The Once and Future President

There will be millions of words spilt trying to understand Donald Trump pulling a Grover Cleveland with serious style points this week. The two most important will be “educational polarization.”

Starting in the 1980s, and accelerating after 2000, educational attainment has become a key dividing line in American politics. Voters with a college degree increasingly skew blue, part of the “coalition of the ascendent” that powered the Obama coalition.

But every action has an opposite reaction, and what was once a theory now seems proved beyond the shadow of a doubt: The Republican Party is becoming—or perhaps has become—the party of voters without a four-year college degree, which of course make up the majority of the American electorate. And while the Democrats clean up among Americans with a bachelor’s degree, there simply aren’t enough of them to compensate for their weakness across the board.

That disconnect was on full display Tuesday night. Critical theories on race and gender, big government spending plans, aggressive culture-war stances, and intersectional identities simply don’t resonate for the majority of Americans who don’t have a college degree. And slapping a camo hat and hunting vest on top of standard-issue identity politics simply cannot compete with talking about issues in the way everyday Americans do. As political scientist Joshua Zingher wrote in the wake of the 2022 midterms, “the diploma divide is one of the dominant political cleavages nationally and the dominant cleavage among Whites.”

This cultural alienation isn’t just political, it’s personal. Every time a corporate HR manager includes “(she/her)” in her e-mail signature, or a public school waters down standards in the name of “equity,” it’s an effective in-kind campaign contribution to the other side. And in the political arena, elite-driven interest groups have pushed well beyond where the median voter is comfortable with on crime, drugs, transgender athletes, urban disorder, and more. Working-class Americans weren’t the aggressors in these battles, but the ballot box provides the best way to fight back.

Even in deep blue California, voters pushed back against progressive wish-list items like soft-on-crime policies and rent control. Measures to legalize psychedelics failed in Massachusetts and legal weed failed in Florida and both Dakotas. Voters broadly signaled that elite priorities are out of touch. That sense, plus the inflation of the early Biden era that took big chunks out of middle-class paychecks, produced the result we saw on Tuesday. Any Democrat who does not take this week’s results as a direct repudiation of progressive governance, rather than some fluke of the once-and-future president’s charisma or demagoguery, will continue to find themselves in the wilderness.

Much will be made of Trump’s electric connection with his base, his combativeness, and his machismo. Those are the easy parts of populism to ape, yet as we have seen in the 2018 and 2022 midterms, copying Trump’s style alone doesn’t recreate his magic.

In a sense, Trump was lucky in losing the last time around—if he had won re-election in 2020, and been blamed for the global surge in inflation that rocked U.S. consumers and had his fingerprints even more directly on the overturning of Roe, his party might have suffered. But he was even more lucky in his opponents’ choices: Transparently partisan indictments over business records and tawdry personal scandals brought by liberal DAs and special counsels solidified his hold on the GOP primary process. An opposing party that tried to run cover for an incumbent on the edge of senility. A late swap for an opponent who, damningly, could not think of a thing she’d have done differently than her unpopular boss. Frantic attempts at “joy” that couldn’t cover up an agenda without much of a vision. And, most importantly, a Democratic Party captive to the language and biases of the college-educated activists, writers, and politicians who make up its power base but are disconnected from real working-class voters on the ground.

Until and unless the Democrats ditch the patois—in approach and affect—of the freshman-year college seminar, they will continue to be surprised by results like last night. Perhaps 2024 will mark the start of a more competitive Democratic party, one that recognizes that D.C. lobbying efforts that speak in NGO-ese do not have an adequate finger on the pulse of the grassroots voters they claim to represent—and often act against their interests.

But that would require progressives owning up to their biases—admitting their privilege, shall we say—and recognizing that it is they, not the voters, who are out of touch. Democrats with an authentic connection to working-class voters, like Maine’s Rep. Jared Golden or Washington’s Rep. Marie Glusenkamp Perez, appear to have won re-election in tight battles, in part by standing against their party’s left-wing priorities. Their party should learn from their example.

What this means for the Republican Party is less certain, but hopeful shoots abound. Competing interpretations of “populism” will lead to messy intra-squad dynamics. To solidify their newfound coalition, the Trump administration and Congressional Republicans will have to take the lesson of educational polarization to heart – that working-class voters are looking for something more than just tax cuts and corporate credits.

For conservatives, there will be no shortage of opportunities in a second Trump term to provide ballast for his populist energies—not every promise made in the heat of a campaign is necessarily prudent to pursue. The various “No Tax on [Swing State Constituencies]” could eat up fiscal space better allocated to other priorities, like a baby bonus or a beefed-up child tax credit. Some of the high-profile figures who have his ear have proposed unhelpful ideas around indiscriminately slashing social spending or raising unfounded concerns around vaccines. The federal deficit will continue to rise, and pro-growth and pro-family tax priorities must be pursued with an eye toward fiscal discipline.

Notably, on the day of his inauguration, Donald Trump will be the oldest man ever to be sworn into office, beating out his predecessor by five-and-a-half months. In the wings waits Vice-President-elect JD Vance, who, to many, represents the fullest potential of a truly working-class orientation to Republican politics.

The path forward is treacherous. There are still many in the party who interpret “populism” as cover for obnoxious social media spats, to be used as cover for indiscriminate cuts to social spending or deficit-busting corporate tax cuts. If that agenda wins the day during Trump’s second turn, it will leave its new voting base disappointed.

But a conservatism with populist characteristics could meet voters where they are; just look at this week’s ballot initiatives. Alaska and Missouri passed measures to raise the minimum wage and guarantee sick leave, and Nebraska will now require employers to provide paid leave, suggesting pro-worker measures resonate even with red-state voters.

Applying those insights to D.C. governance could open the door to sustained success. Imagine a White House that fully empowered Vice President Vance to lead negotiations with Congress. Seeing a Republican White House and Republican Congress deliver pro-family tax reform, develop sensible pro-growth policies, advance meaningful cultural priorities, and produce sensible social conservatism victories could solidify the G.O.P. as the party that authentically represents working-class Americans and works on their behalf.

Those are big dreams; skeptics would say fantasies. But right now, in the afterglow of a trouncing bigger than most analysts dreamed possible, the sky seems the limit. It’s up to conservative policymakers to turn that into reality.