For decades, the establishment Republican Party has been all about tax cuts, entitlement reform and allegiance to corporate America. Axios writes, that could be changing quickly in order for the party to survive.
Republicans, long reliant on big business and the rich, see a post-Trump future centered on working class white, Hispanic and Black voters, top GOP officials tell me.
This is a substantial shift, born of necessity and the post-Trump reality. It would push Republicans further away from the interests of corporate America and traditional conservative ideas like entitlement reform.
The reason for the shift goes back to 2016 and Donald Trump’s successful efforts to court working-class white, Hispanic and Black voters, according to GOP officials who spoke to Axios.
This also has a lot to do with money. Corporate America has cut off funding to those Republicans who refused to acknowledge Joe Biden’s victory.
And, the GOP also needs fresh faces because many of the old guard have left Trump’s party. The New York Times reports that this increase a lot after January 6th: “Data indicates a stronger-than-usual flight from the G.O.P. since the Capitol riot.”
An analysis of January voting records by The New York Times found that nearly 140,000 Republicans had quit the party in 25 states that had readily available data (19 states do not have registration by party). Voting experts said the data indicated a stronger-than-usual flight from a political party after a presidential election, as well as the potential start of a damaging period for G.O.P. registrations as voters recoil from the Capitol violence and its fallout.
Bill Kristol, a longtime Conservative himself left the party a year ago. While a larger number of people are abandoning the GOP than were leaving a year ago, he wonders whether it’s truly a seismic shift.
Kevin Madden, a former operative who worked on Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign shares Kristol’s opinions. The Times says he changed his registration from Republican to independent a year ago, “after watching what he called the harassment of career foreign service officials at Mr. Trump’s first impeachment trial.”
As for the overall trend of Republicans abandoning their party, he said that it was too soon to say if it spelled trouble in the long term, but that the numbers couldn’t be overlooked. “In all the time I worked in politics,” he said, “the thing that always worried me was not the position but the trend line.”
