White Saviors

BlueBoxDave grasps why the suburban realignment to the Democrats is more of a huge opportunity for Republicans.

The Federalist:

“There is supposedly a schism in the Republican Party. You see it on TV, you read about it in the legacy conservative journals, and you see it discussed at length on social media. It isn’t real, but that doesn’t much matter; it appears to be real, and so it must be dealt with. We are to believe that a power struggle has been engaged between the establishment wing of the GOP led by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Rep. Liz Cheney against the Trump wing of the party, which is nearly everyone else including, importantly, the voters.

It is entirely clear that the establishment wants Trump excised from the party even though the voters do not, but this misses a larger point. What McConnell and all of the right-leaning anti-Trumpers don’t understand, what they have never understood, is that the Trump phenomenon is not first and foremost a cult of personality, it is a set of policies and a worldview. Getting rid of Trump, even if that were possible, would not change that. The GOP of the last 30 years is over. To see what has replaced it, we must go back those 30 years. …

Those who tilt at the vain windmill of going back to the old GOP would have the party resurrect its support among suburban whites. But why? The lesson of 2020 was that Trump’s populism, rooted in the Reform Party, opens opportunities to working-class and non-white voters that are far more promising. Republican voters want more than the defensive Republican politics of the past 30 years, they want a new aggressive form of politics that advances their interests rather than slows down the erosion of their America.

There is no going back, and if that means losing some elections, it means losing some elections. Perot lost, and Buchanan lost — but did they? In fact, over time their ideas gained ascendency in the GOP and now define it. This is about much more than Trump. It always has been. The future of the Republican Party belongs to whoever can marshal the new GOP and expand its reach. That means putting the American people first. Republican voters will accept nothing less.”

It is actually great thing that they are gone.

1.) Trump barely won anyway without them. If it had not been for COVID and his own inept governance, he would have likely won. He lost the 2020 election because he lost two groups of White voters. There were the college-educated, upper middle class White suburbanites who live in places like Sandy Springs or Bloomfield Hills and who get all the attention due to the “education polarization” phenomena, but there were also White Independents who just didn’t think he was populist enough. It was this latter group and Trump’s losses with voters who make under $100,000 a year that was decisive.