The following article from the Wall Street Journal is too important for public dialog to be hidden behind a pay wall. Here it is:
A study shows the 2016 electorate was more socially than economically conservative.
By F.H. Buckley
Before the arrival of Donald Trump, the Republican establishment tended to define politics along a one-dimensional economic axis. Their Democratic opponents were socialists while they were the growth and opportunity party. Mitt Romney’s candidacy embodied this view. His campaign’s 59-point plan of sensible free-market ideas was a manifesto for Republican insiders. No one but them ever read it. The Republican one-dimensional man was left in 2012’s dustbin.
The Voter Study Group’s Lee Drutman recently looked beyond the simple left-right paradigm in a questionnaire asking 2016 voters to identify both how they voted and how they felt about various economic and social issues. Mr. Drutman then mapped the results in a diagram, with economic preferences on the horizontal axis and social preferences on the vertical. The diagram revealed some surprising insights about American politics.
Most Hillary Clinton voters were deeply liberal on both axes. The surprise was the Trump voters, who were very conservative on social issues but moderate on economic ones. By Mr. Drutman’s count, 73% of all voters were left of center on economics. Most of the remaining Trump supporters were quite moderate on economic questions.
After the election, the so-called NeverTrumpers claimed that each of their favored candidates would also have beaten Mrs. Clinton. Mr. Drutman’s figures show what a pipe dream that is. A presidential candidate like Ted Cruz, who defines himself primarily through right-wing economic policies, begins with nearly three-quarters of the electorate in the other camp. Such a candidate isn’t likely to go very far.
While the great majority of voters were liberal on economic issues, a small majority (52%) were social conservatives at the top of the diagram, enough to swing the election to Mr. Trump. Only 3.8% of voters were libertarians in the lower-right quadrant, socially liberal and economically conservative. They split their votes evenly between Mr. Trump and Mrs. Clinton.
The crucial differences between the two parties came down to social concerns, including pride in America, immigration, and especially moral issues such as abortion and gay marriage. The social-conservative awakening that helped elect Mr. Trump came when voters recognized that the liberal agenda amounted to something more than a shield to protect sexual minorities. It was also a sword to be used against social conservatives.
The Trump voters might have grumbled about the Supreme Court’s 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges decision, but same-sex marriage didn’t pick anyone’s pockets and no great political protest followed. That changed, however, when homosexual activists employed their newly won rights to start putting religious believers out of business.
In particular, the Democrats gave the back of their hand to Catholic voters, the principal bloc of swing voters in America. Democrats of the past would have been horrified to learn that their party makes faithful Catholics feel unwanted: That’s what they thought Republicans did. But Mr. Trump courted white Catholics, and they provided him with the winning margins in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan. Those three states determined the outcome of the election.
The sweet spot in American politics is thus the upper-left quadrant of the double majority: economic liberals and social conservatives. It’s the place where presidential elections are won, and the winner is usually going to be the candidate who’s won’t touch Social Security and who promises to nominate judges in the mold of Antonin Scalia. In other words—Donald Trump. Mr. Drutman labeled such voters populists, but I prefer the term that Mr. Trump himself has applied to them: the Republican “workers party.” They constituted nearly 30% of voters in 2016 and they split 3 to 1 for Mr. Trump.
What of the future? The Democrats know they’re in a bind. They want to learn how to connect with the forgotten voter in the heartland, but the “Better Deal” they trotted out last month is simply more left-wing economics. The problem for Democrats is they’ve already nailed the pocketbook issue. It’s on the social side where they’re weak. It’s hard to see how they can moderate their maximalist positions on abortion, Black Lives Matter and transgender issues. The entire current leadership of the Democratic Party would need to be replaced.
That’s not likely to happen. Instead, the Democrats will bet on the triumph of their socially liberal ideas, force-fed to students at our universities and preached by most media outlets. They assume that the arc of history, to which President Obama so frequently appealed, bends only their way and that all history moves in their direction. Everything that has gone before was merely a prologue for history’s apotheosis in the persons of Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton—it’s Herbert Butterfield’s Whig theory of history dressed up as a campaign strategy.
The Republicans won the 2016 presidential election, but it hasn’t made governing any easier. Because of the separation of powers, there are now two—or maybe even more—different Republican parties. For presidential elections, however, the Republican Workers Party will be the future of American politics.
Mr. Buckley is a professor at Scalia Law School at George Mason University and the author of “The Way Back: Restoring the Promise of America.”
Appeared in the August 10, 2017, print edition."