MICHAEL BARONE: The Normalcy of Trump’s Republican Party: His unusual personality obscures the GOP’s basic continuity and gradual pace of change.
But when you look away from the public figures and toward the voters, you don’t see such a sharp break with the past. Mr. Trump has won over some voters who never supported a Republican before and repelled others who previously never voted Democratic. But not in enormous numbers: You see much greater oscillations in party percentages nationally and in particular states and demographic groups in the 1960s and 1970s than you do when you compare the 2016 numbers with those of 2012 or 2008 or 2004.
As for the question of whether the Republicans will return to normal, it’s based on a mistaken premise. What’s normal for the major American political parties is change—adjusting issue positions and emphases to changed situations and challenges, attracting new demographic constituencies while losing ground among old ones, adapting to the cues and clatter in a competitive political marketplace while maintaining their basic character. . . .
The emergence of Mr. Trump is the latest example of this pattern. It is widely asserted that he executed a hostile takeover of the party, winning less than a majority of primary and caucus votes (45%, compared with John McCain’s 47% in 2008), insulting his opponents and previous Republican presidents. He took sharply different positions from those of Republican nominees (as well as Democratic ones) over the past half-century on trade and immigration—positions popular with blue-collar voters who had reason to believe Chinese competition had closed down American factories and that low-skill immigrants, especially from Mexico, tend to drive down native-born Americans’ wages. He decried the toll of military interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.
Naturally these stands antagonized some Republican leaders and pundits who supported these policies and some Republican voters who defended them. Even so, the president has enjoyed the near-unanimous support of self-identified Republicans, with percentages rivaling or exceeding those supporting Presidents Reagan and Eisenhower in their times.
Trump Republicans’ downscale strength in 2016 was an amplification of a decadeslong trend. The core constituency of the Republican Party has been moving downscale for decades, first in response to cultural issues like abortion. The state of Pennsylvania provides examples. Metro Pittsburgh, with its steel-and-coal economy, never warmed to Ronald Reagan; George H.W. Bush, running to succeed him, won only 40% there in 1988. But by 2004 the younger George Bush raised the Republican percentage there to 48%, and Donald Trump carried it with 50%. The Republican percentage in Pennsylvania beyond its two big metropolitan areas remained static, at 58% in 1988, 57% in 2004 and 59% in 2016.
As Newton’s third law says that there is in nature for every action an equal and opposite reaction, so in American politics, for every demographic group trending toward one party, there is usually another with opposite views trending toward the other. In Pennsylvania, the four affluent suburban counties around Philadelphia voted 61% for Bush 41 in 1988, 46% for Bush 43 in 2004 and 41% for Donald Trump in 2016.
The increasingly downscale Republican and increasingly upscale Democratic constituencies are increasingly reflected in policy. While Mr. Trump orders a payroll-tax suspension, with dollars benefits flowing mostly to modest earners, Nancy Pelosi’s Democrats demand increased deductions for state and local taxes, which would mainly favor those with income of more than $650,000.
Fatcats.