The Future of the Republican Party Lies in the Rural Working Class
By the grace of God, Donald Trump was the nominee instead of Jeb Bush, and instead of extending the middle finger to the rural working class, he extended his open hand.
Tyler Cobb is writer based in the Washington, D.C. area with extensive political experience.
Something incredible happened on November 8th, 2016. Millions of Americans who had never voted Republican in their lives pulled the trigger for Donald Trump. Rural working class Americans who voted for Clinton and Obama, or perhaps had never voted at all, decided that Donald Trump would be the first politician to deliver on his promises. This trend continued in the following two elections, culminating in President Trump receiving margins in rural, working class counties not seen since LBJ and FDR.
Why, after eighty years of Democrat dominance, did the rural working class decide to vote for Donald Trump? Because he acknowledged their legitimate grievances and provided a positive vision of the future that, for once, included the working class. For decades, politicians relied on the votes of the rural working class, all the while sending their jobs overseas, hobbling their wage growth through mass immigration, and eviscerating their communities with opioids.
However, perhaps the most repulsive sin against the rural working class is the incessant demonization of them. People all over America, but especially the rural working class, are attacked by the media, being branded as moronic and evil oppressors of hapless minorities. They are constantly told about their so-called “privilege.” This is despite the commercial and academic worlds actively discriminating against this demographic in hiring and acceptance. To imply that a rural working class American can only succeed in life because of their race or class is insulting and serves only to demean the people who built America.
The Republican Party very nearly fell into this trap of the Beltway think tanks. If you recall, after Mitt Romney’s loss in 2012, Republican strategists were actively encouraging the 2016 nominee to dump the base and embrace “diversity.” However, by the grace of God, Donald Trump was the nominee instead of Jeb Bush, and instead of extending the middle finger to the rural working class, he extended his open hand.
Eight years of President Trump has solidified the rural working class’s home in the Republican Party, however, there is no guarantee these voters will remain. The Make-America-Great-Again movement was started by President Trump, and its fruits will be realized by JD Vance. The election of President Vance will represent the final and complete transformation of the GOP from Bush’s globalism to Trump’s nationalism. However, despite Vice President Vance’s status as the presumptive 2028 Republican nominee, the ugly head of the D.C. consultant GOP will rear its head in opposition.
The most important thing a Republican who wants to win an election can do is ignore the D.C. consultant GOP. It is time to turn the Republican Party into the party of the working man – a title the Democratic Party left behind decades ago. The Beltway consulting sophists will tell you the X factor for the GOP is to marginally increase its vote share with suburban voters and in majority-minority districts. I make a different case.
The Republican Party welcomes the votes of everyone, regardless of race or status, however, one glaringly overlooked fact is that if White voters without a college degree voted for Republicans at the same rate as African-American voters voted for the Democrats, President Trump would have won all but three states in the 2024 election.1 Of course, the rural working class does not vote as a monolith, however, they do share common beliefs and circumstances. Many voters in rural Appalachia support President Trump but have never voted for him, and there are many, typically older working class voters, who still vote straight ticket Democrat out of habit. These men and women can all become long-time GOP voters.
If the Republican Party wants to win a political and a moral victory, then it must pursue the largest group of voters in the country who, coincidentally, are the ones who have been most left behind by the globalist world order. But how can the Republican Party complete its transformation? How can it get ninety percent of the rural working class to support it? The answer to that is simple, but let’s start with how the Republican Party can lose the rural working class vote.
To do that, the Republican Party should fail to nominate Vice President Vance in 2028, and run on the failed Reagan-Bush policies of free trade and depressing wages through the mass importation of cheap foreign labor. Alongside embracing the racial grievances of the Black Lives Matter movement and the low-testosterone schoolmarmery of the effeminate Right, this strategy is sure to lose.
If the GOP wants to win the biggest landslide in modern history, it must nominate Vice President Vance in 2028 and run on revitalizing American industrial towns, raising wages through mass deportation, making homeownership a possibility for the working class, and most importantly, it must call out and destroy the rabid, hatred of working class Americans expressed in the Democrat Party, the media, the commercial sector, and the academic world.
The 2024 Trump campaign worked wonders in turning out the vote from the rural working class, and its strategy must be replicated in 2028. The rural working class doesn’t care about Hollywood endorsements, and they don’t see the daily ramblings of the right-wing Twitter pundit class. But they do watch sports, and listen to the radio, and they will answer their door if you knock.
The most important thing the Republican Party can do to win rural working class Americans is to reach them where they are. Go door to door in Appalachia, show the people there that you understand their plight, demonstrate that you’re willing and able to fight for them in Washington, and, most importantly, be genuine. The working class is sick of fake, effeminate D.C. politicians. They want a masculine figure who projects power, and they don’t care if he’s wearing a suit or a Carhartt.
The epochal figure that is President Trump has sparked the flame of a peaceful revolution in the hearts of the rural working class. That spark will culminate in the blaze of Trump-Vance populist thought. If the Republican Party has any future, it will lie in the support of the people who built this country.
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Cook Poltical https://www.cookpolitical.com/swingometer/2024
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In 2016, the white rural underclass shifted GOP to vote Trump.
In 2024 the urban minority underclass shifted noticeably toward Trump.
Trump won Latino men in 2024.
It appears we may be witnessing the re-emergence of a class-based political alignment (ala the 1900's-30's). The Democrats have gone hard into race to prevent this, but it appears the urban minority underclass and the rural white underclass may be realizing their problems are pretty similar -- mostly that the ruling class hates them.
"Working class" doesn't mean you drive a truck and listen to country music and are masculine, it means you work for a boss in a non-management or non-professional role. If you own enough assets to quit your job and live off of passive income, you are an upper class capitalist. If you own a small business but need to keep working to get by, you are middle-class petite bourgeois. If you are in a prestigious profession like law or medicine controlled by a credentialization cartel limiting membership, or if you are in a place in the corporate org chart where you are responsible for making hiring, firing, and other personnel decisions for lower level employees and are prohibited by labor law from joining a union for that reason, you are middle-class PMC. Everyone else is working class.
The working class therefore includes many white-collar workers in cities and suburbs who went to college but aren't professionals and aren't in management, even if this group has "middle class" cultural signifiers. A lot of the federal workers Trump fired are working class (although many would be PMC). It also includes people in crappy retail jobs who listen to NPR and use pronouns. Republicans don't understand this because the entire idea that "class" as a socially relevant category that can be defined in precise terms comes largely out of Marxism. The author is borrowing a term from a political tradition his opposes and then reframing it in an incoherent way. Normally, conservatives/libertarians just don't see class as relevant social group.