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Fighting for the Soul of the Republican Party
COLUMBIA, SC — At a time and day – 8:30 am on a Saturday – when most Americans are sleeping in, the Kemp Forum on Expanding Opportunity convened in the capacious Columbia, SC convention center. Even at 8:15, it was tough to find a seat.
South Carolina’s important primary is Feb. 20, and doubtless some of the more than 1,500 attendees were attracted by the opportunity to hear from six of the Republican candidates for President. (It would have been seven, but Carly Fiorina missed her flight.) Jeb Bush, Ben Carson, Chris Christie, John Kasich, Marco Rubio and Mike Huckabee offered their views on how to fight poverty and expand opportunity. Ted Cruz and Donald Trump declined to attend.
The absence of Cruz and Trump was significant, underlining as it does one of the two competing ideas about what the Republican Party is and should be. Senator Cruz and, to a lesser degree, Mr. Trump seem to endorse the notion that Republicans can win national elections by motivating the “missing conservatives” who stayed home in past presidential election years because the party’s nominees were moderates. This is the line doggedly pushed by talk radio, but has been pretty well debunked.
There’s another interpretation of where the Republican Party needs to be — not just to win elections, but to reform the nation. It’s the reform conservatism approach embraced by Speaker of House Paul Ryan, who was one of the hosts of the Kemp Forum (the late Jack Kemp was Ryan’s political mentor). Ryan was joined by South Carolina Senator Tim Scott. Just by themselves, Ryan and Scott confound the image of Republicans as unlikeable or aloof or, in the oft-repeated poll result from 2012 that determined Mitt Romney’s fate, someone who doesn’t “care about the problems of people like me.”
“I hated being poor,” Ben Carson recounted. ”For years I thought I had been born into the wrong family.” Governors Bush, Kasich, and Christie spoke of their efforts to fight poverty through education reform, crime control, expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit, and block granting welfare programs. As Paul Ryan put it, “We’ve been fighting a war on poverty for over 50 years and I don’t think we can conclude anything other than that his war has been a stalemate. Fifty years, trillions of dollars, yet today if you are born poor, you are just as likely to wind up in poverty as you were 50 years ago.”
The discussion was wonky and sincere and mutually respectful. There were three panels featuring presidential candidates and interludes with South Carolina politicians Gov. Nikki Haley and Sen. Lindsay Graham. Not an insult was hurled. There was no chest thrusting, alpha male posturing. You could fantasize that this is what campaigns for President should always be. Poverty, Ryan argued, is not just a matter of “deprivation” but of “isolation.” There was much talk of drug abuse, poor schools, and the problem of incarceration. Kasich endorsed racial set asides, which may not win many plaudits from conservatives, and he, Chris Christie, and Mike Huckabee endorsed more drug treatment as an alternative to prison. The idea that we are incarcerating large numbers of people for simple possession of drugs appears to have become conventional wisdom, though it’s wrong.
Where conservatives shine is in their emphasis on the importance of mediating structures in the lives of the poor (and everyone else for that matter). The family, the church, and private charities can give people more than a check – they can provide the guidance, the supervision, the understanding, and even sometimes, the kick in the pants to get and keep people on the right track. To the degree that government elbows those mediating institutions aside, it creates the “poverty trap” – offering just enough support to keep people from destitution but then penalizing them for working to better themselves.
Will large numbers of poor people abandon the Democrats and vote Republican? Hardly. But when Republicans address the problems of poverty, they demonstrate their connection to ordinary people. Rubio noted that “If you are a child born into a broken family, in an unstable home, in a dangerous neighborhood, in substandard housing, in a school that’s failing in your community, where the people on the street corners are drug dealers or not good role models, you’ve got six strikes against you.”
One of the biggest strikes against Republicans is the perception that they are indifferent to the problems of everyone except bankers and entrepreneurs. The Kemp Forum was a well-placed blow to that image.
Published in Economics
Sometimes. Sometimes it’s a simple sense of entitlement, but sometimes it’s pure fear — I think sometimes conservatives underestimate how much of a factor that fear really is.
I lived for a while in what you could call a genuinely socialist area, and learned something about the grip that ideology can have on people who don’t really know anything different. If we really want things to change, we have to show that there really is a better way.
It seems to me that they want to continue to support the idea that government is here to smooth out life for people. They’re not against big government, they just think they can do it better!
Freedom is the better way.
In the end, government doesn’t really care about the actual people Modern day Germany is a great example. It really was a great ‘socialist’ paradise. And look how the story is ending. Does Merkel and her government care about Germany’s actual people – or do they care more about their ideas and their great socialist vision? I think the answer is obvious.
Did you listen to the forum? I would say that is clearly true of some (Kasich) and plainly not true about others (Tim Scott, who isn’t running for president).
But I’m not endorsing any of the candidates, or anything that they specifically said, and I didn’t watch all of the forum. I’m only arguing that it is both profitable and important for conservatives to talk about these issues. And I’m deeply troubled by the idea that merely discussing poverty indicates weakness or a tendency towards big government. I realize that’s the legacy of “compassionate conservatism,” and it is regrettable.
A bigger strike against Republicans is the perception that they are indifferent to the problems of everyone except big business and the Chamber of Commerce types.
More important to the perception than attendance at this forum is how people stood on the re-authorization of Ex-Im. Paul Ryan said some good things to explain why it should be opposed, but was ineffective in stopping it. Ted Cruz, who was not at the forum, voted against it. That could have been a bigger blow to the old Republican image than attendance at this forum, except for the fact that so many Republicans are hostile to Cruz. .
I agree. They should at minimum be concerned about poverty created by the government.
This is a good point. If the GOP wants to shed the notion that they are all in for the “rich and powerful,” then stop using the Treasury to prop up the “rich and powerful.”
The idea that we should do something about poverty and lack, or actually loss, of opportunity of poor folk in this country is ludicrous in the face of our current situation.
We will all be poverty stricken if they keep spending. Paul Ryan just initiated more poverty in this country in a single act than anything else he could have possibly done, save spending even more money that we don’t have. More people will be poor. More of the middle class will slip into poverty because of these policies.
Instead of fighting for the American people and our future as a viable economic system, these dolts are in South Carolina preening and posturing, and Mona Charen here thinks this will accomplish something for Republicans.
The perception of Republicans being cold-hearted doesn’t come from any rational basis. It comes from a concerted propaganda campaign, decades old, by the Democrats and their media friends.
Poor people aren’t reading Ricochet, or the National Review. In fact, a lot of them don’t read. A lot of them don’t vote, and when they do, they vote for Democrats. The mainstream media won’t report on this conference, and no one is listening to Republicans anyway because they don’t see them as able to do anything about anything.
We have a lot of well-meaning people engaging in meaningless activity and feeling good about themselves while the country is sinking into madness and oblivion.
Sean Trende has been a guest on Need to Know.
Sean Trende has been a guest on Need to Know: http://ricochet.com/podcasts/summertime/
Most of those men on that dais have no problem with current levels of government spending, and are quite willing to import more poverty-stricken people from the third world who either use government assistance and don’t pay taxes, or compete for jobs against the existing pool of poor Americans. Whether or not these poor folk will do these jobs becomes moot when we consider that the wages are driven down to near poverty levels anyway, another disincentive for working.
As for education, besides the fact that some of these preeners promoted No Child Left Behind, a massive big government
solutionfailure, and the universally ridiculed Common Core, we have graduates of American universities trying to pay off school loans as they are being laid off and replaced by foreign workers imported via the H1B visa program, coding for such esteemed American corporations such as Disney.Rather than address any of these comments, Mona drives by to plug her show. Our betters are little more than graffiti writers, signing for each other, then moving on to tag another boxcar.
Mona!
Listen to her podcast and support her sponsors!
Once again, that’s Need to Know: http://ricochet.com/podcasts/summertime/
Does Great Courses still sponsor Mona’s podcast? I see a couple of courses there I’d like to purchase and give Ricochet the credit for introducing me to their product.
I don’t listen to her podcast, so I don’t know.
I tried to listen to this one, but I turned it off when Mona and Jay stared talking about how Trump was really the ‘establishment’ because he’s rich, and laughing at all the silly ‘little people’ who just can’t understand who is and is not ‘establishment’. I’m not a Trump supporter, but I’m really so tired of these republican opinion ‘leaders’ insulting people instead of sincerely trying to understand peoples’ positions and concerns. They are no better than Obama calling the American proletariat “bitter clingers” instead of trying to get to know them and understand them. Its not just insulting – its unhelpful.
I, nevertheless, want to support Ricochet overall, and I was made aware of The Great Courses from their podcasts.
When politicians create a forum , it is for their benefit, not the poor people they are deciding to “help”.
We elect these folks to do a job, not to be philosopher kings.
Note to Mr. Ryan:
Get spending under control, it is your job according to some aged document that once mattered.
I’ve written occasionally about how misleading that series is. Look into the county level data and you’ll see that it’s essentially just the remnants of white Democrats in rural areas who failed to turn out. Romney did better in those counties than Reagan did.
The McLaughlin piece is very enlightening. Thanks for linking it.
Those missing working class voters in the Midwest, including Democrats, could be more available to our next nominee than they were to Romney.
Looking over past data, we must also consider churn. Or more bluntly, death and extreme aging. Most old white Republican+Reagan Democrat voters who elected Reagan and Bush 41 are gone or going by 11/2016. The older whites now in the 65+ cohort have begun to include Boomers. The young replacement white voters are a different breed entirely from their Greatest and Silent Generation great grandparents.
But the most significant finding of all to me is plain enough in this graph:
The big number in the upper right portion of the graph is 93 million registered non-voters in 2012, and it’s on the rise. The author says, “you’ll never get all of them to show up, nor would you want to.” I take a less elitist perspective. By sheer numbers alone, you know the majority of these non-voters must be white, but if they’re non-white, they still passed on Obama in 2012. Many are likely non-college grads. Most of them are surely among the 296.8 million in the U.S. with televisions.
Many have probably seen the inside of a boardroom only on The Apprentice/The Celebrity Apprentice, which averaged typically between 7 and 16 million viewers per episode over 15 seasons (185 episodes.)
So as Rush Limbaugh was saying this morning during his take down of Gov. Nikki Haley’s SOTU response, the Trump campaign is doing what Republicans have been talking about doing for a long time: reaching out to new voters. My best guess about these voters is they’re not the type to sign on to ideologies. If they read it’s People, not people like Aquinas and Augustine. But each vote counts as much as yours.
One thing is sure: they’re out there, 93 million strong. A few may be among the millions of viewers in the vastly expanded debate audiences of this cycle, but in all likelihood most have just seen the clips. Like the black vote of 2008, they have reason to pay attention this time.
They certainly could. Look into the data, though, and you’ll find that no only are Coal Country Democrats not the lowest hanging fruit, they’re not particularly numerous. Romney lost Ohio in the suburbs. If 100% of the missing votes from the seven counties that Trende notes went to Romney, it wouldn’t even have moved the dial much.
The next guy could, and probably will, do a little better still; those are polarizing neighborhoods, and they’re polarizing in non-Presidential races, too. It’s not important; winning essentially empty counties looks good on the map, but the map isn’t the point. Instead, we need to have the Dems lose a little of their astonishingly high scores in 99% and 100% precincts in the inner cities and to turn up our turnout in the suburbs, which is where Bush won the state, along with Bush and Reagan before him.
It’s true that Trump has a different demographic pattern than others, but it’s not true that it’s a better one. He wins more independents and moderates, he loses more Republicans, particularly women. The end result tends to be that he does less well than more traditional campaigners. This would be exacerbated in the campaign, because he would struggle to coordinate with downticket races more than a traditional conservative would.
Makes you wonder about voter fraud, doesn’t it?
The locally popular but politically suspect Gov. Kasich could endear himself to his party by putting squads of trusted black attorneys into those precincts as poll watchers.
You don’t know that yet. He loses some of them to other Republican candidates, and to those silly “what if?” hypotheticals about the general election, which those polled from all camps will always use against the leader they’re trying to bring down.
When/if Trump starts winning primaries and proving he can make the move from big rallies to big wins at the polling place, Republicans will weigh his candidacy in a new light.
Republicans are doing fine in local elections. Down ticket candidates may choose to differentiate themselves on particular issues in individual districts, or they may not. They shouldn’t try to run away from Trump, if he’s the candidate. The only shortcoming Trump will admit to is too long of a memory. Today, I’m fairly certain that Nikki Haley will be primaried in 2018.
It’s true that at the moment all the empirical evidence we have is “What if” hypotheticals, and, for those of us who pound the streets knocking on doors, our own personal polling. Nonetheless, the a-priori reasoning works along similar lines. The Republican party has become ever less diverse in its ideology.
There used to be pro-labor Republicans, and pro-choice Republicans, and all sorts of other heretics. We don’t have them any more because they don’t win elections (Susan Collins is the last surviving example, and she couldn’t win if she was new).
Trump has a base which, famously, doesn’t get offended by his mocking the Eucharist, deriding POWs, making menstrual references, engaging in conspiracy theories about the Mexican government, making absurd promises (in the literal sense of absurd, not that they’re unlikely, but that it’s not clear what it could possibly mean, such as that he’ll go to China and make them give the jobs back) etc. etc. etc.
People outside his base, though, do get concerned about that. His unfavorability ratings are the highest of any candidate in the race, in either party, and a brief experience with the American public will tell you that this is not merely a superficial phenomenon.
It’s true that many of those in the “favorable” minority are not in the traditional camp, but that doesn’t make the number in the camp bigger. A slight majority of campaign workers I know has said that they’d consider resigning if Trump won; it’s a vocation, and they’re not likely to work for someone whose values are not in line with theirs, not even to defeat Clinton.
It’s true that Republicans would have to shift their views of his electoral ability, and that he would win some to his side, but he would also lose some. There’s a lot of protest voters in the Trump camp, and they traditionally peel off if it looks like their protest vote appears as though it may end up with an earnest result. There are also Trump voters who are sad that he’s moderated his tone, as he seems likely to continue to do, now that he’s taking the race more seriously.
Meanwhile, elections are two horse races, not individual contests. Trump is rivaled only by Cruz in presenting the kind of easily demonizable image that excites and turns out opposing voters and activists. While Trump would help the GOP turn out some previously unaffilliated supporters, he would also help the Democrats to reach apolitical people.
This is precisely the problem; you’re absolutely right that for downticket candidates to distance themselves from the Presidential platform is suicide. On the other hand, for most politicians, suggesting that they will extort money from Mexico in a sort of reverse aid payment is also political suicide, in part because they wouldn’t believe in the policy themselves. The general response to that dilemma is to temporize, which also performs terribly.
If the election is about Obamacare, we should win it. If the election is about whether America should become a gangster nation. Social media today means that parties can channel every demographic with the particular outrages against that demographic. The traditional defense for target rich candidates that one scandal crowds out the others doesn’t apply today for Trump (it does apply for Clinton, because almost all of the scandals have the same theme of corruption and/ or sex and/or Bill and few of them have specific demographic targets).
No, no, not extortion. He’ll get them to pay for it voluntarily.
I’m picturing hotel-casinos along the border on the Mexican side of the wall, just south of the velociraptor attraction in the Moat of Trump. The slots empty out on our side.
The important question is, how good are the analytics on your smartphones as you go door to door?
Better than the Democrats had in 2012?
If you’ve got enough accurate data at each address to make Rand Paul’s hair stand on end, we’ll win with whomever we nominate.
The smartphone software’s pretty good; it’s much easier now, for instance, to poll people you bump into, to correct database errors and such, but I’m only familiar with the Democratic software from articles that described it at quite a high level. I know that we have a lot of good guys working on the software, and that they have the Democratic software as a model. In 2012 we did better than they did in 2008, and I’d expect that to continue. We don’t have nearly as good access to high skill tech volunteers, though; Google and pals lean to the left. As such, it seems likely that we’ll be a half cycle behind on that stuff for the foreseeable future.
Also, the DNC has less to do, so can focus on the software more. The RNC does everything the DNC does, but also runs more of the party’s ground game, whereas the DNC farms a lot of that out to unions.
That’s interesting and somewhat encouraging. In CA the Republican Party generally gets overwhelmed by the union GOTV effort. Our presidential primary is so late that it’s usually settled by then, and the only door knockers are for city council. Big direct mail on propositions out here.
I’ve been unimpressed by the contacts I’ve received from POTUS wannabees. Looks like list buys with no data science behind it. At this stage it’s mostly fundraising solicitations of course, but Rubio’s callers ignore information I’ve given them on the phone; Carson should have analysed my donor pattern and realized I’m not a potential customer, yet the glossy pix and and thick packets come both to home and P.O. Box; Jeb is clearly wasting the most money on unrequited postage; and Christie, who should have picked up on my previous giving to Giuliani, has been utterly invisible.
The guys I know who work on the software work for Advantage, which is by far the biggest GOP software team. They’re mostly working on voter issues rather than fundraising, though. There’s a widespread sense that we got our clock cleaned on GOTV, but that it was closer on fundraising.
I agree with you that this isn’t really true, but the RNC is a donor based organization, so when a meme becomes powerful enough for the donors to believe something, it pretty much has to be treated as truth. I gather Cruz has some pretty good fundraising software, so hopefully he’ll either keep that and share it if he wins, or he’ll share it if he loses.
In terms of direct mail, I don’t think that anyone’s particularly sophisticated. The Obama campaign was proud of basic A/B testing, but didn’t get much done in terms of voter targeting. In terms of caller databases, sadly, the manpower for that stuff is volunteer, and volunteers are often awful at data input. Since paid staff and robocalls get even worse responses, though, that’s where we’re at. It seems unlikely that technology will fix our volunteer quality issues in the foreseeable future. It turns out that training, stupid though it may be, really does make a difference, but volunteers hate being trained in things they feel they could do anyway. It’s more important to have the volunteer than to have them be excellent, generally.