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Donald Trump Won Because Republicans Have Bad Ideas And People Hate Those Ideas

CREDIT: AP PHOTO/CHARLES REX ARBOGAST
CREDIT: AP PHOTO/CHARLES REX ARBOGAST

Donald Trump is a lot of things. He is a racist and a demagogue. He is openly contemptuous towards women. He often appears completely ignorant about basic aspects of our nation’s policy. And he is now one other thing, according to the chair of the Republican National Committee:

What Trump is not, however, is a movement conservative. While the conservatives who’ve increasingly dominated the Republican Party treat the need for entitlement cuts as an article of faith, Trump promises to protect Medicare and Social Security. While the conservative movement grows more and more obsessed with plans to repeal the twentieth century through litigation, Trump’s commitment to appointing conservative justices is a very recent development — seemingly born from his desire to court Republican voters. While Trump sees no problem with labeling Mexican immigrants “rapists,” movement conservatives generally prefer the more careful rhetoric employed by figures like Chief Justice John Roberts — which shies away from overtly disparaging racial groups while simultaneously treating efforts to cure the legacy of discrimination as the Real Racism.

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The irony of Trump’s apparent victory in the Republican nominating contest is that, at the very moment when movement conservatives appeared to have gained total dominance over the GOP, a reality show host with no record of public service and only a passing interest in the Republican Party’s particular flavor of conservatism came along — and he singlehandedly stripped the conservative movement of their party’s top prize.

When confronted with the sheer enormity of the Republican Party’s plan for their nation, American voters simply refused to believe that party leaders could be capable of such depravity.

When Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), Trump’s chief rival for the GOP nomination, ran for his seat in the Senate, Cruz’s campaign ran a poll which found that over 80 percent of Republicans believe that “both parties have let us down.” In response, Cruz’s built his political persona around the theory that, by preaching a gospel of maximalist conservatism, he could harness his party’s anger and ride it all the way to the White House.

Cruz’s vanquisher, however, just proved that Cruz’s theory was all wrong. GOP voters are angry, and they want a candidate who will feed that anger. But they do not hunger for the kind of ideological purity that Cruz was serving up. Trump bested Cruz by offering an eclectic buffet of populism, racism, and the kind of big government that only benefits his own kind of people.

The conservative moment will probably have many months — if not years — to autopsy this year’s primaries and try to figure out what went wrong for the movement. It shouldn’t take them that much time, however, because the answer isn’t particularly hard. The kind of conservatism that took over the GOP shortly after President Obama took office isn’t especially popular, even among GOP voters.

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Before this election, the closest thing the Republican Party had to an intellectual leader was Speaker Paul Ryan. The Ryan Budget — with its deep cuts to programs like Medicaid and food stamps and its signature proposal to repeal and replace Medicare with a voucher program — unites Republicans in Congress. Yet it is also deeply unpopular.

The Republican Party’s voucher program isn’t simply rejected by the overwhelming majority of Americans. Self-identified Republicans also prefer Medicare to Ryan vouchers by a 2 to 1 margin:

These views aren’t particularly surprising, because replacing Medicare with the Republican Party’s voucher program would be a financial disaster for many seniors. Though Ryan has released several different versions of his budget that include variations on his voucher proposal, his original proposal phased out coverage for seniors by offering a voucher that effectively lost value over time. According to the Congressional Budget Office, “by 2080, Medicare would be cut 76 percent below its projected size under current policies” if the original Ryan voucher program became law.

Meanwhile, the GOP’s voucher program would impose massive new out-of-pocket costs on seniors as soon as it took effect. As the CBO explained, total health expenditures for a typical 65-year-old “would be almost 40 percent higher with private coverage under the [Ryan] plan than they would be with a continuation of traditional Medicare” in the first year that the voucher program took effect:

Other aspects of the Republican fiscal plan are less unpopular than Ryan’s vouchers, but that’s only a relative comparison. By a 62/32 percent margin, for example, Americans prefer the existing Medicaid program to the Republican proposal to replace it with block grants to states. Notably, even Republican voters are ambivalent about their own party’s proposal — only 50 percent support it. Meanwhile, other data suggests that voters are extraordinarily reluctant to cut Medicaid funds once people start to benefit from them. Even after the blood red state of Kentucky elected a staunchly conservative governor, a Kaiser Family Foundation poll found that 72 percent of the state’s residents wanted to keep the Medicaid expansion implemented under the previous governor.

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These polls, moreover, may understate the depths of the electorate’s disdain for Republican fiscal policies. In the lead up to the 2012 election, a Democratic super PAC convened a focus group to explore whether Republican candidate Mitt Romney’s support for the Ryan Budget could be turned against him. The result was astounding. When the group “informed a focus group that Romney supported the Ryan budget plan — and thus championed ‘ending Medicare as we know it’ — while also advocating tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, the respondents simply refused to believe any politician would do such a thing.”

When confronted with the sheer enormity of the Republican Party’s plan for their nation, American voters simply refused to believe that party leaders could be capable of such depravity.

In fairness, Trump shares many of the same goals as the conservative movement that captured the GOP in recent years. Trump’s tax plan, for example, is a bonanza for billionaires such as himself. Nevertheless, there is more than enough daylight between Trump and the Republican establishment’s unpopular fiscal plans. Trump called the Ryan Budget “stupid” last January, warning that “everything that you don’t want is in that budget.”

Nor is public disdain for Republican ideas limited to the party’s fiscal plans. In the final days of his presidential campaign, Cruz tried to distinguish himself from Trump, who is a relative moderate on LGBT issues, by openly mocking the billionaire’s moderation. After Trump said that transgender people should be allowed to use the bathroom that aligns with their identity, Cruz incredulously asked “have we gone stark-raving nuts?

In the end, however, these appeals to anti-trans bigotry did not move Indiana primary voters, where Cruz was crushed. Meanwhile, in North Carolina, where the state’s new bathroom law has brought national attention to the state’s anti-LGBT policies, support for that law is in free fall.

Even on strategic issues, the electorate has less and less patience for Republican tactics. Eight in ten Americans disapproved of the government shutdown caused by congressional Republicans in 2013. With each passing month, Americans are growing more and more tired of the GOP’s refusal to vote on Chief Judge Merrick Garland’s nomination to the Supreme Court:

CREDIT: Peter Hart
CREDIT: Peter Hart

The problem #NeverTrump Republicans faced from the very beginning is that you cannot defeat something with nothing. To keep Donald Trump from winning the Republican nomination, Team #NeverTrump had to convince primary voters that they would be better off picking one of the myriad of other Republican candidates — all of whom were much more closely aligned with the conservative movement than Trump himself.

Ultimately, that proved to be too heavy an ask. The product the conservative movement offered just wasn’t all that appealing.