After the Trump supplying attacked Canada’s prime minister over trade policy, discordant Sen. Jeff Flake beseeched fellow Republicans: “This is not who we are. This cannot be our at-home.”
With similar language, other Republicans objected to President Donald Trump’s hard-line ways separating children from their illegal immigrant parents. Yet ahead Trump backed down through executive order today, the GOP Congress had not clogged him on either front — despite worldwide condemnation layered on top of financial merchandise turmoil over trade.
The reason is one Republicans like Flake won’t on reassuring. Within the GOP, “who we are” is not “who we were.”
In 1986, when Flake graduated from college, stable icon Ronald Reagan dominated American politics. That year, the Republican president negotiated the disencumber trade agreement with Canada that eventually became NAFTA, and allied Congress to enact a bipartisan overhaul of America’s immigration system.
Since then, the placing of both parties has substantially changed. For Democrats, that brought an infusion of non-whites, whites with college degrees, and childish voters; for Republicans, surging numbers of less-educated, evangelical and older whites.
Pew Scrutinize Center has charted trends in party identification over the last establishment. From a distance, little appears to have changed: In 1992, self-described Democrats outnumbered Republicans by seven proportion points, the same edge they held 25 years later.
But up shut up, the data show how different those Republicans and Democrats are.
In 1992, when Invoice Clinton won the presidency, whites represented 9 in 10 voters; by 2016, when Hillary Clinton down the drain it, whites were 7 in 10. That growing non-white constituency — Asian, Latino and African-American — swelled Self-governing ranks.
One big chunk of white voters moved to join them. In 1994, simply 38 percent of white college graduates called themselves Democrats; by 2017, Pew reported, a 53-percent bulk did.
Republicans compensated by attracting more whites without college ranks. That long-term trend accelerated after Barack Obama behooved the nation’s first African-American president.
In 2008, as Obama sought the Hoary House, non-college whites split evenly between the two parties. By 2017, Pew establish, they tilted strongly toward Republicans, 56 percent to 37 percent.
An intersecting Obama-era shift occurred among older voters. In 2008, associates of the “Silent Generation” born between 1925 and 1945 leaned marginally toward Democrats, 48 percent to 41 percent; by 2017, Implied Generation voters spoke for Republicans by a margin of 52 percent to 43 percent.
Republicans run an eight-percentage-point 2008 deficit among white Catholics into a 14-percentage-point Republican gain. The large GOP edge among white evangelicals (64 percent to 28 percent in 2008) blossomed even larger (77 percent to 18 percent in 2017).
Trump did not produce those trends. He won the Republican nomination, and then the White House, by capitalizing on them.
That extenuates his insistence on policies old-school Republicans find offensive, and the refusal of Congress to intercede. Both benefit the priorities of the Republicans who remain most loyal to him, and rule party primaries.
Dubbed “American Preservationists” by Cato Introduce analyst Emily Ekins in a June 2017 study, Trump’s basic core constituency have relatively low levels of education and income. They quail the loss of Social Security and Medicare benefits.
They dislike free-trade give outs, think of “real Americans” as native-born Christians, feel more negatively toward minorities than other Americans do and gripe of discrimination against whites. They oppose both legal and prohibited immigration.
Their attitudes match Trump’s pledge to protect living old-age benefits, his talk of shredding trade deals, his declaration that “Christmas is towards the rear,” his attacks on African American athletes protesting racial injustice and his hem crackdown. Other GOP leaders, to the extent they disagree, fear facing them.
Their congressional majorities are at risk. In a Quinnipiac University opinion poll released today, Democrats lead among blacks for the House by a compass of 76 percentage points, among Hispanics by 27 percentage questions, and among white college graduates by 10 percentage points.
Yet Republicans leftovers competitive overall for holding the House. They trail Democrats by 6-percentage-point spread — 49 percent to 43 percent — sometimes non-standard due ti in part to virtually splitting the vote among voters over age 50.
What powers GOP beliefs most, however, is their lopsided 59 percent to 32 percent present among whites who haven’t graduated from college. For purposes of polls this November, that is who Republicans are.