Salena Zito has an article out in the Washington Examiner that’s worth your time. The whole notion that “The Republicans have lost the suburbs” is way overstated. If that were true, the Dems blue wave would have materialized as they expected, rather than being a historically ho-hum midterm performance for the party out of power. But that’s not to say I think the Republicans are playing all the right moves. The Dems are doing a far better job of selling to wealthy suburbanites than the GOP is doing of selling to working class voters. What you’re seeing now is wealthy suburbs shifting hard for Democrats, while working class suburbs that have been traditionally democratic are shifting more slowly.
The GOP will find its home not necessarily just with blue collar workers: there’s whole classes of educated, middle-class voters out there who are working professional jobs, but aren’t rich enough to afford the wild redistributionist schemes of the progressive left. We aren’t going to pay for universal health care and free college by taxes on the wealthy. You and I will pay for those things, and if you think they’re expensive now, wait until they’re free. If I were running the GOP, here’s what I’d tell them:
- Forget the Chambers of Commerce. Let the Dems have them. A lot of the small business people are in that “not quite rich enough” category, so you’re not going to lose them by telling the chambers to piss off.
- Forget free trade. Smacks of globalism, and whether you like it or not, Trump has positioned the GOP as a nationalist party that believes in borders and trade agreements that benefit the American worker.
- You’ve lost the rich to the Dems, so why promote corporate friendly policies and tax structures that benefit them? They are begging to pay more in taxes. So have it!
- Use the immigration issue to crack into the black working-class vote. You might also find that latinos who are already here aren’t keen on wage competition with new arrivals either. You want to break tech workers away from their oligarchical overlords? Run on ending the H1B program. Sure, your donors will squeal, but you need votes more than donors.
- Front candidates who are talented at retail politics, and who get what that means in the 21st century. You can win elections on the cheap if you know what you’re doing. The great conceit of all the consultants is that they can take the most Quasimodo of political candidates and make them winners. That is an exhausted model that takes a lot of money, which needs a lot of donors. You can get donors by kissing ass to wealthy elites, but at the cost of votes from your base. Trump defeated Hillary on a shoestring budget. Sure, Hillary had more money to showcase the country how awful she was, but that’s not to say Trump didn’t do a lot of things right.
- Religious, but not too much. The wear your religion on your sleeve model of politicking is as dead as a doornail. This will vary from region to region, but if you want the rust belt states, you’ll scare them with too much overt religiosity. Trump should have shred to pieces the notion that you can’t win the Jesus vote without praising Jesus publicly and loudly.
I’d note that a lot of these aren’t my preferred position: if you’ll notice, economic libertarianism is the loser in this realignment. But it’s not like it really had a home before. This is where I see all this going. The overall realignment, and not just here but globally, is between nationalists and globalists. Globalism will probably win in the end, but the fight is going to be over whether globalism happens democratically, with nation-states in voluntary cooperation, or whether we continue creating international institutions controlled by the wealthy for their own benefit.
Where do guns end up in all of this? The ruling classes have never been in favor of the peasants being able to shoot back. Unfortunately, I do not see the Democratic Party coming back to gun rights any time soon. Our home will be with the Republicans for the foreseeable future. What we have to hope for is that even when the Dems take control, they can never take enough control to really push the worst. We’re also playing the court game very well, and that could provide a firewall against the Dems’ worst excesses.
What will the Dem coalition look like? A party of wealthy elites is a losing party. The Dem coalition will be between the wealthy and urban and suburban poor. You see this in California. The wealthy will provide the money, from both themselves, but also from their political opponents in the working class, to provide benefits for their poor coalition members.
The election of that socialist from the Bronx is a preshock of the parties exothermically realigning. First thing she did was go after Pelosi…
First thing she did was go after Pelosi…
We should ‘encourage’ that by actively inciting these radical left democrats. Another form of Wedge Politics under a false flag.
The more idiocy they push, the more the less radical and centrist of them will either go republican, or simply not vote.
I recently read that of the 100 Congressional Districts with the highest per capita income, 73 are represented by Democrats.
I continue to believe that unless we realign into separate countries, the future is civil war. We defacto live in different countries now and trying to shoehorn everyone into the same government structure is going to end in bloody failure.
Richard, my problem with that is ‘How do we divide places up?’ I don’t think a partition, India style, will work here.
This isn’t like CW1 where a group of states seceded.
Look at the county-by-county map of the ’16 election and a lot of the blue states have large red patches and vice-versa.
If things ‘go south’, it’s going to look worse than what the former Yugoslavia went through.
Yes. PA is a classic example of how you can’t just draw a clear East and West. Lancaster County (deep red) is in between Dauphin and Cheater (blue and purple, respectively), but with two red strongholds beside us (York and Lebanon). How exactly do those lines get drawn exactly?
Lines won’t help us. Fighting will. Smart fighting. Just like the homos.
My problem with the ‘How do we divide places up?’ is that its focusing on the wrong questions. “Who gets the military bases in San Diego?” Who cares? That’s an implementation detail. The country will pull itself apart regardless of what you think about certain “important” parts of the country.
Sure county by county in states will show a lot of patches. But as has been noted (https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/11/the-dangerously-unified-states-of-america/), we are realigning along regional boundaries. It is becoming more like the last war between states.
We will either split up (peacefully or not) or we will be subjugated by the left. It might take 50 years, but its coming.
Pat, my concern is not with military bases, or any other “infrastructure”. It’s with homes and land that people have had in families for multiple generations and places where people have lived the same and those people’s desire to hold what’s theirs.
Compare Washington, Oregon, and California, for example, in the article and tell republican stronghold counties that’s it just sucks to be them since the state is now considered a democrat stronghold.
Are they to blithely accept a national division where they’re part of a new proggie nation?
Flip side of the coin for Kansas City and StLousy in Missouri.
I think not.
If a split were to occur, it definitely won’t be peaceful. It probably won’t remain so if it doesn’t happen.
My point is to play using the democrat’s rules (no holds barred) and beat them at their own game. Peacefully if possible, if not? welllll……
That’s a concern, but we are already seeing people move. We need to get out of this mindset that we have homes and lands that are more important than freedom.
Yes, it does just suck for them that they are in a blue state. It sucks for us in PA that we are in a bluing state. We have to accept a tactical retreat and move to an area with like minded people.
A split may not be peaceful, but it will be necessary.
Or, we could just strengthen the existing mechanisms of federalism in the constitution and go back to making people make their fights at the state level.
We don’t need to break up, just make it harder for CA to interfere with IA.
They are not going to do that and now they want to nuke us.
That of course is the optimal solution.
But they’ll never accede to that. They want complete control. Only way to stop that is become a sovereign country where they don’t have that.
It’s nice to want things; and the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. Splitting up won’t change the underlying issues, not if we want viable smaller countries. We’re too intertwined.
If other modern era civil wars any indication, it will all sort itself out in the most ugly way possible. Expect lots of body bags…
I think the lines need to be drawn around counties, not states. Perhaps sub-counties in some places. I can draw a map that puts the leftist enclaves in a half dozen or so fairly big entities. It is easy to do America since it is most of the land area. There will inevitably lots of people left behind enemy lines (This happened in CWI. W. Virginia seceded from Virginia, there was insurrection in E. Tennessee and S. Indiana and Missouri was complete no-mans land) , so we need a voluntary relocation assistance program.
I totally agree that this will be like Yugoslavia or Mexico or Russia which is why I devote attention to trying to figure out how to avoid it.
All points made in that article happened in Ohio in 2018. Looks like our State GOP read Sebastion’s mind, or he was telling him those things all along.
16% of Black Voters in Ohio voted GOP, and 37% of our, albeit small, Hispanic Population voted GOP as well.
If President Trump is to win reelection in 2020, The “Bellwether of America” is his blueprint. Outspent by the Democrat Party and their Billionaire Sugar Daddy’s, the GOP here created a Red Firewall. Governor and Attorney General Elects, Mike DeWine and Dave Yost have the blueprint for him on hand.
You also have a Republican governor who learned from his past congressional mishaps on guns (or so I hope) in Mike DeWine. We must seek to educate, hopefully not by force, but we need to adopt the tactics of that shill who followed Sen. Jeff Flake to the elevator. That’s how we must think. I seem to remember a mild freakout by you when the prospect of Mike DeWine as for came up. Well you guys fought for him so don’t stop.
Can we see a pattern here? Just because we have a GOP executive, legislature, courts, you DO NOT STOP keeping at their throats. In fact it’s when we appear to have it all is when the antis call our bluff. We need to no longer accept that as an option.
Well done in Ohio. No more Kasich idocy and you have a guy who seems to want a second chance in the governors office. Now show us how it’s done over here in PA!
Always good seeing your comments, HappyWarrior6. I’ll admit, the Demographics issue just drives me nuts. My State, however, has shown me that there isn’t a need to freak out.
DeWine was great for us on the 2nd Amendment as AG.
We’ve found out this week, through many of our local radio-stations, that DeWine’s Internal Polling was showing that he would lose to Cordray if he hadn’t adopted “Trumpism”, and it was really David Yost that pulled the Coattails for the GOP’s 2018 Ohio Success.
Yost is a hawk on the immigration and voter fraud issue, but unlike Trump, he is much more articulate, more focussed, and more cut-throat in staying on message. Yost did better with minorities than DeWine too.
Also, Ohio got it’s Red Firewall without any help from the RNC, and our State GOP wants the Romneys tossed overboard. Rinna Romney McDaniel= Worst RNC Chairperson, ever.
Making the Republican Party also the Party for Free Speech rights seems like a good election tactic too. And it might be a good way to reach younger voters who are more connected.
Heck, the Republicans are becoming that Party by default anyway, as the Democrats are morphing into the anti-Free Speech Party.
Democratic Party stances on Free Speech echo their stance on Gun Rights, as the Party displays favoritism towards Big Government and the Rich and Entitled Class. Democrats believe in Free Speech for big corporate allies like CNN, but not for the little guy. Democrats are just fine with seeing their Silicon Valley allies crush the Free Speech of the little people.
Of course Republicans becoming staunch advocates of Free Speech rights comes in conflict with some older Republican allies, the anti-Porn advocates of religious conservatives. But I think at this point even religious conservatives see the dire threat to Freedom of Religion from the hostile stance of the Left towards Freedom of Speech.
H1B visa reform?
Making it difficult for Facebook, Google, and all the others?
Making it possible for middle aged US Citizen software engineers to stay employed?
Where do we sign up?
Nobody wants it but… The Democrats are rapidly becoming the party of Hate Whitey and replace them with Third World peasants. (Also Socialism, rejecting Western Civilization, and assorted other bad ideas)
The inevitable reaction is that the Republicans will become the party of Whites, traditional Americans, and all the accompanying stuff like the Constitution.
The switch in parties has been happening pre Trump. It was very obvious that blue collar was the new home of the GOP The country club GOP in the NE has been withering for some time. It is not identity politics but class politics . As media people have moved from working class to upper class they have gone left The MSM is the Democratic Party The representatives follow the MSM lead. Chamber of Commerce represent both small business ( blue collar ) and big business ( white collar)
As blacks and hispanics move into blue collar jobs and gain middle class prosperity they tend be more conservative since free stuff is a drug they recognize. The Obama years was very hard for the small business and blue collar workers Only the public employees got raises.
The Janus decision will help with destruction of public employee unions to destroy their politic power monopoly. The obvious indoctrination of our children by teachers is creating a big problem and resentment The solution is charter schools and home schooling getting power back to parents.
The recent SAlT change in Federal tax law is going to create a lot of social change. Rich will disperse to low tax states It will cause many red states go purple and Blue states go purple
MD wanted a GOP governor due to the bad business climate pre 2016 They like the better climate Yet MD had been blessed with mainly Democrats that are not ideological. So they go anti gun but not excessively. We have no GOP to counter anti gun initiatives but many Democrats are reluctant to be extreme.
The rich county of Montgomery has been pushing the progressive line. Why? Because they an afford to indulge their compassion It makes them feel good and superior Yet the SALT changes will hurt them badly Many will not be afford to live there.
The representatives will have to keep property taxes low in order to maintain their population base. That starve public employee expansion. It also give blue collar business a better business climate.
Obama primary push was to damage and reduce the middle class. It is easier to control the lower class that is dependent on government assistance .
Trump did not threaten the public assistance for the lower middle class but instead gave them more job opportunity so that would reduce their need for public assistance.
Ryan cold hearted deficit push threaten those who needed food stamp and such to live since jobs went away. That is why libertarian which is economically conservative failed.
Libertarians seem to like legal pot and liberal societal polices They are not staunch economic conservative They were not threatened by Obamacare. The were fine with deficit spending. So they were not as opposed to Liberal tax and spend.
The faith full religious are very staunch and will fight. Guns are a practical need Not an ideological issue to them The know that with guns they can fight if need be.
As more liberals go to the southern states that will break the territorial gains of the GOP So no a civil war based on territory will not work It is by class and we are in all states
As population we have a very large white. some black and asian and hispanic blue collar that freedom , capitalism and guns are a priority . The upper class is mainly white more college educated and also large population. Since high schools pushed most students to go to colleges and colleges had high indoctrination the group think of progressivism increases.
I recall Mitch Daniels, a very good governor and libertarian conservative, said not to push culture issues but focus on the economics. The problem is that when people are economically secure they will ok spending .Economic theory is not a emotional issue. So it loses However males in girls locker rooms and bathrooms are a cultural issue and people will fight that. People do fight on the culture . Making people who think abortion is murder pay for it, is a cultural issue . Taking our guns are an emotional cultural issue so it is strong motivator to vote.