Posted on 12/19/2016 7:15:37 AM PST by drop 50 and fire for effect
The new president owes nothing to the ‘Bush Barnacles’
The media have paid much attention to how Donald Trump broke through to blue-collar voters in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania and captured the presidency. Trump is certainly assembling what might prove to be a new GOP coalition. But one shouldn’t forget that Trump’s temperament cost him upscale Republican voters in key suburbs. To solidify his reelection chances, he will have to overcome their doubts with policy successes that assuage their concerns about his rough edges.
Trump won an impressive victory, carrying 31 out of 50 states. But in several of them — including key states such as Georgia, Arizona, and Texas — he won a smaller percentage of the vote than Mitt Romney did. Indeed, nationally, Trump won 46.2 percent of votes cast, whereas Romney won 47.2 percent. In the 37 states considered “non-swing” or uncompetitive this year, Hillary Clinton’s margin of victory was greater than Barack Obama’s in 2012.
Much of Trump’s weakness with upscale, suburban Republicans can be traced to the hostility of the Bush family. They viewed Trump’s primary victory as a hostile takeover of the party they had long dominated — a Bush was on the national GOP ticket for president or vice president in every election between 1980 and 2008 save for one (1996). With his attacks on the Iraq War, his humiliation of Jeb Bush in the GOP primaries, and his characterization of George W. Bush’s presidency as “weak,” Trump clearly alienated the Bush base. Texas’s seventh congressional district, the wealthy Houston enclave that elected George H. W. Bush to Congress in 1966 and that has remained in GOP hands ever since, saw a stunning reversal in its voting patterns. In 2012, Mitt Romney carried the seventh district with 61 percent of the two-party vote. In 2016, Hillary Clinton actually beat Donald Trump in the district by 51 percent to 49 percent.
A big reason was clearly the hostility of the Bushes to Trump. George W. Bush made it known that he left the presidential line blank on his ballot. His father, former president George H. W. Bush, was “outed” as a Never Trumper by a member of the Kennedy clan, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, in October. She posted a photo of her and the former president on Facebook with the caption: “The President told me he’s voting for Hillary!!” She followed up in an interview with Politico by saying: “That’s what he said.”
The Bushes were obviously not alone in their antipathy toward Trump. Republicans who had served top roles in both Bush administrations signed an open letter in mid October declaring that Trump in their view was not qualified for office. The former Bush officials included Christine Todd Whitman, who ran George W. Bush’s Environmental Protection Agency, and Mary Peters, who headed his Transportation Department. They warned that Trump fails to exemplify the traits the Republican party holds dear.
Nor was theirs the only letter from former Bush officials. In August, a group of GOP national-security experts warned that Trump “would be the most reckless president in American history.”
Those signing the letter included former CIA and National Security Agency director Michael Hayden; former director of national intelligence and deputy secretary of state John Negroponte; and two Homeland Security secretaries under Bush, Tom Ridge and Michael Chertoff. They were joined by Robert Zoellick, a former U.S. trade representative and deputy secretary of state.
Conspicuous by their absence from the letter were former secretaries of state Henry Kissinger, Condoleezza Rice and James Baker.
Trump didn’t wait long to blast the letter, denouncing the signatories in a statement. In part, it read:
"The names on this letter are the ones the American people should look to for answers on why the world is a mess, and we thank them for coming forward so everyone in the country knows who deserves the blame for making the world such a dangerous place. They are nothing more than the failed Washington elite looking to hold on to their power, and it’s time they are held accountable for their actions.
These insiders — along with Hillary Clinton — are the owners of the disastrous decisions to invade Iraq, allow Americans to die at Benghazi, and they are the ones who allowed the rise of ISIS. Yet despite these failures, they think they are entitled to use their favor trading to land taxpayer-funded government contracts and speaking fees."
It’s clear that the gulf between the “Bushies” and the “Trumpsters” isn’t likely to be bridged anytime soon. That is a good thing. Any other Republican president-elect would have been under enormous pressure to bring in former Bush officials to staff cabinet agencies with safe, don’t-rock-the-boat appointees. “I call them Bush Barnacles,” top Trump strategist Steve Bannon told me earlier this year. Instead, Trump owes next than nothing to the Bushes and has selected only one of George W. Bush’s former cabinet officials to head a department: Elaine Chao at Transportation, who also was the most conservative member of the cabinet during George W. Bush’s two terms.
Instead, Trump has largely turned to an eclectic mix of top business executives (Rex Tillerson at State, Wilbur Ross at Commerce), former generals (James Mattis at Defense and John Kelly at Homeland Security) and bureaucracy busters (Scott Pruitt at the Environmental Protection Agency and Jeff Sessions at Justice).
Trump will no doubt be careful to cement his support with the blue-collar voters who delivered him the election. In keeping with his promises to these supporters, he’ll probably aim to renegotiate trade deals without touching off trade wars, clear away barriers to job creation, and reassert American leadership overseas. For someone who needs to solidify his political standing for 2020, succeeding in those policies would represent the best possible political revenge against the Bushes and his many other critics.
The Pennsylvania results will be the subject of academic scrutiny for a long time. Donald Trump and Senator Pat Toomey both overcame long odds to win in 2016, and yet they appealed to very different groups of voters and I believe there was a lot of ticket-splitting there. Trump won a lot of support among Democrats in central and western PA who didn’t vote for Toomey, while Toomey won a lot of support in suburban counties around Philadelphia that Trump lost to Clinton.
Agreed on all points.
“Yet one of the major themes of Bush’s 2004 campaign was opposing gay marriage.”
In my opinion this was just lip service to obtain the evangelical vote. He wasn’t going to expend any political capital on this issue.
He kept repeating that “Muslim is the religion of peace” which left one wondering what Christianity was. The statement that “all religions go to heaven” in the Charlie Cook interview was telling with regard to his view of Christianity. The fact that the Bushes were more comfortable with a candidate with extreme abortion positions like Hillary than Trump tells me all I need to know.
The Bushes are the establishment and exist to make sure there is not a real alternative to the establishment in either party.
“It was blue Collar Democrats that saved our ass!”
Yes. Ironically, many of them were diehards for Hillary in 2008. Her time in the limelight as SoS and foundation grifter did her no favors.
Great post. The Bush family is full of sh!t from top to bottom. Yeb’s abysmal performance in 2016 was an indication that even ardent Republicans weren’t buying their bullsh!t anymore.
>>For example: I don’t think there was a single candidate other than Trump who would have won Pennsylvania.<<
Well, for starters, Senator Toomey distanced himself from Trump to an extent and still got more votes than Hillary did, although a few thousand less than Trump. Granted, he was an incumbent and wasn’t a presidential candidate, but here’s what I find interesting.
Toomey’s lack of outright support for Trump cost him in coal country where Trump outperformed him, but Toomey managed to get more of the suburban GOP vote than Trump. I find this encouraging.
View this election as a river of potential GOP voters. Upstream there are four tributaries, with by far the largest being composed of the traditional GOP voter who supports the eventual nominee, regardless. A much smaller tributary feeding the GOP vote is composed of disaffected Democrats, e.g., coal union members, etc., who Trump, like Reagan, pulled into the GOP stream, diverting it from the traditional Democrat stream, a two-fer. Depending upon a lot of factors, this stream could dry up, or increase, in 2020 and beyond.
The other two tributaries hold GOP voters, but of drastically different temperaments. The Toomey stream is composed of voters who couldn’t abide Trump’s perceived character flaws, and because of that just couldn’t defend a vote for him, even though they easily voted for Toomey.
The Trump stream is composed of anti-establishment (anti-Bush?) GOP voters who would have stayed home or written in a third party if Bush, or Kasich, or ???, were the nominee. Trump won partly because this stream has grown over the past six years of dissatisfaction with the GOP Congress, and because he managed to divert a significant portion of the the DEM stream, with Hillary’s help.
Here’s where I see it going, assuming Trump does just a reasonable job as President the next four years: The Toomey stream and the Trump streams will merge into the rest of the massive GOP stream, and the diversions from the DEM stream will continue. Third party voting by former GOP voters will be way down, and the GOP will be in excellent shape in 2020.
This is why I was very critical of Freepers who decided to punish any House and Senate candidates who didn't support Trump. A Trump presidency with Democrats in control of Congress would have been an absolute disaster.
I can’t speak to all of the counties mentioned, but at least as far as Cobb and Gwinnett in GA are concerned, I suspect Trump’s weakness had more to do with the increase of Hispanics than moderate/Bushie sentiment. I also suspect the same is true for the Texas 7th Congressional District, which the author mentions was GHWB’s old district. It still includes wealthy areas, but much of it has become downscale Hispanic. Unsurprisingly given what has happened to our country in recent decades, it does not much resemble the district GHWB won 50 years ago.
I’d agree that Trump doesn’t have a Republican pedigree, but he did run as one, and as essentially an anti-liberal in nearly all respects, so I think it’s a stretch to say the appealed to “voters from all parts of the political spectrum.”
The question in my mind was whether he meant what he was saying (since he obviously exaggerates in many obvious ways). Judging from his appointments so far, he is serious about “draining the swamp.” That alone will go a long way to fulfilling his MAGA pledge, and I’m quite optimistic at this point.
Nope. Wishful thinking since Issaccson won both easily. The Never Trumpers need to take ownership and quit looking for scapegoats. They did their best to elect Hillary and they did mange to depressing GOP votes for Trump in GOP strongholds.
Ironically, this is part of his appeal to many voters. They're tired of politicians, and they just want someone in office who can get the job done for the sake of getting it done rather than having everything subject to political posturing.
Maybe I’m wrong, but it’s not “wishful thinking” because I’m a Never Trumper or a Bushie. If it’s “wishful thinking,” it’s that I think (or would like to think) that the Never Trumpers and the Bushes had a lot less pull than they thought and have been outed as completely irrelevant.
NR has the bolls to print this? They started it.
It's the America First party and it's long overdue.
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