Party Label Dragged Trump Across the Winning Line

Conventional wisdom holds that Donald Trump “broke the blue wall” by winning over white-working class Democrats with his protectionism and nativism. It has created quite a bit of soul searching among Democrats. However, the rest of the federal elections provide a different narrative: voters elected Trump because he was the Republican nominee, not despite that fact.

The first piece of evidence is with Senate races. Every single Democrat running in a state Clinton carried won. Assuming John Kennedy is elected in Louisiana’s runoff (and that is the far more probable outcome), every Republican nominee in a state carried by Trump either has won or will win. That perfect partisan alignment between Senate and Presidential elections has never happened before in the post-17th-Amendment era.

Delving further into the Senate races: four of the five key swing states won by Trump (FL, NC, PA, and WI) had Senate Republican incumbents running for re-election. Not only did they all win, but they all won a higher share of the vote than Trump did. Three of them (Johnson-WI, Burr-NC, and Rubio-FL) actually won more votes than Trump (Pat Toomey, in PA, came less than 25,000 votes short of Trump).

The House of Representative shows a similar alignment. Less than a dozen Democrats were elected in Trump-carried districts, even fewer Republicans won Clinton-carried districts (According to the Cook Political Report data as of Monday night). Overall, Trump did run about half a million votes ahead of his party, but that pales in comparison to the five million votes Clinton ran ahead of hers. While Trump may have won fewer popular votes than Clinton, his down-ballot House running mates scored over 3 million more votes than their Democratic opponents.

In the aforemetioned swing states, House Republicans won a higher share of their states’ votes than Trump did in all five. Indeed, in three of them (FL, NC, and PA) House Republicans actually won more votes in their states than Trump did.

This is not an election result in which Democrats crossed over to elect Trump. This was an election in which Republicans came out to protect their Congressional majorities, and dragged Trump across the finish line due to the R next to his name.

For Democrats, that is a sobering realization – one that many of us are naturally avoiding. However, for the few of us who are conservative Democrats, it points to an opening for 2020.

First, it says that most Trump voters are just looking for a standard-issue Republican president. That makes a large chunk of them more likely to peel off when Trump acts, well, like Trump. As the president-elect completes the transformation of the Republican Party into the Party of Big Government for White People, genuine conservatives will recoil. This is especially true for economic conservatives when Trump spends money like water on “infrastructure” while tearing up trade agreements and restricting high-skilled immigrants, and for foreign policy conservatives who are already beginning to wince at Trump’s coziness with the Putin regime.

It is those voters in the Atlantic South and the Southwest (and Johnson voters across the country, who will certainly be angered by Trump’s economic interventions) that will be truly available for Democrats, rather than the mythical “white working-class Democrats” who did not in fact vote Democratic at any federal level. For the Democrats to win – and for conservatives to become relevant again in the next decade – both sides need to be open to working together.