Ryan Streeter
This is the first of a three-part series on a Republican agenda for middle America.
A battle is raging in middle America, even if it doesn't feel like it. The battle is being fought on three fronts, which I have previously outlined: a struggling middle class, a growing and unpredictable demographic middle within the electorate, and the growing regions around middle American cities and regions. These are, admittedly, overlapping groups.
But they are important as distinct groups in terms of policy and political strategy. Each presents a distinct problem for the GOP. Here’s why:
Middle class: The GOP’s vision problem. If the GOP fails to put forward an agenda that improves the prospects of middle class Americans as a whole, it may become the party of the upper middle class – hardly enough to base a governing majority on. The middle class presents the GOP with its greatest challenge when it comes to advancing a robust vision of economic growth.
Demographic middle: The GOP’s relevance problem. If Republicans think they can win without addressing the interests of the millennial generation and Hispanics, it will be a long time before the party recovers.
Geographic middle: The GOP’s potential lost opportunity problem. As yesterday’s Census figures show, population growth is most aggressive in Republican states. But these fast-growing places are also increasingly diverse racially and ethnically, filling up with professionals, managers, entrepreneurs, and working class people whose political affiliation and loyalty is hard to predict.
Despite these challenges, the GOP is showing signs of winning the middle in two ways.
First, the best middle class job growth in America is in fairly red places. Most of the states that gained congressional seats in yesterday's new Census report are Republican strongholds, while those that lost seats are more Democratic. People are moving to places where taxes are reasonable, public sector costs are low, infrastructure is good, families can have a good quality of life and decent cost of living, and new businesses can grow and thrive. These characteristics are more likely to be found in places with policies that Republicans typically support. The following is from Enterprising States, produced by the Praxis Strategy Group for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
The states that lost congressional seats in Tuesday's Census report are virtually absent from this chart. States that are friendlier to Republicans are also friendlier to the middle class.
Second, Republicans fared well among working class and ethnic districts in the 2010 mid-terms. As Michael Barone wrotet earlier this month, Republican gains in the mid-terms came almost entirely from the lesser educated, non-elite sectors of the populace. This is a group that is likely more pragmatic than ideological. They just wanted Washington to stop its drunken spending. As Ramesh Ponnuru and Reihan Salam have pointed out, a significant part of this group maybe opposed to the government spending money to prop up low-income people despite being fairly low-income themselves. They share an individualism and self-sufficiency with conservatives and don't want the government bailing anyone out.
Republicans have shown they can create growth environments at the state level that help middle class people, and they have learned that middle class voters want to join their effort to reign in spending.
These two trends bode well for Republicans. Tomorrow, however, I'll look at ways the GOP is losing the middle. And after that, we'll wrap up the series by proposing an initial agenda that builds on what's going right, and fixes what's going wrong.
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