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RONALD BROWNSTEIN
QUICK, NAME THE differences between the tax plans issued this year by Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio.
Stumped? You’re not alone.
The issues that usually drive Republican p**********l primaries — taxes, spending, national security — have almost completely fizzled this year. They have been replaced by blazing questions about America’s identity in an era of rapid demographic and cultural change.
Spurred primarily, but not solely, by Donald Trump, the Republican field has spent months debating whether undocumented immigrants from Mexico pose an economic and security threat, whether gays and liberals are waging a “war on Christians” and now, whether Muslims can be trusted as loyal Americans fit for the presidency (not to mention whether President Obama is a Muslim).
This succession of searing arguments has t***sformed the Republican p**********l field into a kind of national purification tribunal sequentially debating which groups stand as legitimate members of the American community.
This volatile dynamic has presented Republicans with a stark choice between one set of candidates (including Bush, Rubio and John Kasich) who essentially argue that the GOP must adapt to cultural and demographic changes, and another set (including Trump, Ben Carson, Ted Cruz, Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum) who effectively urge Republicans to resist.
The distance between these two camps has elevated the stakes in the primary — for the party and the country. Trump and those echoing him have framed the race as an apocalyptic showdown to protect the nation’s “traditional values,” restore the political primacy of (the implicitly white) “silent majority” and to “make America great again.”
The candidates and party leaders urging adaptation are warning that the GOP risks exiling itself from the White House by fighting irresistible demographic and social change.
“If you embrace this view, it is going to be politically suicidal,” says Peter Wehner, a former top White House advisor to George
W. Bush. “We are sending in bright neon lights a signal that ‘we don’t like you, we don’t want you … and we consider you the enemy.’ We cannot be in a position of being seen to h**e people of different ethnic backgrounds and races and be a winning party.”
After Mitt Romney in 2012 won a larger share of the white v**e than Ronald Reagan did in 1980 and still lost to Obama, those arguing for adaptation initially seized the GOP’s upper hand. That was reflected in the Republican National Committee’s poste******n analysis, which argued the party could not regain the White House without winning more people of color and millennial v**ers.
That impulse crested when Senate Republicans helped pass a bipartisan immigration reform bill in 2013. But a conservative backlash has steadily suppressed it since.
In this campaign, candidates led by Trump have moved far beyond Romney’s embrace of “self-deportation” of immigrants here illegally with an agenda that includes mass deportation, “a pause” (in Trump’s term) on legal immigration and ending birthright citizenship. In parallel, other contenders (led by Huckabee, Santorum and Cruz) have insisted that those who object to gay marriage on religious grounds should be exempt from following the Supreme Court decision legalizing it. Now, Carson and Trump have loudly questioned the loyalties of Muslim Americans.
Bush, Kasich and Rubio have sought a middle ground, mostly urging acceptance of a diversifying America — though with more caveats and qualifications (like Bush’s criticism this week of “m**************m”) than Democrats typically offer.
The challenge for the Republicans urging adaptation is that, as Trump’s rise has demonstrated, this insular and defensive nationalism strikes a powerful chord in a GOP coalition now centered on older, rural and blue-collar w****s. In recent polls, a majority of Republicans without a college degree have supported mass deportation and declared that the growing number of immigrants “threatens traditional American values and customs.”
Most Republicans still oppose gay marriage. In a 2013 survey by the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute, nearly two-thirds of college and noncollege Republicans said they believed that “the values of Islam are at odds with American values.”
If the choice in the primary is framed as embracing or holding back the emerging “Next America,” the camp of GOP v**ers who prefer “resistance to the change is probably larger,” says Daniel Cox, the institute’s research director. And these views are interlocked: PRRI research has found that suspicion of Muslims and hostility to immigrants are closely correlated.
Though Americans today divide narrowly on some of these questions (particularly whether Islam is compatible with American values), on most issues public opinion across the entire e*****rate bends toward tolerance and inclusion. That’s especially true among young people, which means the e*******l danger for Republicans on these issues of American identity will grow over time — even as Democrats struggle to sell a majority of v**ers on their approach to economic and foreign policy.
“It’s the generational thing that is going to really be a [Republican] problem long term,” says Cox.
Those e*******l risks may help the Republican candidates urging adaptation to erode support for defensive nationalists like Trump even among some v**ers who mostly share his grievances. But the biggest message from the 2016 race so far may be how large a segment of the GOP coalition is alienated from the kaleidoscope society that America is becoming. And that promises turbulence ahead for the party no matter which side prevails in this explosive Republican primary.