"The Party of Sam's Club"

In the Atlantic, Ross Douthat writes, “the GOP is now a working-class party”:

There are two important points to be made about these numbers, and the deeper reality they reflect. The first, which you hear around these parts a lot, is that the GOP is now a working-class party (with class defined by education and culture more than income, just to be clear; there are plenty of skilled craftsmen who make more money than teachers and journalists and academics), and that it needs to start acting like one if it’s going to rebuild its shattered majority.

If the first half of that equation sounds familiar, it should: it’s a theme that we wrote about four years ago when the GOP, and its incumbent president were riding high. After the midterms–and with more trouble potentially on the way–Douthat adds:

The second is that the GOP can’t only be a working-class party; just as the famous Judis-Texeira emerging Democratic majority is built around the mass upper class and the poor but depends on winning some working-class votes to put it over the top, so any future “Party of Sam’s Club” Republican majority is going to need to win back at least some of the mass-upper-class votes that the party has hemorrhaged during the Bush years.

Hopefully it won’t take another Carter-esque extended economic malaise this time.