There’s
no mystery about the Republican agenda. For at least the past 40 years,
the G.O.P.’s central policy goal has been upward redistribution of
income: lower taxes for the wealthy, big cuts in programs that help the
poor and the middle class. We’ve seen that agenda at work in the
policies of every Republican president from Reagan to Trump, every
budget proposal from party stars like Paul Ryan, the speaker of the
House.
This policy agenda is, however, deeply unpopular. Only small minorities of voters favor tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations; even smaller minorities
favor cuts in major social programs. So how does the G.O.P. stay
politically competitive? The answer is that the party has mastered the
tactics of bait and switch: pretending to stand for one thing, then
doing something quite different in office.
But
if special elections in the Trump era are any indication, voters are
wising up. Rick Saccone, the Republican candidate in a deep-red
Pennsylvania congressional district that Trump won by almost 20 points,
tried not one, not two, but three different bait-and-switch strategies.
And on Tuesday he still seems to have suffered a hair-thin defeat.
At
first, Republicans tried to sell their candidate by touting the 2017
tax cuts, which they portrayed as a boon to the middle class. This was
classic Bush-era strategy: The Trump tax cuts, like the Bush tax cuts,
did indeed offer some temporary relief to middle-class families,
although they offered far more to the wealthy.
What
makes this a bait and switch is the hard truth that tax cuts must,
eventually, be paid for — in fact, people like Ryan barely waited for
the ink on the tax bill to dry before proclaiming that social programs
must be cut to reduce the budget deficit the tax cuts will do so much to
inflate. And under any plausible allocation of the spending cuts needed
to offset lost revenue, the tax cuts will leave most Americans worse off (while, of course, benefiting the top 1 percent).
The thing is, voters seem to have realized this. Republican groups pretty much stopped running ads about the tax cuts weeks before the election, apparently concluding that they weren’t gaining much traction. And election night polling
suggests that health care — specifically, opposition to G.O.P. efforts
to repeal the Affordable Care Act — was a key issue in PA-18.
If
tax cuts won’t sell, how about tariffs? In 2016 Trump portrayed himself
as a different kind of Republican, an economic populist who would stand
up for the little guy. In practice, he has been utterly orthodox except
for one thing, his willingness to break with free trade. And it’s
possible that he announced steel tariffs partly in an effort to swing a
district in what used to be steel country. Or he may have been trying to
steal Stormy Daniels’s thunder. With Trump, you never know.rd and contributing writers from around the world.
Anyway, it didn’t work, perhaps because many Pennsylvania voters realize that steel country isn’t what it used to be, and the old days aren’t coming back. These days there are about 10 times as many hospital workers as steel workers in the Pittsburgh metropolitan area — and surely at least some voters realize that G.O.P. efforts to slash health care threaten their jobs as well as their coverage.
Finally,
Republicans pulled out their old standby: trying to distract voters
from their economic agenda by appealing to racial, cultural and
religious enmity.
That’s what Ed Gillespie tried in the Virginia
gubernatorial race, and in this latest campaign Saccone proclaimed that
Democrats are motivated by “hatred for our country” and “hatred of God.” But it didn’t work either time.
Why
not? One answer may be that despite the eruptions of racism and
anti-Semitism under Trump, America is on the whole a far more tolerant
country than it used to be.
But there are also Trump-specific issues. It’s hard for Republicans to pose as the party of patriotism while slavishly defending a man who holds office in part thanks to Russian intervention, and seems almost eager to demonstrate that he really is Vladimir Putin’s puppet.
And despite receiving overwhelming support from white evangelicals — which tells you something about the state of conservative Christianity — Trump is surely the least godly man ever to occupy the White House.
So
the upset in Pennsylvania wasn’t just a harbinger of likely Democratic
gains to come. It also showed the bankruptcy of all the political
strategies Republicans have used to distract voters from an unpopular
agenda.
Yet
I have to admit that while the wising-up of American voters is deeply
encouraging, it also makes me nervous. History says that Republicans
won’t change course, because they never do. They’ll just look for bigger
distractions.
And
with everyone who showed even an occasional sense of responsibility
leaving the Trump administration, you have to wonder what comes next. In
particular, regimes in trouble — like, say, the Argentine junta
in the 1980s — often try to rally the public with dangerous foreign
policy adventurism. Are you sure that Trump won’t go that route? Really
sure?
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