Republicans are fumbling their moment with faction-fighting, the first ouster of a House Speaker in U.S. history, controversial candidates and election underperformances, wrote Washington Post columnist Ruy Teixeira.
But former President Donald Trump isn't the core source of this "havoc," he wrote. The former president's rise is a symptom of a larger change that has uprooted the GOP's ability to work coherently.
"By the numbers, this should be their moment. President Biden is scraping the proverbial bottom in polls that measure his approval rating. A recent NBC News poll found that voters prefer Republicans to handle the economy by a shocking 21 points, the largest lead for the GOP in over 30 years," wrote Teixeira. However, "Republicans seem intent on proving they cannot govern."
And a big part of that, he argued, is how reliant they are on white non-college "working class" voters.
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To some degree, the educational re-alignment has been oversimplified, as Democrats still win large working-class groups. However, Republicans in particular have made white voters without degrees who respond to cultural grievance a core part of their base, while at the same time they've bled more educated suburban voters who backed the party over economic freedom – with dramatic consequences for both their policies and their internal cohesion.
As these voters' communities entered economic distress, they "lost faith that lower taxes and less government were really the solution to their problems — however much those principles might appeal to business supporters of the GOP," wrote Teixeira. Trump, he continued, understood he could "break with orthodox Republican economics, particularly on trade, entitlements, deficits and corporate priorities. In other words, he leaned into the working-class tilt of the GOP instead of simply exploiting it when it overlapped with standard GOP priorities."
But when Trump took office, he didn't actually deliver on policy for these voters — because Republicans simply don't know how to. And they still don't, the columnist wrote.
"There is no agreement," Teixeira wrote. "You can see it in the dueling manifestoes of the Freedom Conservatives and National Conservatives, who disagree about how strong a role government should play in supplementing and regulating the free market. You can see it in the complete lack of a party platform when Trump ran in 2020, which could well be replicated in 2024. And you can see it in the shambolic debates among the Republican presidential candidates that have been held so far this year — and the shenanigans of the Republican House last week, which now have left it leaderless."
As long as this sort of inability to provide for the voters they're relying on continues, concluded Teixeira, Republicans will "continue to struggle, even against an unpopular Democratic Party."
