Reimagining Republicanism - Arizona RINO Revenge

ReimagininArizona Illustrates the RINO Revenge

By Henry Olsen| November 13th, 2018

Arizona’s Senate race was perhaps the most surprising, and disturbing, midterm result for Republicans and Trump fans. Many struggle to understand how Barry Goldwater’s home state will send a former pink tutu-wearing antiwar activist to Washington. The answer is instructive regarding what Trump Republicanism must do to build a majority.

The biggest reason Martha McSally lost is the same reason Republicans lost control of the House: RINOs. Across the nation, moderate college-educated independents who had frequently backed Republicans in prior elections switched sides. We can see this trend both in the Arizona exit polls and the results reported to date.

Support for Republicans has collapsed since 2012 among college-educated Arizonans when Mitt Romney cruised to a 54-44 win over Barack Obama, crushing him by a 63-36 percent margin among college graduates. This year, while Republican Governor Doug Ducey even more easily won victory by a 56-42 margin, he barely carried college grads with only a 51-46 margin. McSally ran against a much tougher opponent in Kyrsten Sinema and ended up losing college grads by a 52-47 margin. Since college grads cast nearly one-quarter of the state’s votes, that 10-point swing added nearly 2.5 percent to Sinema’s margin. Since her lead is currently below two percent, this was the difference between victory and defeat.

Support for Republicans has also declined since 2012 among the smaller, and more liberal, groups of voters with graduate degrees. In 2012 Romney won them by a 54-42 margin. Ducey got clobbered among them 59-40, and McSally lost by an even larger 62-37 percent margin. They cast 14 percent of the vote, so that extra six-point difference added nearly another one percent to Sinema’s victory margin.

The actual returns bear this out. Phoenix’s Maricopa County is home to 60 percent of all voters and a much higher percentage of Arizona’s college grads. Romney carried it easilyin 2012 by a 55-43 margin. McSally, however, lost it to Sinema by a 51-47 result, the first time a Republican had lost Maricopa County in a contested race for President, Governor, or Senator since the last century. Game, set, match

McSally is far from the only Republican to lose because of the RINO’s revenge. Four Republican-held State House seats flipped parties, each in districts that had moved dramatically in favor of the Democrats between 2012 and 2016. Tucson’s 10th District voted for Obama by 5 percent and Hillary Clinton by 10 percent; the Republican there was living on borrowed time. But the other seats were in—you guessed it, Maricopa County—with between 39 and 46 percent of residents holding a four-year or a graduate degree. The 17th voted for Romney by 14 percent but only 4 percent for Trump, while the 18th and 28th both flipped from Romney to Clinton districts. House districts with similar profiles account for the lion’s share of Republican losses nationwide.

Other states could make up for the RINO defection with votes from blue-collar voters who switched from Obama to Trump. Arizona, however, does not have many of them. In the Midwest it is common to find areas where Trump outpolled Romney by 10-20 percent. Trump outpolled Romney in only two Arizona legislative seats, however, and by only 3.5 and 1 percent.

McSally was also harmed by a small number of defections from Trump-supporting Republicans. The exit poll shows she lost 12 percent of the Republican vote and 11 percent of people who approve of Trump’s job performance. This was higher than any of the other Republican challengers in targeted races except West Virginia’s Patrick Morrissey. Removing Morrissey, Republican candidates in six other similar targeted races (Florida, Indiana, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, and North Dakota) lost on average about 7 percent of Republicans and 9.5 percent of Trump approvers.

However you look at it, McSally’s higher defection rates made an even bad situation worse. Her higher GOP defection cost her about 1.9 percent of the total vote or about 3.8 percent on the margin, much more than Sinema’s 1.9 percent lead. Her higher defection rate among those who approved of Trump cost her about 0.75 percent of the vote or about 1.5 percent on the margin, nearly enough to close the gap.

These “MAGA fans for Sinema” were likely disgruntled backers of one of McSally’s two, more conservative GOP primary competitors, Kelli Ward and Joe Arpaio. McSally had not crafted a strong conservative record prior to her run for Senate and she had been the GOP establishment’s preferred candidate. McSally also attacked Ward in the primary for being insufficiently supportive of President Trump, which was more than ironic since Ward’s criticism of Trump was that he was being too liberal on one issue. We could just be dealing with survey error, but it appears some conservatives did not forgive and forget after the primary.

Some might contend McSally’s loss was simply a matter of liberal women coming out for a liberal woman, but the exit poll again shows this view is wrong. Both Democrats and Republicans comprised larger shares of the electorate this year when compared with 2016. The exit polls do show Sinema doing much better among both Democratic and Republican women than Clinton did, but they also show a significant shift of opinion among independent men. Trump beat Clinton by ten percent among independent men while losing to her by seven points among independent women. McSally, however, lost independent men and women by an identical three-point margin. The race would be a dead heat had she won these men by three points instead of losing them.

McSally’s defeat shows just how tenuous the Trump coalition’s hold on power is. Trump won the Electoral College while losing the popular vote by over two percent of the vote, something that had not been done in nearly 150 years. Trump has not added to that coalition in his first two years as president, and that cost his party control of the House while also preventing them from gaining more than two Senate seats on a highly favorable map. It’s possible he could gain a narrow re-election without gaining support if the Democrats nominate someone as unacceptable to moderate voters as Hillary Clinton. But he cannot change the direction of the country without secure and substantial majorities in Congress, and that will not be forthcoming without a change in course.

At a crucial moment in the Peter Jackson’s epic movie, “The Return of the King,” Elrond Half-Elven visits Aragorn with sage advice. “You are outnumbered,” he tells the Ranger. “You need more men.” So it is with Trump. Whether it is regaining a portion of the RINOs or a winning a much larger share of Hispanic or African-American votes, he and the MAGA movement need more supporters to succeed. If not, 2020 will see many more Martha McSally’s, making even a successful re-election a Pyrrhic victory.

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Photo Credit: Getty Imagesg Republicanism

By Patrick Maines| November 14th, 2018

For at least 25 years, the Republican Party has been promoting policies damaging both to its own political standing and to the middle class. In the face of the growing radicalism of the Democrats, and the need—more crucial now than ever—for the GOP to assemble a majority coalition of voters, it must reexamine those policies.

Broadly speaking, the areas in need of reconsideration are tax policy, trade policy, foreign affairs, and antitrust policy.

Tax Policy. Supply side economists argue persuasively that tax cuts benefiting corporations and the upper classes have a more profound impact on the economy overall than tax cuts for the middle class. But whatever the correct answer to this broad economic question may be, the political consequences, as shown in exit poll data from the midterm elections, have not been to the GOP’s advantage.

It is also worth considering whether the broad economic consequences of sound policies on tax cuts actually do much to benefit those most in need of relief, at least in the near term. Getting the economic calculus right is not the same thing as getting the political calculus correct.

More than this, one guesses that the public’s opinion of the extraordinarily rich—billionaires like Tom Steyer, George Soros, Michael Bloomberg, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and the Koch brothers—has taken a hit in recent years as their political activities and immense wealth are seen as frightening and no longer on a human scale.

It has been reported that President Trump is considering a middle class tax cut. How about combining it with a tax increase, perhaps through a wealth tax on, say, individuals with net assets of $100 million or more? It wouldn’t require such people to switch from vichyssoise to gruel, but it would disarm the Democrats’ criticism of GOP tax policy as “favoring the rich” and be deeply popular with the middle class.

Antitrust Policy. The technology companies that are referred to by investors as FAANG (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google), have grown to such a size they now have a market cap of some $3 trillion and account for 11 percent of the value of the S&P 500.

But it’s not just their size that is gargantuan, so too is their impact on other industries. Take Google and Facebook, for instance. These two companies have decimated the advertising revenue of newspapers and magazines, to the point that their continued survival is in doubt, while Netflix is doing the same thing to the motion picture studios and theaters. The point here is not to lionize the Hollywood studios or newspaper publishers per se. As I am about to make clear, neither are friends of the GOP. What’s important, however, is that the motion picture and newspaper industries remain viable.

In 2012, the FTC wrapped up a years-long investigation of the competitive practices of Google. Despite a (leaked) staff report that recommended legal action against Google for tactics that harmed internet users, the agency let Google off with a slap of the wrist in August of that year.

Though it was little remarked at the time, in March 2012, just five months before that FTC decision, it was announced that Google CEO Eric Schmidt was under consideration for a cabinet position within the Obama Administration. Google and its employees had contributed millions of dollars to Obama’s reelection campaign and to other Democrats. Of course, there’s no chance at all (wink, wink) that then-FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz, another Obama appointee, was aware of Google’s political heft within the administration as he overruled his staff’s recommendation.

Part of the problem for Republicans in embracing strong antitrust positions has been that many quasi-libertarians in the party see antitrust as just another government intrusion in the marketplace. But as with the continued existence of the Libertarian Party, it’s something the GOP is just going to have to deal with and get over.

Tariffs and Free Trade. President Trump’s decision to go after countries, and earlier trade deals, that work against the interests of American companies and workers is the correct policy but it is not currently embraced with enough enthusiasm by Republican legislators.

Their diffidence is largely explained by the lobbying of S&P 500 companies, many of whom are thought of as “American” largely just because they are domiciled here. A recent report in USA Today indicated more than 44 percent of total sales of these companies came from abroad, not to mention the large number of S&P products being made overseas. In other words, these companies are more concerned about their sales and manufacturing abroad than they are about the impact on American companies and workers—past, present, and future.

The hollowing out of the manufacturing capability of so many American towns and cities is the legacy of these “free trade” policies, that, and the canard that America could get by just on service companies.

Foreign Affairs. Easily the most disastrous policies pursued by earlier Republican administrations and congressmen are those connected to military activity abroad, either as part of America’s role as the world’s policeman or in pursuit, as the neocons put it, of “nation building.” The mess that is the Middle East today speaks volumes about the folly of such policies.

But there’s another dimension to this problem: It is impossibly blinkered in that it implies that our nation has the resources and relative strength among nations to engage in these wars. But we don’t.

Indeed, until just the last two years, China’s economy was growing at a rate that was at least double our own, and China is also expanding its military at light speed. Even Russia, though not in the same league economically, is itself expanding its military and teaming up with China in military exercises.

Going forward, the GOP should wholeheartedly embrace, as Trump is advocating, “nationalism” rather than “globalism,” and Main Street rather than Wall Street. And GOP legislators should resist the lobbying of corporations that despise them, like the entertainment industry and the legacy media. It isn’t enough that such companies are “corporations” for the GOP, the party of business, to support their policy positions in Congress or with the regulatory agencies. The political damage these companies do to the GOP is orders of magnitude worse than whatever minuscule gifts they can bestow on compliant GOP legislators.

In sum, the politics of a generation ago needs updating, even as the principles that animated the party remain constant. It is not enough to recur to position papers of 30 years ago to understand what we need to do today. In order to maintain those principles of freedom and self-government that we all should care about, we have to adapt our policy positions in order to meet current political realities.

Photo Credit: Brooks Kraft LLC/Corbis via Getty Images