Maybe Stop Trying To Give Your Constituents Mostly Stuff They Don’t Want?

It’s easy to make fun of the primary voters that put Donald Trump in the driver’s seat for the Republican nomination:

The idea of Donald Trump as president does indeed seem like the premise of a too on-the-nose Hollywood satire. But it should also be emphasized that he’s closer to the views of the typical Republican voter than an orthodox conservative like Rubio:

One of the important underlying facts of American politics is that rich people tend to have more socially liberal and economically conservative beliefs than the country as a whole. The elite criticism of the structure of party politics usually boils down to demanding that the parties reflect elite beliefs even more closely than they already do. Hence the endless demands for a socially liberal third party that will reduce spending on retirement programs, or the fantasy that America is entering a “libertarian moment.” The truth is just the opposite: The underserved political market is voters who want less libertarianism. They oppose free trade, want to keep every penny of promised Social Security and Medicare, distrust big business, think immigrants hurt the country, and generally distrust the rest of the world.

Trump’s campaign initially emphasized his nativist position on immigration, which caused him to be identified with the Republican right. But Trump has repositioned himself increasingly as the candidate of the populist, disaffected center. Even though Trump has proposed a huge tax cut for the rich, he draws support from Republican voters who are most heavily in favor of raising taxes on the rich. (They have no other candidates to choose from within their party.)

Trump’s populism has slowly intensified. “I don’t get along that well with the rich. I don’t even like the rich people very much,” he recently said. “It’s like a weird deal.” He has proposed to let the federal government negotiate lower prices for Medicare prescription drugs, a plan horrifying to conservatives (and drug companies). Like other Republicans, he proposes to eliminate Obamacare and replace it with something undefined but wonderful. The reason Trump’s vague repeal-and-replace stance makes them so nervous is that he once advocated single-payer insurance, and he has emphasized, in a way other Republicans have not, the horrors of leaving people who are too poor or sick to afford insurance on their own. Trump’s shorthand description of the travails of the uninsured before Obamacare — people “dying on the street” — alarms conventional conservatives precisely because it captures the broad reality of the suffering that justified Obamacare in the first place, and which would intensify if the law is repealed. The Republican fear is that Trump’s vague promise to replace Obamacare with something terrific is not just a hand-waving tactic to justify repealing Obamacare. Their fear is that he actually means it. Trump’s populist positions may place him farther away from the Republican Party’s intellectual and financial vanguard, but they draw him closer to its voters.

People who put a lot of stock in BULLY PULPITING the OVERTON WINDOW have this narrative that even though reactionary Republicans have largely failed in their attempts at dismantling the New Deal, they’ve succeeded in moving public opinion to the right in ways that figure to have a long-term payoff. But the thing is that this isn’t true. 35 years after the election of Ronald Reagan, the agenda represented by the Paul Ryan budget remains massively unpopular among the public as a whole and unpopular even among Republicans. Republicans have remained competitive at the federal level in spite of, not because of, the positions taken by a typical Republican elected official. Republicans remained a viable national coalition after George W. Bush because the wars the base strongly supported and the Medicare expansion they wanted and the upper-class tax cuts they can live with were financed entirely by debt. Had Congress actually tried to finance stupid wars and upper-class tax cuts through massive cuts to popular federal programs, it would be a very different story.

What Trump is doing, in other words, is very politically shrewd. The mechanisms that Republican donors and reactionary ideologues can use to keep members of Congress and most presidential candidates in line — the money spigot, the threat of congressional primary electorates much more conservative than the typical Republican voter — don’t apply to Trump. Cruz and Rubio attacking Trump as a fake conservative is going to run into the problem that the typical self-described conservative voter has views more like Trump’s than Cruz’s or Rubio’s. Trump is in many respects a clown, but he’s also much more plausible insurgency candidacy than the typical dream of centrist pundits, someone who represents a small constituency that is already massively overrepresented. In many respects, Trump’s supporters are acting in a perfectly rational manner, which is why stopping him won’t be easy for Republican elites.