The anxiety among Republican elected officials is palpable, as well it should be.
In the House, a number of their representatives from swing districts, confronted with the prospect of their constituents losing their health insurance on January 1, are still trying to craft some kind of legislation that both preserves government health insurance programs (required if they’re to be re-elected) and diminishes government health insurance programs (required to accord with basic Republican ideology). That this can’t be done merely confirms the Republican inability, after a decade and a half, to craft an alternative to the Affordable Care Act.
The Democratic plan to extend the enhanced subsidies of the ACA for three years won four Republican votes when it came before the Senate last Thursday, but it needed nine more to clear the 60-vote hurdle. It’s not likely to reach the House floor at all, though as my colleague Bob Kuttner has written, two discharge petitions that would force the House to vote on an extension despite the wishes of the Republican House leadership have been filed.
A separate discharge petition, which reached the required number of 218 signatures via the backing of all House Democrats and a smattering of Republicans, compelled a House vote, also last Thursday, on a measure to restore the collective-bargaining rights of roughly one million federal employees, which President Trump had abolished by executive order, despite the ongoing contracts the government had with the workers’ unions. The measure passed by a 231-to-195-vote margin, with 20 House Republicans joining all House Democrats in the majority.
Trump had justified the withdrawal of those rights by stating that unionization could impede work related to national security. No one actually believed that the workers who mop the floors in federal office buildings—the very kind of workers who lost their bargaining rights due to Trump’s orders—engage in work that would compromise national security if it’s unionized; indeed, workers at agencies that actually are related to national security, like the CIA, have always been expressly forbidden from unionizing.
The executive order was simply part of Trump’s war against the “deep state,” alongside his downsizing, his attempts to withdraw civil service protections from the federal workforce, and his efforts to repopulate that workforce with MAGA partisans—apparently, the less qualified, the better.
So, who were the 20 Republicans who strayed from MAGA orthodoxy in Thursday’s vote? None had a notably high percentage of federal employees in their districts, chiefly because all the Maryland and Virginia districts in the Greater Washington, D.C., area are represented by Democrats. But location did matter in their decisions to vote yes.
Ten of the 20 came from the mid-Atlantic states of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. Seven came from the once-industrialized Midwestern states of Ohio, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa. Behind those votes, there’s a lot of working-class history.
Once upon a time, the Northeast was home to what is now a tendency as extinct as the brontosaurus: liberal Republicans. None of the ten mid-Atlantic heretics fit that description, but in clustering around Greater New York, they do represent the most highly unionized districts that sometimes elect Republicans to the House. Moreover, the building trades unions in that region still have a large number of white members (as they increasingly do not in states like, say, California) who probably vote Republican at least much of the time.
The rate of unionization in the Rust Belt states, by contrast, has fallen to very low double digits or even high single digits, but they were bastions of unionization—sometimes with rates higher than 40 percent—in the mid-20th century. And there, too, some of the more venerable remaining unions like the trades have a substantial share of white members. (Few such members, of any race, are to be found in the anti-union South, the region that provided zero Republican votes to overturn Trump’s order.)
Finally, the remaining yes votes came from members in other regions who cling narrowly to their swing seats, including California’s David Valadao and Colorado’s Gabe Evans, as well as the two Iowans on the list. For that matter, a number of the Midwestern and mid-Atlantic yes-voters hail from swing districts, too. (The 20th vote came from Nebraska’s Don Bacon, who isn’t standing for re-election in Democratic-trending Omaha.)
Look outside these regions and you also find hints of damage control between Republican politicians and workers. In Utah, the state legislature repealed a law last week that barred public employee unions from collective bargaining, after unions collected over 300,000 signatures that would have put the repeal on the ballot. The vote margins in this heavily Republican state were pronounced: 60-to-9 in the state House and 26-to-1 in the state Senate. (That Virginia, which is again about to have a Democratic trifecta, still has a “right to work” law on the books, while Republican Utah just legalized public-sector collective bargaining, is both a mystery and, as regards Virginia Democrats, a disgrace.)
Time was when the levels of unionization in the Northeast and Midwest compelled some Republicans from those regions to regularly interact with and occasionally even support issues of concern to union members. (Certainly not all Republicans: The push for the anti-union Taft-Hartley Act and kindred legislation also originated with Midwestern Republicans.) But as the rate of unionization outside the mid-Atlantic region generally and Metro New York in particular has fallen to trace levels, that hasn’t been the case for some time. Moreover, as Republicans can no longer win many elections in more unionized regions around New York and California, Republican interactions with union members have diminished.
However, as every voter survey taken in recent election cycles makes clear, Republicans now usually come out atop Democrats in the contest for working-class voters. The elected Republican who appears to best understand the implications of that shift is Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, who joined Maine’s Susan Collins and Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan on Thursday in voting for the Democrats’ bill to extend millions of Americans’ enhanced subsidies. While a hard-line reactionary on culture-war issues, Hawley has taken the lead among his fellow Republicans in arguing that their party has to somehow attempt to address workers’ economic concerns, even pushing legislation that might speed, though not necessarily ease, the unionization process.
Hawley’s party’s abject failure even to devise an alternative to the ACA over the past 15 years makes clear, however, that its fundamental economic precepts stand athwart a plausible economic outreach to its working-class supporters.
When inflation was high under Joe Biden’s presidency, Republicans could posit themselves as the economic alternative without actually having to devise economic alternatives. Now that the economy is floundering under Donald Trump, they no longer have that luxury, nor the requisite economic alternatives. Indeed, they sacrificed many of their working-class constituents’ health insurance on the altar of tax cuts for the rich. That’s why some Republicans will occasionally cross party lines to demonstrate their recognition of working-class economic concerns. That’s why all swing-district Republicans are anxious.