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The New Main Street Coalition


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Claremont Review Of Books

What it will take to win in 2024.

Jeffrey H. Anderson

Fall 2021

Just nine months in, the Biden administration has already shown that it combines the ideological ambitions of the Wilson, Roosevelt, Johnson, and Obama Administrations with the incompetence of Jimmy Carter’s. So it’s never too early to start thinking about 2024. Before Republicans begin to contemplate the next slugfest, however, they would do well to take stock of developments over the past three presidential elections and the ways in which the electoral map has changed as a result. The salient fact is that Donald Trump won more Midwestern swing states over the span of two elections than Republicans had won over the prior seven presidential elections combined, dating back to 1988. This is evidence of a budding Main Street coalition. But it remains to be seen whether Republicans will nurture and cultivate that coalition or let it die on the vine, a reminder of an unconventional president whom many establishment Republicans would sooner forget.

(Snip)

Winning on the Issues

In 2020, the combination of Trump’s personality and the novel coronavirus did him in. He lost despite exit polling showing that, among the plurality of voters (35%) who said the economy was the most important factor in their vote, five out of six (83%) backed him over Joe Biden. What’s more, the 11% of voters who said that crime and safety was their number one issue supported Trump by 44 percentage points (71% to 27%). Trump, however, never gave the serious yet hopeful addresses that Franklin Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, or Ronald Reagan would have relished giving during the COVID crisis, and therefore Americans never had a clear sense of where things were headed or why. Despite Trump’s impressive efforts to help spur the development of a vaccine in record time, among the one sixth (17%) of voters who said the coronavirus was their biggest issue, Joe Biden beat Trump, 81% to 15%. (Trump lost even worse—92% to 7%—among the 20% of voters who listed “racial inequality” as their top issue, but in more than two thirds of swing states, the coronavirus beat out “racial inequality” on the list of biggest concerns.) Trump didn’t play up immigration or trade enough in 2020 to motivate those doing the exit polling to ask specific questions about those issues.

In separate exit polling conducted by Fox News and the Associated Press, 61% of all voters in 2020 said Trump was not honest and trustworthy. But perhaps the best evidence of how tired voters were of Trump’s unorthodox way of comporting himself in the White House is provided by how poorly they thought of Biden, even as a majority cast votes for him. In the Fox News/A.P. polling, only 6% said they always agreed with Biden’s positions on important issues, while 33% said they never agreed with him on important issues; only 53% said he was healthy enough to serve effectively as president, and only 52% said he had the mental capacity to do so; just 39% said he was better able to handle the economy than Trump was; only half (50%) said he was honest and trustworthy, and less than half (48%) said he was a strong leader. It appears that, as in 2016, the issues largely favored Trump, but this time he lost the election to a weak opponent on the basis of the more intangible qualities of personality and leadership style.

That said, Trump did remarkably well in many bellwether counties and in several states that usually swing the election—such as Florida, Ohio, and Iowa, each of which he won convincingly—yet he lost because he did poorly among relatively affluent suburbanites in places like Arizona, Georgia, and the Philadelphia suburbs. One remarkable aspect of Trump’s rise and fall, therefore, is that voters in places that usually decide elections—presumably the most prized targets in any campaign—seem largely to have been won over to his Main Street agenda: strong at the border, skeptical toward “one world nation” trade policy, tough on crime, circumspect about foreign engagements, and committed to defending the traditional American way of life.

The fact that he lost his re-election bid anyway points to four major possibilities for 2024 and the future:

(Snip)

To discount the generally decisive importance of the five states that form a ribbon from Pennsylvania, through Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin, to Iowa is to ignore not only the electoral map but also electoral history. In the 41 presidential elections dating back to Abraham Lincoln’s victory in 1860, the candidate who has won a majority of those five states has won the election 83% of the time. (Over the past century, that percentage has been essentially the same: 84%.) More than 60% of the time (26 out of 41 elections), one candidate has swept these five states, with those candidates posting a national win-loss record of 25-1 (96%), including Trump in 2016. (The sole exception was James Blaine in 1884.)

A Republican nominee who champions a Main Street agenda in 2024—and has the track record to show that he or she means it—would provide the GOP with the best chance of winning across this ribbon of five states as well as nationwide. The question is whether Republicans will embrace and advance this new Main Street coalition, which they have inherited more than built, or will revert to their old Big Business-focused, Chamber of Commerce-pleasing, establishment ways. The answer may well determine the outcome in 2024.

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