What's More Repulsive To You-- Republicans Switching To The Democratic Party Or Democrats Switching To The Republican Party?

Yesterday, a piece in the Washington Post by Erica Werner and Jeff Stein-- Trump administration pushing to block new money for testing, tracing, and CDC in upcoming coronavirus relief bill-- couldn't be more damaging to Trump's reelection campaign if it were designed specifically to do just that. With most of the country-- including big majorities or Democrats and independent voters-- now certain that Señor Trumpanzee can't handle the pandemic and is just making everything significantly worse-- defunding the efforts to competently confront it is both murderous and suicidal for Trump and the Republican Party, as Nancy Ohanian illustrated with her drawing Murder/Suicide recently:

"The Trump administration," they wrote, "is trying to block billions of dollars for states to conduct testing and contact tracing in the upcoming coronavirus relief bill, people involved in the talks said Saturday. The administration is also trying to block billions of dollars that GOP senators want to allocate for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and billions more for the Pentagon and State Department to address the pandemic at home and abroad, the people said. The administration’s posture has angered some GOP senators, the officials said, and some lawmakers are trying to push back and ensure that the money stays in the bill. The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to reveal confidential deliberations, cautioned that the talks were fluid and the numbers were in flux. The negotiations center around a bill Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) is preparing to unveil this coming week as part of negotiations with Democrats on what will likely be the last major coronavirus relief bill before the November election.

The two parties are far apart on a number of contentious issues, such as unemployment insurance, but the conflict between Trump administration officials and Senate Republicans on money for testing and other priorities is creating a major complication even before bipartisan negotiations get under way. Some lawmakers are trying to reach a deal quickly, as enhanced unemployment benefits for millions of Americans are set to expire in less than two weeks.

One person involved in the talks said Senate Republicans were seeking to allocate $25 billion for states to conduct testing and contact tracing, but that certain administration officials want to zero out the testing and tracing money entirely. Some White House officials believe they have already approved billions of dollars in assistance for testing and that some of that money remains unspent.

...Trump has repeatedly questioned the value of conducting widespread coronavirus testing, arguing that if there were fewer tests conducted, the numbers of infections would be lower. Coronavirus infections and deaths are on the rise in many states.

Most of the new cases are in "red" states. Yesterday's 10 states with the worst one-day confirmed cases (along with how many cases each state has per million residents):

• Florida +10,328 (15,717 cases per million Floridians)
• California +8,806 (9,692 cases per million Californians)
• Texas +7,945 (11,398 cases per million Texans)
• Georgia +4,689 (13,174 cases per million Georgians)
• Arizona +2,742 (19,408 cases per million Arizonans)
• Tennessee +2,517 (11,178 cases per million Tennesseans)
• North Carolina +2,386 (9,340 cases per million North Carolinians)
• Alabama +2,143 (13,304 cases per million Alabamans)
• South Carolina +1,552 (13,132 cases per million South Carolinians)
• Ohio +1,538 (6,319 cases per million Buckeyes)

Eric Levitz hit on a reason Republicans are letting Trump get away with this kind of behavior: the GOP has turned into a party of ignorant-- often stupid-- losers, in other words, Trump's coalition. Traditional Republicans are abandoning the party and many are perfectly comfortable with Biden and his conservatism. The Republican coalition is getting smaller. According to Gallup, just 39% of voters identify as Republicans (as opposed to 50% who say they are Democrats). This is a big change since just last February. Levitz thinks that the reason could have something to do with "having your party’s standard-bearer counsel the public to inject disinfectant while a pandemic kills 140,000 Americans and plunges the nation into the worst recession since World War II... it could do the trick." But that isn't precise point of his column.

[A]nother significant way that the GOP coalition is changing is that its voting base is becoming more working-class. And if this November does bring a “blue tsunami,” that fact could theoretically have some bearing on how the Republican Party rebrands and rebuilds in the aftermath.

Donald Trump’s erosion of support in recent months has been driven by the defections of white voters in general, and college-educated ones in particular. A variety of recent polls have found Biden leading Trump among the latter by roughly 30 percentage points. Although the president’s standing among non-college-educated whites has declined significantly in recent weeks, he still boasts a roughly 20-point lead with that demographic in the most recent surveys.

Counterintuitively, the president’s grip on a sizable minority of nonwhite voters has scarcely loosened: In recent polls from CNN, Monmouth University, and the New York Times, Trump’s share of the African-American and Hispanic voting blocs remains about where it was in 2018 exit polls-- which was itself a bit higher than his share in 2016.

...[S]ince the Latino and African-American voting blocs are more working-class than the electorate as a whole, one effect of the GOP holding its ground among nonwhite voters-- while bleeding white college-educated ones-- is to render its coalition less affluent and highly educated than it was in 2016.

xxBlacks for Trump

This is the scintilla of truth behind Ted Cruz’s remarks on the Federalist Radio Hour Thursday.

“The big lie in politics is that Republicans are the party of the rich and Democrats are the party of the poor. That just ain’t true,” the Texas senator told the right-wing outlet. “Today’s Democratic Party is the party of Silicon Valley billionaires. Today’s Democratic Party is the party of Michael Bloomberg. It is the party of power, it is the party of suppression, it is jackbooted thugs who will enforce their will through force.”

Setting aside Cruz’s last remark (by all indications, the president wants the GOP to be known as the party of jackbooted thuggery), he is narrowly correct that the Democratic Party boasts more support from affluent voters than at any time in its modern history (although American billionaires still donate predominately to the GOP, and controlling for educational attainment, Republicans still soundly beat Democrats among high-income voters).

And yet: If the GOP is becoming more working-class, in terms of its coalition’s demographic composition, there are few signs that it is becoming a party “for the working class,” in the sense of governing in the interests of workers as workers. By the same token, while the Democratic Party is becoming more affluent demographically, its economic policies have grown steadily more progressive over the past decade. Since taking control of the House of Representatives on the strength of the party’s support in suburban districts, Nancy Pelosi’s caucus has passed a $15 minimum wage, The Protecting the Right to Organize Act (a pro-union labor-law reform bill), and pushed to have the CARES Act provide Americans with the highest unemployment benefits on offer anywhere in the world (albeit, on a disastrously temporary basis).

By contrast, since Donald Trump eked out an Electoral College majority by making significant inroads with lower-income white voters, he has established himself as (at least arguably) the most economically regressive Republican president in history. He began his presidency with an attempt to throw 14 million low-income Americans off Medicaid, and then proceeded to shower wealthy capitalists in tax cuts, make it easier for corporations to cut costs by poisoning children, and gutted the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, among other reactionary things.

Now, with tens of millions of Americans freshly unemployed, upwards of 20 million at risk of eviction by autumn-- and state governments poised to layoff public-sector workers and slash social services due to cratering revenues-- the Republican Party is putting its principled commitment to slashing welfare provision above its political interests. There is no evidence that the CARES Act’s $600 weekly federal unemployment benefit is starving the U.S. labor market of much-needed workers by making joblessness more rewarding than hard work. On the other hand, there is copious evidence that such benefits have stabilized personal income levels in the U.S., thereby preventing a much sharper recession.

Nevertheless, the party of “single moms” and “steelworkers” finds the theoretical threat of American workers having the power to turn down an unattractive job offer from an employer-- without suffering a significant loss of living standards-- so offensive, it is fighting to slash the incomes of 32 million Americans (in the middle of a pandemic, just months from Election Day).

Meanwhile, the party’s other top priority for the next COVID-19 recovery package is to immunize employers from workplace safety lawsuits.

...Given the hegemony that business conservatives have enjoyed over the American right’s core institutions of policy and leadership development, the safe money would be against the Republican Party embracing a remotely prolabor economic agenda in the coming years, even if there were a significant faction within the GOP advocating for such a turn. As is, there is only a cohort of opportunists who’ve wedded marginally heterodox views on a few discrete issues to vituperative denunciations of a rootless, godless professional-managerial class.

So, the GOP is (almost certainly) not becoming a party for the working class. Whether it will become the preferred party of 51 percent of working-class voters is less clear. Given the relative sturdiness of the GOP’s share of non-college-educated voters throughout three years of reactionary policy-making-- and five months of catastrophic misrule-- it seems possible that well-packaged pseudo-populism may be all the party needs to grow its blue-collar wing. All true friends of American labor must do what they can to guard against that possibility.