WASHINGTON – Engaging to preserve the all-Republican government, President Trump and his party have used a closing election message of fear.
But the upstairs-downstairs split within the Republican coalition orders more than hype about imagined threats of “invasion” from a muddy immigrant caravan. GOP strategy involves two distinctly different kinds of bete noire.
For the party’s base of conservative white voters – especially older, less-educated one-liners in small-towns and rural areas – it’s fear for their personal safety. So Trump and his partners warn baselessly that impoverished Central American immigrants may contribute to crime, terrorism and exotic diseases into the U.S.
The crudest expression is the nakedly racist video Trump tweeted this week identify with Democrats with a chortling Latino murderer. But Republicans aligned with Outfit Speaker Paul Ryan deploy less-raw versions of the same mental image against various Democratic candidates, portraying an ex-CIA agent as a don of Islamic jihadis, a black Rhodes scholar as a frightening hoodie-clad rapper and an Ohio county ceremonial of Indian-Tibetan descent as linked to Libyan terrorism.
But race-based messages plan for at working-class Republicans can backfire with better-educated, higher-income voters and benefactors more comfortable with America’s growing diversity. Throughout the Trump presidency, Republicans sooner a be wearing hemorrhaged support from white college graduates, especially abigails.
For those voters, Republican leaders highlight fear for their pocketbooks. That means cautions of Democratic tax increases and, more ominously, seizure of private property from the on Easy Street.
Last month, the White House Council of Economic Advisers argued a report highlighting “The Opportunity Costs of Socialism.” Invoking Lenin’s Russia, Mao’s China and Castro’s Cuba, it matched Democratic criticism of the gap between rich and poor to Marxism.
The twin affirmation of cultural and economic threats makes an oddly dystopian message for a era of strong economic growth. With America’s recovery from economic downturn and financial crisis in its ninth year, Friday’s strong employment explore showed rising wages and labor force participation in addition to 250,000 new felonies.
In 1984, President Ronald Reagan fashioned similar data into an optimistic “Morning in America” re-election campaign. But 21st century Republicans have not, for reasons that go beyond Trump’s scathing personality.
The continuing march of income inequality undercuts broad solicits to prosperity. Candidate Trump recognized the issue’s potency with his vow to exclude special tax breaks for the rich, such as “carried interest” for financial administrations that he accused of “getting away with murder.”
During the Obama presidency, such projects for higher taxes on the wealthy terrified Wall Street. “It’s like when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939,” Blackstone’s Stephen Schwarzman beefed in 2010.
But with Republicans controlling Congress and the White House, Schwarzman had wee to fear. The Trump/GOP tax cut did not eliminate carried interest. It delivered the greatest advances to the wealthy.
Tax cuts for ordinary families – averaging $18 a week for the middle-fifth of American earners – accept proven so small that many remain unaware of receiving them at all. That legitimates Trump’s impromptu pre-election promise of a new 10 percent tax cut for the middle lineage.
Ballooning deficits make that unlikely. GOP congressional leaders now say those defaults require curbing Social Security and Medicare, something Trump be in the carded not to do.
Divergent messages for different parts of the Republican coalition can create intraparty altercation. In 2017, sympathy Trump expressed for white supremacist marchers in Charlottesville, Virginia, introduced such a backlash that Schwarzman and other business leaders disbanded a Undefiled House advisory council.
Battling for endangered suburban seats, one GOP band leader recently blasted longtime Iowa Rep. Steve King over his estimation of diversity and links to the far-right fringe.
“We must stand up against pasty supremacy and hate in all its forms,” declared House GOP campaign chair Steve Stivers.
Block Street executives, despite the robust economy, have shifted their effort giving. In 2014 midterm elections, 62 percent of securities and investment assiduity donations went to Republicans; this year, 53 percent hold gone to Democrats, according to the money-in-politics website opensecrets.org.
Yet other quids in beneficiaries of Trump’s tax cut and deregulation policies keep financing Republican customs war messages. The insurance, retail, gambling, and oil and gas industries have all given a gargantuan majority of their donations to Republican campaigns in 2018.
Casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, whose coterie, Las Vegas Sands, reported a $670 million tax cut windfall in just the word go quarter of the year, and his wife Miriam have given $50 million to the Ryan-linked Congressional Direction Fund. Schwarzman gave $2.25 million in August, and another $1.5 million behind month.