Clinton lost among young voters by nearly 6–1, and among independents by 3–1. Most arrestingly, Sanders won voters with an income of less than fifty thousand dollars by 2–1.
.. There’s a lot of talk about Clinton’s campaign repeating the chaos and errors of 2008, but that year she had the white working-class vote. Clinton’s candidacy looks narrower than ever, more confined to those whose experience of life approximates her own. Last night, in New Hampshire, the rare demographic group she won was those with incomes of more than two hundred thousand dollars a year. For now, at least, Clinton has become the wine-track candidate.
.. Bill Clinton, once the Party’s great channeller of working-class pain, surfaced, gaunt and joyless and wearing lumberjack red plaid. But his speech on Sunday had little of the old empathy; it was just a nasty blast at Sanders, whom the ex-President called “hermetically sealed” from reality.
.. Perhaps residual working-class loyalties, and her own strengths, will be enough to carry Clinton through the primaries. But the enthusiasm for her candidacy increasingly seems concentrated among affluent, older voters who are already committed members of the Democratic Party. That is not the most promising platform from which to begin a general-election campaign in any year, and especially not in a vigorously populist one.
.. But, in Iowa and New Hampshire, the trouble seemed broader than that: it ran through all of those people who have not yet made it. During the nineteen-nineties, the Clinton coalition ran along aspirational lines, drawing a hard line between virtuous workers and welfare recipients, and between hard-working professionals and capitalists, to summon the upwardly mobile. But the revelations of inequality have meant that aspirational talk has fallen flat, and the experience of 2008 has fractured faith in established leaders to fix it.
What About Ted Cruz?
One of the most conservative members of the Senate, Cruz would test the argument made by leaders of the hard right that Republicans have lost four of the last six presidential elections because their candidates — George H. W. Bush of 1992, Robert Dole, John McCain and Mitt Romney — were insufficiently conservative.
.. Cruz’s nomination would turn the general election in November into an almost perfect test of the viability of a pure conservative.
.. He subscribes to the belief that life begins at fertilization. This position would not only criminalize abortions in the case of rape and incest but would prohibit the use of contraceptive methods that are understood to prevent the uterine implantation of a fertilized egg like the intrauterine device and the morning-after pill.
.. What is really stunning to a longtime observer of Washington is the number of reputable people who have brutally criticized Cruz on the record. The New Republic recently published an extraordinary collection of anti-Cruz quotes that runs from the left through the center to the right. His colleagues are on record as hating him — hate may be too mild a description. First and foremost, he has angered virtually everyone he works with, especially his fellow Republican senators.
.. John Feehery, president of Quinn Gillespie Communications, and a former top Republican staffer on Capitol Hill, was more outspoken:
Cruz is an army of one, alienating anybody who is in his path. He advocates losing strategies purely to further his own career at the expense of the party.
.. Cruz, more than any of the other Republican presidential candidates, including Trump, is ideally suited to mobilize every Democratic constituency, including single women, minorities, young voters and socially liberal professionals
.. Married white Christians have steadily dropped from 80 percent of voters in the late 1950s to fewer than 40 percent now. In 1940, 82 percent of adults were members of the white working class; now that number is well below 30 percent.
.. if Cruz were nominated, party leaders would “sit down and try to help Cruz run a better campaign, but he may not listen.” In contrast, “You can coach Donald,” Black said.
Trump Plucked The Populist Apple
Point is, 11 years ago, the basis for a Trump-like candidacy was there. A candidate that was broadly socially conservative, favored government programs but was broadly skeptical of government, and broadly wary of big business: that was where the great center of American politics was.
Nobody could really take advantage of it. The parties were too ideologically rigid, and redistricting favored the most ideologically rigid candidates.
.. First, Steadfast Conservatives take very conservative views on key social issues like homosexuality and immigration, while Business Conservatives are less conservative – if not actually progressive – on these issues. Nearly three-quarters of Steadfast Conservatives (74%) believe that homosexuality should be discouraged by society. Among Business Conservatives, just 31% think homosexuality should be discouraged; 58% believe it should be accepted.
.. The Steadfast Conservatives (15% of the overall electorate) are much more likely than the Business Conservatives (12% overall) to back Trump, it would appear. But if you look further into the typology, you’ll find the single largest group, at 16%, is the Faith and Family Left — basically, pro-government, skeptical of business, but also religiously conservative.
.. And are you beginning to see why the gatekeepers on the GOP side — the party insiders, the think tanks, the conservative media — were able to keep any candidate who might have appealed to the middle, against the interests of Business Conservatives, from getting through?
Until along came someone so rich he didn’t have to depend on party donors and insiders to promote his political career. Those voters were there, but there was no way for Republican politicians within the system to speak to them, and for them.
.. the leadership of the Republican Party and the old conservative movement is, itself, culturally cosmopolitan. I doubt if many top Republican consultants interact with many Young Earth Creationists on a regular basis. Many quietly cheered the Supreme Court’s gay marriage decisions. Most of them live in blue megapolises, most come from middle-class families and attended elite institutions, and a great many of them roll their eyes at the various cultural excesses of “the base.” There is, in other words, a court/country divide among Republicans.
.. So the Republicans offer up candidates who are from cosmopolitan America, who have their speeches written by speechwriters from cosmopolitan American, who have their images created by consultants from cosmopolitan America, and who develop their issue positions in office buildings located in cosmopolitan America. Then they wonder why the base isn’t excited. Say what you will about George W. Bush, but a large part of why he was successful was that he didn’t talk like your average D.C. denizen.
.. Cosmopolitan America sees a strong, moral – frankly ideological – interest in accepting refugees from Syria. Traditionalist America thinks that after Paris, this is insane.
.. All of this is a lengthy way of saying that Trump is a creation of the Republican establishment, which is frankly uncomfortable with many of its own voters, and which mostly seeks to “manage” them.
Rubio: Republicans can’t win without expanding beyound white base
The argument that there are simply not enough Republican voters today to elect a Republican president is one that is not usually uttered in public by Republican candidates. And it is essentially the opposite of the theory being put forward by Mr. Cruz, who says he can win by expanding the white vote.
.. “If an extra 10 million evangelical Christians show up on Election Day, we will not be up at 2 or 3 in the morning wondering what happened in Ohio or Florida; they’ll call the election at 8:37 p.m.,” Mr. Cruz told Glenn Beck in an interview last year.