As it stands, the race for the White House is a toss-up. Practically every poll in all seven main swing states shows former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris deadlocked with just four weeks until Election Day.
The race is so close, and a segment of the GOP is still embittered that the rest of the party’s voters chose to nominate Trump for a third consecutive election. A favorite pastime of anti-Trump Republicans is to claim that if the party had instead nominated former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, Trump’s last surviving rival in the primary, Harris would be trailing by a wide margin as the GOP barreled toward a landslide victory not seen since George H.W. Bush in 1988.
In many ways, this appeal to a hypothetical is wishcasting for a group of people who dominated Republican Party politics for most of the last 40 years. To this wing of the Republican Party, Trump is an insult to their policy agenda, which is best described as economic libertarianism with a robust and hawkish approach to foreign policy.
But this assessment not only misunderstands Trump’s enduring appeal but also overestimates the ability of Haley, or a candidate like her, to replicate Trump’s success at turning out Republican voters while restoring the party’s appeal with the suburban voters who once formed the backbone of the Republican coalition but have since embraced the Democratic Party following Trump’s emergence on the scene in 2016.
Campaigning for the old Republican Party
The belief that Haley or a candidate like her would exceed Trump’s standing with voters and would have delivered a Republican landslide relies on two assumptions: First, that white working-class voters who once supported the Democratic Party but have turned Republican in the Trump era would continue to back Republicans regardless of which candidate was at the top of the ticket. And second, that the white-collar suburban voters who once supported Republicans but turned to the Democratic Party with Trump in the race would come home to the GOP with Haley as its standard-bearer.
There is little evidence to suggest either assumption is true. But more than that, the suggestion that Haley or other traditional conservatives, such as former Vice President Mike Pence, could win a national election by maintaining the Trump coalition and expanding it to the old Republican coalition is a farcical proposition that ignores the policy agenda that made Trump appealing to these working-class voters, while previous generations of Republican candidates, with the exception of Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, had failed to secure their support.
Haley, through her policy agenda on the campaign trail, and Pence, through his short-lived presidential campaign and his new organization Advancing American Freedom, have repeatedly decried the Trump-era Republican Party’s populist shift on economic issues, as well as its retreat from an aggressive interventionist posture abroad.
“Should the new populism of the Right seize and guide our party, the Republican Party we’ve long known will cease to exist, and the fate of American freedom would be in doubt,” Pence said while visiting New Hampshire in September 2023. “The truth is Donald Trump, along with his imitators, often sound like an echo of the progressives they seek to replace. The growing faction would substitute our faith in limited government and traditional values with an agenda stitched together by little else than personal grievances and performative outrage.”
Pence, Haley, and their supporters are pining for a Republican Party that no longer exists. Neither has offered a glowing endorsement of Trump on ideological lines, even as Haley has fallen back in line behind the former president and spoke at the Republican National Convention in July. Pence has refused to endorse Trump, no doubt in part because of the row between the two men over the aftermath of the 2020 election and the events of Jan. 6, 2021, but likely also because of the policy differences between the 2024 Trump campaign and the 2016 and 2020 campaigns that Pence was a part of.
Today, the Republican Party coalition, created in no small part because of Trump, is made up of conservative religious voters of all education backgrounds, white voters without college degrees, and a growing number of minority voters without college degrees. It’s a far cry from the last presidential election that did not feature Trump as the Republican nominee in 2012.
That year, according to exit polling data from the New York Times, Mitt Romney defeated then-President Barack Obama 51%-47% among college-educated voters. But Obama bested Romney among voters without college degrees by an identical margin. Since the latter group outnumbers the former in the electorate, it accounted for Obama’s electoral strength.
Four years later, it was entirely inverted. Trump defeated former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton among noncollege-educated voters 51%-45%, while Clinton defeated Trump among college-educated voters 49%-45%, a major factor in determining Trump’s upset victory in that election. In 2020, Joe Biden clawed back some of the Democratic Party’s losses and narrowly lost noncollege-educated voters to Trump by only 50%-48%. At the same time, he won college-educated voters by a margin of 55%-43%, delivering the worst result among more highly educated voters for a Republican in recent memory. By all accounts, the education gap between the two parties will increase this year.
A new policy playbook
Herein lies the problem for a Haley or Pence. Trump has proven resilient nationally in no small part because he repudiated the policy gospel of the Republican Party before his entry into national politics.
Gone is the party’s belief that any and all foreign trade is good for the economy and the consumer. Tariffs and protectionism are now the name of the Trump game, as the policy priority lies in protecting existing manufacturing jobs, rather than driving down the costs of goods. Rather than propose cuts to Social Security and other entitlements as Haley, Pence, and others have done, Trump promised never to touch those programs.
On foreign policy, the doctrine that called for a strong national defense willing to intervene in foreign conflicts has been thrown out. Instead, Trump has rattled allies by demanding that members of NATO increase their commitments to the alliance and by threatening to withdraw U.S. support if they do not. All the while, he vows to keep the nation out of conflicts in the Middle East and now Eastern Europe.
Trump has also supported rolling back legal immigration, occasionally offered support for striking labor unions, and called for more regulation of major tech companies — all policy positions that have broad appeal among working-class voters but are among the old policy orthodoxies of the college-educated GOP. In fact, Haley openly criticized Trump for even meeting with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, a powerful labor union that has historically supported Democrats.
Winning, or losing, votes
But policy differences aside, when it comes to winning an election, what matters is votes. The truth is that no Republican candidate has shown the ability to turn out voters in the swing states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania quite like Trump has.
In 2012, Romney lost the Michigan county of Macomb by 4 points, which mirrored his loss nationwide. Macomb, a white working-class stronghold, was once considered a bellwether of every presidential election. The results in this Detroit-area county almost mirrored the national popular vote exactly. In fact, the county backed the winner of the national popular vote in every election between 1996 and 2012. Then, it backed Trump by 11 points in 2016 as he stormed to an upset victory in the state.
Two years later, the county flipped back to Democrats in the state gubernatorial race as now-Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI), running against a fairly generic Republican opponent, carried the county by 4 points. But in 2020, Trump again carried the county by 8 points, even as Biden pulled the state back into the Democratic column. In 2022, Whitmer again carried the county by 5 points as she went on to win reelection. In other words, with Trump off the ballot, the county swung 15 points toward the Democratic Party compared to when he was on it.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
The variance in results when Trump is on the ballot and when he is not explains a large part of his appeal, as the story of Macomb County can be replicated in several other regions of the three Rust Belt swing states. Trump won the presidential election in 2016 and nearly again in 2020 because he rejected Republican policies still championed by Haley and Pence today, not in spite of that. If he wins on Nov. 5, it will be for the same reason.
When Trump is gone from the national stage, Republicans will have to find a way to turn out his voters in Macomb and elsewhere if they are to have any hope of being competitive in presidential elections. The evidence is thin that a return to the traditional Republican playbook championed by Pence and Haley will accomplish that. If Harris were running against either of them, she very well could be on a glide path to an Electoral College victory and the White House. With Trump at the head of the ticket, that is more questionable today.