Where Does the Republican Party Go After Donald Trump?

While Donald Trump has only been president for a little over a year and a half (it seems longer, doesn't it?), with the 2020 election starting in January of next year (assuming it hasn't started already), it is perhaps not too early to start looking at the question in the title this post, since it could happen in a little more than two years.¹

In an editorial (“What has become of the Republican Party?”) and a long article (“How the elephant got its Trump”) back in April, The Economist touched on this question.  One of the most interesting points in the article was that Trump supporters came to the Republican Party before President Trump did.  Donald Trump didn’t create the populist wing (or whatever you want to call it) of the Republican Party.  He merely took advantage of it.

What a lot of people don’t fully understand about Donald Trump (probably because they find him so distasteful and unappealing) is that he is a reasonably good politician.  He’s not in Bill Clinton’s class, of course (few are), but in terms of winning elections, he’s done pretty well.  Whether or not he realized what was going to happen when he announced for President in June of 2015, Donald Trump has ridden the wave like a surfer king.

In looking at the Republican Party, The Economist notes that “[p]eople who identify as Republicans are united by cultural issues rather than narrowly political ones.”  However, when The Economist tries to figure out why so many white, non-college voters shifted from the Democrats to the Republicans between 2009 and 2015, they only come up with two possible answers: the Great Recession and racism.²  What they don't mention as a possible reason for the shift is the very thing they identified as uniting the Republican Party: cultural issues.  A lot of things have changed in our culture since 2009, and they have changed very fast.  Gay marriage/marriage equality.  What bathroom or locker room people can use.  Even the number of sexes we seem to have. 

But it’s not just the changes.  It’s the feeling people have that the decisions are being forced on them by courts, Washington bureaucrats, and executive decrees.  In other words, by the elite.  An elite that looks down on anybody who doesn’t agree with the changes they are making and that seems to think anybody who disagrees with them is racist or ignorant – or both.  It’s a feeling of condescension and disrespect.

Which brings me back to the question of what will happen to the Republican Party when Donald Trump leaves.  Part of that answer may be found in the answer to another question.  What comes first for a political party: its policies or its members?³  In other words, do people join (or vote for) a party because they agree with its policies or do parties adopt their policies based on who their supporters are?

Obviously, the answer is not entirely one way or the other.  But the shift of so many white, non-college voters to the Republican Party between 2009 and 2015 and the success of Donald Trump in capturing the Republican nomination in 2016 indicates that it might be more the latter, i.e., parties adopt their policies based on their supporters.  Which means, if those voters who recently came to the GOP stay in the GOP, the Republican Party going forward, even after President Trump leaves the scene, may be a lot different than the Republican Party we used to know.

And if that is true, where do Republicans who liked the domestic policy approach Paul Ryan was talking about in his “The Path to Prosperity” in 2011 and who liked the foreign policy of George H.W. Bush go?  The Republican Party of Donald Trump may not be the answer, but the Democratic Party of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren would be worse.  It could be a lonely time.
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¹ I realize some Democrats are hoping it will be sooner than that.  They are thinking, if they get control of the House of Representatives in November, they can start impeachment proceedings in January.  Of course, as we saw in the case of Bill Clinton, impeachment by the House is not the same as conviction by the Senate.  Also, an overly-partisan impeachment process can rebound against those conducting it.  The Republicans' effort against President Clinton seemed to increase his popularity.  Could doing the same to President Trump increase his chances of being re-elected in 2020?  Also, at times, I wonder if the Democratic base understands that getting rid of Donald Trump just leaves you with Mike Pence.
² Per The Economist, the left likes the racism reason.  It even lets them somehow tie Donald Trump back to Richard Nixon (‘southern strategy” and all). 
³ The answer may be different in parliamentary systems, especially those with proportional representation systems, than in the United States.  First-past-the-post is different.