War, Trade & The Republican Reckoning

New polling has confirmed that across the Midwest, Trump has support where other Republicans founder. There are reasons for this and the GOP better figure them out--fast.

A new poll came out of Ohio this week and it caused a bit of a ruckus among activists on social media. Most of the audience here at Corned Beef Catholicism isn’t involved in Twitter-world, so I generally steer clear of covering social media battles. But sometimes, those fights point to a bigger issue that needs discussing, and this is a classic example.

The poll, and the response of traditional conservatives—not RINOs, but actual conservatives—illustrates why so much of the Republican Party, particularly its elected officials and those who occupy posts within the party can’t grasp the hold Donald Trump has in this primary. And why, if they fail to start understanding (or be removed from positions of influence), the GOP is going to fall into complete irrelevance whenever the post-Trump era begins.

To put Ohio in context, remember that this is a state that Trump won comfortably in both 2016 and 2020. Ohio is also a state that Barack Obama carried twice. Going back to 2004, George W. Bush eked out a close win. So, it’s fair to call it a “Lean Red” state, but with Trump’s dominance it’s been assumed to be Safe Red. The poll results indicated that assumption is likely incorrect.

As you can see, the poll shows Trump still winning by landslide margins in the state. But if another Republican—either Ron DeSantis or Tim Scott is substituted in as the nominee, the state reverts to battleground status.

Furthermore, the Senate race features Democratic incumbent Sherrod Brown. After the results of the last cycle, when J.D. Vance, a populist Republican, comfortably beat a strong Democratic candidate in Tim Ryan, it was taken as another sign the Buckeye State was safely Republican. But Brown—an incumbent the GOP realistically must defeat if they are to flip control of the Senate next year—running as strongly as he currently is, stands as another challenge to the notion that Ohio is now safe territory for anyone running under the Republican banner.

It’s true that Ohio does offer the GOP real opportunities. But it has to be the right kind of candidate—one who can appeal to independents. And one of the biggest errors the Republican Establishment, as well as more traditional conservatives are making, is by defining the “independent voter” too narrowly.

When politicians and pundits talk about the independent voter, they really have one demographic in mind—suburban women, who may be somewhat economically conservative, but somewhat socially liberal. They were nicknamed “the soccer moms” in political lingo, and their shift to Bill Clinton in the 1990s was a big part of his success.

Since then, the soccer moms have been something of a Holy Grail for campaign strategists. They became “the security moms” in 2004, supporting Bush 43 in the aftermath of 9/11, before reverting back to the Hope and Change of Barack Obama. One of the many memorable moments of Trump’s campaign endeavors came in October 2020, when he said, “Suburban women, please like me!”. But for the most part, they didn’t.

But here’s the thing—there are other types of independent voters out there, and quite a few demographics where Trump—and like-minded candidates like Vance—do well. Here are just a few possibilities:

*The working-class voter who sees their jobs being shipped overseas
*The military wife who wants a president that’s strong on defense but is tired of seeing their husband pull long tours of duty in conflicts that have nothing to do with national security.
*The first-generation Hispanic immigrant that doesn’t like seeing other people from their native land enter illegally, perhaps bringing in the same hellhole that they waited patiently to escape.
*Middle-to-working class voters everywhere who see an unsecured border driving wages downward.

These are all independent voters. They believe there are some things domestically that the government has to do. Some are socially conservative, others aren’t. They don’t necessarily like Republicans, but are willing to hear them out. Trump gets them. Vance got them. Ron Johnson in Wisconsin gets at least enough of them. The middle-class populist version of Ron DeSantis got them. The newly-minted millionaire version of DeSantis, mostly funded by Wall Street and running a frontal challenge against Trump, is having more difficulty.

But most Republicans don’t get them—at least not nearly enough to offset Democratic margins in the cities. And the GOP—not just its Establishment, but its classic Reagan conservatives don’t understand why.

The reason is simple, and it boils down to two words. War and Trade.

Trump Populists Vs. Traditional Conservatives

John Ziegler is a libertarian/conservative writer, whom I crossed paths with back in 2012 when he promoted my defense of Penn State football coach Joe Paterno, who was wrongfully slandered as having enabled pedophilia within his program. Ziegler is no RINO—he’s an actual conservative (or at least a libertarian). And he, like many other traditional conservatives have such a blind spot about what the Republican Party is to many voters, that their only answer to polls like these is to dismiss them. Here is Ziegler’s tweet and my response:

How This Happens

The GOP adopted military policies aimed at intervention, most notably in the Middle East. The party adopted trade policies that prioritized the rights of multinational corporations to instantly ship jobs anywhere in the world, while still being able to export back into the United States and undercut homegrown companies. Thus, what happened in many communities might be roughly described like this:

*Slowly but surely, the good-paying jobs disappear. All that’s left is lower-wage work in retail industries where they sell cheap imports.

*Economic pressures work against marital stability and broken homes increase

*Alcoholism and other substance abuse increases. In more recent years, one of those addictions was for opioids, which Big Pharma poured in, and supposedly trustworthy doctors handed out to their unsuspecting patients.

*There are two ways of getting out—incur huge amounts of debt by going into college. Or go into the military. A lot of kids, upon leaving high school, motivated by sincere patriotism, to be sure, but also economic necessity, go into the Armed Forces.

*They get sent overseas into battle, often pulling multiple tours of duty during the long Middle East Wars.

*The lengthy time overseas puts its own strain on marriages. These now-grown kids go through divorces of their own, and their own families end up broken.

*Many come back with real mental health struggles, the byproduct of the things they saw in battle.

*As a byproduct of imperial overreach, our own border has been left completely unprotected. Consequently, fentanyl is now pouring into these communities. And the jobs situation, having never been fixed by changing trade policies, is as bad as ever.

*Rinse and repeat. It’s a spiral of military service spurred by economic necessity, which is then exploited by political leadership to serve foreign policy goals that have nothing to do with the direct security of the United States.

Given all this, can you understand why a voter who lives through this might have a deep distrust of politicians? Why they might have a negative view of both political parties? Why they might even default to vote Democratic, to at least have access to social programs? After all, if the country is going to hell in a handbasket (which they generally believe it is), you may as well vote for the party will make your life slightly less miserable, right?

I’m not saying the assessment in the above paragraph is my own (although it’s not far from it). I’m saying that it is the assessment of large numbers of independent voters that are congregated disproportionately in places like Ohio and across the Midwest.

These are the voters that Trump—who shattered Republican orthodoxies on war and trade—was able to get in 2016. In 2020, with a record of having renegotiated some of our worst trade deals and starting no new wars, he was able to broaden that coalition and make it more multi-racial. Issues relating to COVID-19 cost him critical support in more traditional Republican constituencies. That, along with what we’ll just call “other things” prevented him from going back to the White House. But he had forged a connection with voters that otherwise recoiled from Republicans.

The Republican Response (Or Lack Thereof)

So, let’s say you’re a Republican Party member that’s desperate to move on from Trump. Here are your options:

Option A: Realize that Trump succeeded where you failed because he addressed the concerns of those voters. Change your platform so you can now address those concerns too, thereby removing Trump’s appeal.

Option B: Assume that because these voters went for Trump, they’ve had some sort of epiphany, and are now going to vote Republican. And you don’t have to change anything. They love you now.

Unsurprisingly, the GOP Establishment chose Option B, and traditional conservatives generally went along with it.

The problem is, that’s simply not dealing with reality. These voters still have a distaste for Republicans. If anything, that distaste might even be worse, now that they’ve seen most GOP officeholders effectively abandon the only Republican in a generation they actually like. It’s all but confirmed their belief that traditional Republicans are responsible for the societal portrait I outlined above.

To be clear, while I think the indictment that these voters have of Republicans is accurate, I think these voters are too soft on Democratic complicity in the twin crises of war and trade. But this article is about exploring what they think and vote as they do, so we might better respond.

Rich Baris, the pollster at Big Data Poll, has been watching these trends closely, and he spelled them out in great detail, both historically going back to 1984, and in recent elections. He explains how the poll in Ohio connects to similar results that are being found in Iowa (another state that Trump flipped from Obama by a comfortable margin but will revert to coin flip status under another GOP nominee), and how Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennysylvania are likely gone without any hope whatsoever under a non-Trump nominee. The first hour of Rich’s Friday show lays this all out.

The Road Ahead

The history and the current polling underscore opportunities, but they are also a reminder of sobering realities. For those who share the worldview of Corned Beef Catholicism, there is work to do on the pro-life front. These voters aren’t against us—Trump overturning Roe vs. Wade and pushing for a ban on abortions after 15-20 weeks isn’t a turnoff to them. But the “Heartbeat Legislation”, signed by DeSantis and other pro-life governors in Red States that protects life after six weeks is going to be a tougher sell.

That’s something to build on. I would appeal to these voters to consider that the fact we’re a society that lacks appropriate reverence for life at all stages is what fuels the greed that has effectively destroyed so many of their communities. And that perhaps if we get the right to life correct, maybe some of these other deep problems will work themselves out.

But I would also appeal to traditional conservatives to take the teachings in the Epistle of James to heart—that, before you preach to someone, you first feed them. In this context, that means let’s stop nominating GOP candidates who wreck people’s lives, and then gripe about how those people vote. A good example of what not to do came in 2012, when Mitt Romney was caught on a hot mic telling wealthy donors that 47 percent of the county were a bunch of hopeless freeloaders.

Contrast Romney’s rhetoric with that of Trump, who was in Pennsylvania on Saturday night speaking to an audience filled with these types of voters. Voters who had been written off by Republicans, but who come teeming by the thousands to Trump rallies. Maybe it’s because of rhetoric like this: “I was the first president in decades who didn’t start a war.”

At an hour of history where the United States government is intent on outsourcing our money to Ukraine and our jobs to India, that’s a good place for the new, America First Republican Party to start.