Sue Ogrocki/AP Photo
Mike Pence at the Tulsa rally in June. Some Republican governors have begun connecting directly with the vice president in order to circumvent President Trump.
Is the long-predicted Republican crack-up finally here? Pollsters and social scientists have been predicting an “emerging Democratic majority” for more than two decades.
Their main rationale was demographic. Groups that tended to vote for Democrats were expanding—college-educated, Hispanic, African American, older voters—while the core Republican base was contracting.
We published the first such piece, by Paul Starr, in 1997 (!), and two frequent Prospect contributors, John Judis and Ruy Teixeira, wrote a book by that title in 2002. As Starr pointed out, Bill Clinton, as an emblem of the new moderate South, made inroads in the 1996 election in several Southern states.
The most recent and comprehensive account, by our friend Stan Greenberg in his new book RIP GOP, identifies even more powerful demographic and ideological trends. Young people and single women are more progressive and intensely Democratic than ever. Old folks are coming back to the Dems, given the Trump-driven calamities in nursing homes. Racial justice is a majority cause once again.
What took so long for the emerging Democratic majority to emerge? One reason was electoral theft—the 2000 election. There were also major elements of theft in the form of voter suppression in 2016. And clearly, theft will be the main obstacle to a big Democratic win in 2020.
A second factor was the Republican embrace of the racist South. The sort of racial moderates among Southern governors represented by Jimmy Carter (Georgia), Bill Clinton (Arkansas), and Ray Mabus (Mississippi) have been eclipsed by Republican versions of George Wallace.
A third factor was the desertion of two core parts of the traditional Democratic base—older voters who were loyal to Democrats based on Social Security, Medicare, and memories of FDR; and white working-class voters who once voted wall-to-wall Democratic in the North, but saw neoliberal Democrats doing a lot for bankers and not much for them.
Obama’s perverse embrace of budget austerity played a role in the Democratic loss of seniors. In order to make the numbers work for the costly Affordable Care Act, Obama’s budget technicians came up with the idea of unspecified future “savings” in Medicare—which Republicans easily branded as cuts at the expense of older Americans.
All of these deeper dynamics, plus a lot of electoral theft compounded by the 2013 evisceration of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder, were just enough to give Trump the White House in 2016.
Now, however, that emerging Democratic majority and the Republican crack-up may be back on track. And the most interesting new element is the incipient splintering of the GOP.
Ever since Reagan, the Republican coalition has been an unstable alliance between cosmopolitan billionaires and local religious fundamentalists who otherwise have little in common. Fiscal conservatives have gotten into bed with deficits-be-damned tax-cutters.
But it took Trump to make these and other fissures unsustainable. For his first three years, Republican support for Trump was cynical and transactional. Republicans who didn’t trust Putin looked the other way, as long as Trump was delivering judges and tax cuts along with his embrace of the Kremlin. Republicans who believed in small government ignored Trump’s power grabs. Budget-balancers stared at their shoes. Principled conservatives were as rare as Rinos.
In the last few weeks, however, more and more Republicans have been running for the exits. With the exception of a handful of die-hard Trumpers, most Republican governors have distanced themselves from Trump and his catastrophic leadership in the corona pandemic. As Senate control is at risk, even Mitch McConnell has explicitly rejected Trump’s attacks on the CDC and his calamitous public-health advice.
Mr. McConnell urged citizens to wear masks, expressed “total” confidence in Dr. Tony Fauci, and backed the CDC. “The straight talk here that everyone needs to understand is: This is not going away until we get a vaccine,” McConnell said on Wednesday.
As the Times recently reported, Republican governors have been having private phone meetings to discuss strategy on how to end-run Trump, and have been connecting directly with Vice President Pence. It is a mark of just how much trouble the GOP is in that Mike Pence—Pence!—is viewed as some kind of life raft.
With the exception of a handful of die-hard Trumpers, most Republican governors have distanced themselves from Trump and his catastrophic leadership in the corona pandemic.
As Trump becomes more and more isolated, he becomes more and more dangerous. He has flitted from one strategy to another, dropping impulsive gambits as they backfire. He tried to insist that schools open, on the premise that parents were tearing their hair out. But polls showed that parents cared much more about their kids’ health.
He tried for a few days to scapegoat immigrants once again, saying that visas would be denied to foreign students who were not attending classes live. That lasted less than a week. In the face of massive opposition, the administration did not even bother to defend against lawsuits.
Now, once again, Trump is resorting to police-state tactics, sending federal forces to Portland, Oregon, where they are not wanted. And when this also backfires, his last recourse will be trying to steal the election. Trump even told Fox News that he would not necessarily accept the November election result, which is of course not his to accept or reject.
If Trump does fall, the aftermath could well be a splintering of what used to be the Republican Party, into a neofascist Trumpian party and a party of traditional conservatives. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s recent theocratic version of a human rights charter was his opening bid to succeed Trump.
The coming GOP crack-up recalls the splintering of the pre–Civil War Democratic Party, into an overt pro-slavery faction and one led by Sen. Stephen Douglas, who hoped once again to finesse the issue of slavery with states’ rights and “popular sovereignty.” The result was Lincoln, and nearly seven decades of mostly unbroken Republican rule.
We could be headed for that long-awaited progressive Democratic majority. All that stands in the way is the risk of a stolen election. That’s all.
