The New Republican

The election is much more than a victory for Donald Trump and his Republican Party. It’s a strong, unprecedented victory for a new type of Republican Party, one firmly grounded in America’s multi-ethnic working class.

Traditionally, the party had its roots in the upper-class, British Northern Protestant elements of America. This was the group that had won the Civil War, and which industrialized the country in the decades thereafter. The Republican Party may have increasingly relied on immigrant ethnic votes by the 1920s, but Northern White Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPs) continued to provide the leaders and most of the voters to the Republican cause.

This pattern continued even after Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s landslide victories in 1932 and 1936. Immigrant whites and African Americans fled the Party of Lincoln for the New Deal, but this merely strengthened the hand of the old guard. Most intra-party fights for the next 30 years were between WASP factions arguing over how best to respond to FDR’s revolution.

Even Ronald Reagan’s 1980 landslide, a victory which brought the party back from the political graveyard, did not substantially alter this equation. The new “Reagan Democrats” often split their tickets, voting for the GOP for executive offices and Democrats everywhere else.

The party electorate’s tilt toward upper-class Protestants can be seen in the 1988 Election exit poll. George H.W. Bush was a WASP’s WASP, a graduate of the elite New England prep school Phillips Academy and Yale University. He won the presidency on the strength of college-educated Americans, winning 62% of those with a four-year degree and even getting a majority of those with postgraduate degrees. Joined by 67% of Protestants (with substantial overlap between those groups), Bush showed that even the Gipper had not made the Republicans into the working person’s party he had envisioned.

Much of the Republican Party’s national frustrations and failures over the ensuing decades came from its inability to expand from these redoubts even as their share of the electorate shrank. The party’s presidential nominees won or split the college vote through 2012, although it lost considerable ground with postgraduate voters. It failed to win the popular vote in all but one election, though, because its share of non-college educated voters was dramatically lower than it was in the heady days of Reagan.

This was compounded by the growing strength of non-white voters. By 2012 they comprised nearly 30% of the vote, and Republicans were getting crushed. Democrats looked at Barack Obama’s comfortable 2012 re-election and proclaimed that they were the ascendent party of the future.

This “Rising American Electorate” theory posited that growing Democratic majorities were inevitable as older, religious whites passed away and were replaced by younger, secular, non-white voters. It was political version of the “End of History” mantra that gained such credence after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Trump changed that because he changed the party. Gone were the regular invocations of unquestioning support for big business and its totems of trade and untrammeled migration. Christian triumphalism was replaced by calls for religious liberty that were marked by fewer theological dog whistles and more secular argumentation. Trump signaled that the Republican Party was open to all who shared its pro-worker, pro-American emphasis, no matter what god they prayed to or what nation they hailed from.

The result was electric. Put a map of Trump’s gains in 2016 over an ethnic heritage map of the United States and it’s clear that he gained most in areas where the descendants of the 1880-1920 immigrant classes lived. The voters in the areas where the grandchildren of those Italian, Polish, Slovakian, Finnish, and Swedish immigrants lived swung overnight from Democratic to Republican.

This also showed up in polls on education. Trump lost many of the moderate, often WASP, college voters who really did not want significant change. But he more than made up for it with votes from non-college-educated voters who did.

Trump continued to increase these gains even in 2020 when he lost. Latino, black, and Asian voters supported him in larger numbers than before, and in some cases larger numbers than they had backed more traditional Republican nominees. It wasn’t enough to offset the continuing losses among the traditional GOP-leaning college crowd, but it was nearly enough to re-elect him.

The 2024 Election is the culmination of this effort. Latinos had supported Democrats by 30 or more points in nearly every election since 1988, but they voted for Kamala Harris by only 6 points according to the exit poll. Black voters gave Trump 13% of their vote, the highest mark for a Republican since 1976. He also received the highest share of Asians’ votes for a Republican since 2004 and carried the multi-ethnic collection of Native Americans, multi-racial voters, and smaller racial groups.

Trump’s coalition is also decidedly tilted toward those without college degrees. He lost the college-educated voters, once the Republican Party’s bastion, by 13 points. He won because he carried non-college-educated voters, once the Democratic Party’s core, by 14 points.

Time will tell whether this new coalition survives. The British Conservative Party won a huge majority in the 2019 election with a similar demographic upheaval, but decided once in office that it wanted to govern as if nothing had changed. As a result, it fell to a record low 24% of the vote in this year’s election as working-class voters abandoned it in droves.

Trump’s triumph will be total if he can remake the party’s policies as much as he has its politics. That will require him to shift the party’s economic policies away from free-market fundamentalism and toward one that puts workers’ gains, not returns on equity, first. It will also require the party to reorient its global face toward prudent internationalism rather than its over-exuberant Bush-era embrace of Wilsonianism. If he does those things, though, we will stand on the cusp of something the elite classes thought unimaginable just a decade ago: a new, realigned Republican majority.