President Donald Trump’s decision to name Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) as his vice presidential running mate has solidified the Republican Party’s transformation from a party of Wall Street and the country club into the party of Main Street and, in the words of Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam, the “party of Sam’s Club.”
Almost 20 years ago, Douthat and Salam wrote that “this is the Republican Party of today — an increasingly working-class party, dependent for its power on supermajorities of the white working class vote, and a party whose constituents are surprisingly comfortable with bad-but-popular liberal ideas like raising the minimum wage, expanding clumsy environmental regulations, or hiking taxes on the wealthy to fund a healthcare entitlement. To borrow a phrase from Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty, Republicans are now ‘the party of Sam’s Club.’”
“Clumsy environmental regulations” aside, with the selection of Vance as his vice president, this prediction has mostly come true. Vance is in favor of raising the minimum wage and raising taxes. He supports rolling back environmental regulations, not imposing new ones, in order to make it easier for the country to build things again. But there was never really any evidence that America’s working class was a leading supporter of environmental legislation to begin with. That has always been led by college-educated professionals, particularly single, college-educated women.
And as Democratic strategist Ruy Teixeira notes, the GOP’s embrace of the working class is working. “In the July New York Times/Siena College poll, Biden is losing to Trump by 23 points among working-class likely voters. In their June poll, which was closer to the running average of the polls, Trump led by 17 points among working-class likely voters,” Teixeira writes. “Either way, this is a massive shift from the 2020 election where Trump carried these voters by only 4 points and mostly explains why Trump is running ahead this year. … It appears that the GOP’s big working-class bet has been a good one. And we should not rule out that it just might get better.”
The New York Times’s David Brooks also acknowledges that the Trump-Vance brand of working-class populism looks like a winner but then suggests it also has a weakness. “The American consciousness has traditionally been an abundance consciousness,” Brooks writes. “Successive waves of immigrants found a vast continent of fertile fields and bustling cities. Many foreign observers saw us, and we saw ourselves, as the dynamic nation par excellence. We didn’t have a common past, but we dreamed of a common future.”
“MAGA, on the other hand, emerges from a scarcity consciousness, a zero-sum mentality,” Brooks continues. “If Democrats are to thrive, they need to tap into America’s dynamic cultural roots and show how they can be applied to the 21st century. … American dynamism was turbocharged by the construction of the transcontinental railway, the creation of the land grant colleges, the G.I. Bill. … I wish [Democrats] would champion the abundance agenda that people like Derek Thompson and my colleague Ezra Klein have been writing about. We need to build things. Lots of new homes. Supersonic airplanes and high-speed trains.”
Brooks is right that America was built by successive waves of immigrants. But America has performed best — indeed, it won two world wars and had the most egalitarian and widespread economic boom ever — when immigration was declining and the percentage of foreign-born residents in the population was at an all-time low. If anything, American history shows us that we do not need record-high numbers of immigrants to grow and prosper. Quite the opposite: Low numbers of controlled immigration have proven to be best for widespread economic growth.
And when it comes to building things, a working-class populist party will beat the party of environmentalism every time. Brooks’s transcontinental railroad could never be built under today’s federal permitting regime. California, the state most totally controlled by the Democratic Party, has spent $10 billion and 15 years on a high-speed rail project that has built just over one mile of track and has no completion date. Meanwhile, the Republican-controlled state of Florida has completed over 230 miles of track connecting Miami to Fort Lauderdale to Orlando in under 10 years. And the Republican-controlled states of Texas, Florida, and Utah build far more housing than California does every year.
The only things the Democratic Party is good at abundantly delivering are abortions and transgender surgeries.
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If you want real infrastructure built, infrastructure that unapologetically creates jobs for mostly young men who can then get married and start families, there is only one party that delivers: the Trump-Vance working-class populist party.
The Democratic Party is now simply incapable of delivering the dynamism Brooks envisions. It is a party controlled by government unions that make the public sector unaccountable and ineffective, it is bankrolled by globalist corporations addicted to cheap foreign labor, and it is staffed by hard-left ideologues obsessed with gender and race. Democrats may continue to control Hollywood, academia, and the C-suite, but those institutions may soon not be enough to beat a new populist, working-class Republican Party.