to the extent, you know, you had successful Republican candidates in New York City like Rudy Giuliani.
Starting point is 00:30:45 They were always campaigning on, they were pro-choice on abortion, but they were campaigning sort of as hard-edged cultural warriors on cutting crime and issues like that. So that was really the Trump. And it worked out really well, not just in the Republican primary, but it worked out really well in those Midwest or battleground. But of course, Trump himself leaves the seat for the return of abortion as an issue. right, and probably against his will, right? And, you know, he has, I think, instincts on this that are pretty different than what produced the job, Dobbs-Ree Jackson decision, in terms of, you know,
Starting point is 00:31:18 saying, yeah, this issue is killing Republicans. And, you know, he's been outwardly, openly saying that. And he hasn't really paid a political price for it. So I think his political instincts, frankly, on the issue are probably pretty right in terms of saying, well, you know, these, you know, in a lot of cases, these six-week abortion bans go too far, more farther than, you know, our voters want to go. I also think many of the people who brought into the coalition based on where these abortion referenda are underperforming, right? In the rural areas, in Trump areas, they're underperforming strongest in the rural counties, which tells me that, like, you know, many of his, maybe those Obama-Trump voters were not really on board for that social issue agenda. So it's
Starting point is 00:32:04 something that Republicans certainly have to navigate. Now, I think the more and more states kind of have, you know, ironclad constitutional provisions one way or the other. I think the less of an issue it's going to be moving forward. But it's certainly a risk heading into 2024, particularly with the prospect of there being valid initiatives in many swing states. So one thing that you talk about happening a lot in the kind of late 2010s with the Obama presidency is, that he has these particular political strengths that kind of get Democrats passed and help Democrats miss
Starting point is 00:32:41 this broader demographic growing weakness that Trump ends up exploiting in 2016 and 2020. And I was thinking about that when you start to talk about what this realignment looks like after Trump. Because you bring forward, you talk about Glenn Yonkin, you talk about Ron DeSantis
Starting point is 00:32:59 as people who have kind of thrived in this post-2020 environment, where, you know, Trump's not on the ballot, what's going on exactly? But I did want to ask because in 2021, in retrospect, is a truly horrible year message-wise for Democrats. I mean, you talk about, like, these cultural issues just not playing well for them. I mean, that's the year of COVID emergence, right? That's the year everyone's talking about school reopenings and mask mandates and all these
Starting point is 00:33:26 things. And all these things that Yonkin and DeSannis both become kind of, they're able to exploit those extremely well. So I guess what I wonder, is there a possibility when you're looking at those two guys, if you're talking about kind of permanent realignment, that you end up with too rosy a picture of kind of what Republicans can do once those issues have receded a little bit? Yeah. I mean, I think that what those cases established is not that part is going to be an R plus 20 state, right, in perpetuity. What that establishes, though, I think what is established with Yonkin, in particular, is that he doesn't really lose any Trump voters.
Starting point is 00:34:05 So the big debate, right, during, I think during the Trump years, is can you actually put this coalition together without Trump? Can there be Trumpism without Trump? And it was also in 2016 election point to maybe not in the sense of you had a huge gap between the performance of Donald Trump and the performance of down-ballot. Republicans in terms of suburban voters who were really actively making a distinction between the Ben Sass in Nebraska and Donald Trump, right? I mean, there was, you know, he had a huge overperformance in suburbs and underperformed in rural areas or, you know, you know, kind of Normie
Starting point is 00:34:46 Senate Republicans. So it's like in certain standard Norma Senate Republican, you have this huge differentiation on the map, right, in terms of where they, which member of the Republican ticket performed Strong and Square. So that kind of suggested that like, You know, we have to really choose a path here between more populist coalition Trump is putting together in the more, let's say, say, normal suburban coalition, for more Romney-plus coalition, right, that other Republicans put together. That differentiation disappears in post-2016 because all of those, many of the suburban voters just become Democrats and realign into the Democratic Party,
Starting point is 00:35:24 and many of those rural voters realigned into the Republican Party and are now down by a straight-ticket Republican voters and straight-ticket Democratic voters. So I don't think we're going back to anything resembling a Romney-style coalition. And you see with someone like Brian Kemp, right, and even Brad Raffensberg in Georgia and so you look at the coalitions, right, that they put together for their elections. Obviously, they out-perform Donald Trump. I don't think there's a serious question why they out-perform Donald Trump. But really what they're able to do is they don't get any less fewer votes than Donald Trump
Starting point is 00:35:58 anywhere in the state, right? They don't lose, they're not offending MAGA vote, bag of voters aren't staying home, MAGA voters aren't splitting their tickets against Brian Kemp or the guy who got Trump in hot water with Clinton yet. They're still voting
Starting point is 00:36:14 for those candidates, but they get more suburban voters, so you have somewhat less polarization, but it's nowhere near Kempgues, maybe a third of the old Romney vote back in terms of the Romney, maybe Clinton, Romney-Biden and vote back. But it's not a full reversal of the realignment. So I think it's just an acknowledgement of reality. I think it's also, you know, possibly more optimistic take in the
Starting point is 00:36:40 sense of, you know, I think there are many different types of candidates who could run and win with this coalition. So the book is Party of the People inside the Multiracial Populist Coalition remaking the GOP. I've been talking to Patrick Rafini, the author. It's a really interesting book. Recommend going and reading it. Thank you for coming on the podcast today. been fun. Thanks, Andrew. Thank you.

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