White evangelicals are culturally and economically disaffected—anxious to protect the conservative Christian culture rapidly disappearing in America.
How did Donald Trump—a twice-divorced, casino-owning New Yorker who curses during campaign speeches and is prone to church-related gaffes such as accidentally putting cash into the communion plate—win in this southern state where approximately seven in 10 GOP primary voters are white evangelicals?
Trump’s success has demonstrated that the conventional mode of thinking about white evangelical voters as “values voters” is no longer helpful, if it ever was. The Trump revelation is that white evangelicals have become “nostalgia voters:” a culturally and economically disaffected group that is anxious to hold onto a white, conservative Christian culture that is passing from the scene.
.. The best explanation for this unlikely consolidation of white evangelical Protestant support behind Trump is that his appeal to “Make America Great Again” resonates more deeply and powerfully with the group’s anxieties than a checklist of culture war issues or an appeal to shared religious identity.
.. Two-thirds of white evangelicals say that immigrants are a burden to the country because they take American jobs, housing, and health care; and nearly six in 10 say it bothers them when they come into contact with immigrants who speak little or no English.
.. On the economic front, eight in 10 white evangelicals believe the country is still in an economic recession today.
.. His appeal to nostalgia voters has brought together important groups that have historically been overlapping but distinct:
- the voters of the southern strategy,
- the Christian right,
- and the Tea Party.
Donald Trump, Crony Capitalist
The Trump phenomenon caught everybody by surprise. Yet it is a manifestation of a fundamental contradiction long present in the Republican Party: Despite fierce anti-big-business sentiment among many Republican voters, no Republican candidate has emerged to champion them.
Who gains the most when the GOP field shrinks?
When we ask registered Republican and Republican-leaning voters about their second choices, the results show that Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio are in the best position to gain supporters if and when voters decide to make a switch. Cruz is the second choice of 18 percent of registered Republicans, while Rubio is the second choice of 17 percent.
Why Marco Rubio is insisting that his massive tax cuts will pay for themselves, explained
Conservatives hate taxes, they dislike deficits, and they’re scared of spending cuts. Dynamic scoring is the answer.
The basic idea here is that massive tax cuts boost growth so much that they pay for themselves, and so there’s no actual trade-off between lower taxes and balanced budgets. In this telling, eating your cake leads your body to burn calories so fast that it’s like you end up thinner than you started!
.. As Jonathan Chait wrote, the skeptical reception Rubio’s plan got among many on the right spoke to a problem almost without precedent in the modern GOP: Rubio had designed a tax cut “so gargantuan that nobody in the party actually believes it.”
.. While Rubio gives some lip service to deficit reduction — he later tells Harwood that balancing the budget will require entitlement reform, not just tax reform — he clearly cares a lot more about the tax cuts than about the deficit reduction, just as Bush did.