Matt Vespa reports from Townhall.
Donald Trump was good for the Republican Party. This is now a bipartisan opinion. David Shor, a former 2012 Obama campaign veteran who now does data science for Open Labs, was quite adamant Democrats could blow this whole thing and Republicans could have an institutional grip at the federal level for years – if Democrats don’t get their act together. The emerging injection of white liberals is coming into conflict with the traditional nonwhite voter blocs of the Democratic base, which has, in turn, driven these voters away from the party. That could continue and leave a mess for Democrats.
Nonwhites are not as ideologically driven as progressive whites, [who are] now helming the agenda and its action items. This could cause a big rift, especially when both groups have voted Democratic in the 70+ percent margins for years. Shor also touched upon the GOP in an interview with New York Magazine about the 2020 election, going into detail about why Trump was good for the GOP.
The Trump base is more diverse than Mitt Romney’s, earning a higher share of the nonwhite vote than any GOP candidate in years. Shor noted “defund the police” didn’t resonate with folks the liberal media thought were totally for it. Until 2020, whites were the only racial group in which voting preferences could be gauged on ideological lines. When white progressives forced nonwhites to vote in this manner, this caused Democrats to bleed voters, especially Hispanic voters across the country.
Further, we live in a country where winning elections is often rewarded by having a geographically diverse coalition. The Trump coalition is exactly that. Shor offered the typical “liberal lines” about Electoral College bias, but admitted Trump’s voter base is distributed throughout the country in very efficient numbers, making him and his brand of politics hard to beat (via NY Mag):
“Between 2012 and 2016, the Electoral College bias changed from being one percent biased toward Democrats to 3 percent biased toward Republicans, mainly because of education polarization. Donald Trump is unpopular, paying a penalty for that relative to a generic Republican, but he’s popular with voters that happen to be efficiently distributed in political-geography terms.”
“If Hillary Clinton had run against Marco Rubio, who’s a less toxic figure to the public as a whole, and he performed as expected for a generic Republican, she would have won the 2016 election (if her 49.6 percent had the same ratio of college-to-non-college-educated voters as Obama had in 2012). The down-ballot implications for the GOP, especially in the Senate, would have been a lot worse off with a narrow majority coalition (a Romney split between college and non-college voters) than with the Trump coalition.”
“So I think the Trump era has been very good for the Republican Party, even if they now have to accept this very thin Democrat trifecta. If these coalition changes are durable, the GOP has very rosy long-term prospects for dominating America’s federal institutions. If the GOP can get the good parts of Trumpism without the bad parts, things can get very bleak for the DNC very fast. When I look at the 2020 election, I see the most unpopular Republican ever to run for president against the most popular Democrat (after Obama), and we only narrowly won the Electoral College. If Biden had done 0.3 percent worse, then Donald Trump would have won re-election with just 48 percent of the two-party vote.”
The good GOP news is not making Puerto Rico or DC states or getting redistricting reform. Democrats failed to make any meaningful inroads with state legislatures in 2020, because Trump helped candidates in these down-ticket races. For the next 10 years, Republicans will be in the driver’s seat for drawing congressional maps for many House districts. This dynamic, coupled with white liberals forcing their party to take positions that are not popular with its traditional voter groups, primes Democrats for disaster as the 2022 midterms loom. Shor adds:
“We have no margin for error. If we conduct ourselves the way we did after 2008, we’re definitely going to lose. And due to the way the electoral system works, we could be locked out of power for a very long time, just like we were after 2010. The need for messaging discipline is stronger than ever, but keeping the national conversation focused on popular economic issues won’t be enough. The maps in the House of Representatives are so biased against Democrats – and without redistricting reform – their chance of keeping the House is very low. Moreover, the Senate is more biased against Democrats than the House.”
Shor added that if Biden’s approval rating dips below 50 percent by the end of the year, “we’re probably f***ed.”There’s a lot to unpack here, but Trump brought millions into the fold and his coalition is engaged, passionate, and geographically diverse. Trump populism will continue to surge as long as Congress fails to do its job. The sooner anti-Trump Republicans get that, the sooner the GOP can move on from the petty squabbles about Trump and the party’s future. There was a fight in 2016 that ended as soon as Trump got the delegates to clinch the 2016 nomination, and the GOP was merely 90,000 votes away from controlling everything in 2020.
To be sure, the Trump base is a double-edged sword; about 30 percent voted for Democrats in 2018. And marginal shifts can sink the boat. Shor alluded to this: “if Biden had done 0.3 percent worse, Trump would have won re-election.” And how much did Democrats gain with non-college whites in 2020? “Somewhere between half a percent to one percent,” Shor added.
The massive influx of college-educated whites to the tune of seven percent was significant to Biden’s win, but these folks mostly live in deep-blue areas already. The point here is that the working class who broke for Biden in the Rust Belt had more of an impact when it came to reaching the magic number of 270. It is this group that is not so woke and votes its wallet.