Trump and Vance need to make dramatic populist moves now while GOP voters’ appetite for economic libertarianism has dwindled.
In theorizing about what it takes to actually break up with someone after a long-term relationship, Jerry Seinfeld came up with an analogy. “Breaking up is like knocking over a coke machine; you can’t do it in one push. You have to rock it back and forth a few times and then it goes over.”
Since at least the early 1980s, the Republican Party was in a long-term relationship with economic libertarianism, but with Trump’s hostile takeover of the party in 2015-2016 we saw the first attempt at a breakup. Old flames die hard, however, and since then there has been a lot of rocking back and forth. But with the 2024 election, we finally saw the machine go over: The GOP has finally broken up with economic libertarianism — for good — and replaced it with multiracial populism.
The numbers were as staggering as they were revealing. The ethnic group most likely to support Trump? Native Americans. Counties that were over 25 percent black? They saw a four-point shift to Trump compared to 2020. And counties that were over 25 percent Hispanic saw a ten-point swing in the same direction. Trump won the southern part of Dearborn, Michigan, a Muslim stronghold that Biden won with 88 percent of the vote in 2020. Trump won Anson County, North Carolina, which is 40 percent black, making him only the second Republican to do so since post-Civil War Reconstruction. Trump even flipped the most Hispanic county in America to the GOP.
The Harris campaign’s main strength compared to 2020 was with white women with a college degree and populations making over $100,000 per year. This could not have been set up better for a new, multi-racial populist GOP — and in some ways should not be surprising given the views of J.D. Vance, the person a non-ideological Trump picked to lead his movement into the future. No friend of big business, the vice president-elect will almost certainly be attempting to remake the new GOP according to his populist agenda — one which he explicitly says overlap with that of the populist Bernie Bros. […]
— Read More: thefederalist.com
