2022.05.18 初选揭示了特朗普主义的未来

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POLITICS
What the Primaries Reveal About the Future of Trumpism
The movement no longer depends on Trump himself.

By Ronald Brownstein
Illustration of Donald Trump's silhouette at a rally
Paul Spella / The Atlantic; Tayfun Coskun / Anadolu Agency / Getty
MAY 18, 2022, 12:33 PM ET
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For all the talk about how Donald Trump’s endorsed candidates would fare in the Republican primaries this year, the results in this week’s races made clear: Whatever happens to Trump’s personal influence, Trumpism is consolidating its dominance of the GOP.

The former president’s scorecard on Tuesday was mixed. Candidates he endorsed won the GOP nominations for governor in Pennsylvania and Senate in North Carolina, while his preferred choice for Idaho governor failed to topple the incumbent and his late intervention could not save troubled young Representative Madison Cawthorn in North Carolina. The Pennsylvania Republican Senate primary remains too close to call between the celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz, Trump’s candidate, and David McCormick, whom Trump has criticized.


Yet more revealing than what happened to the candidates Trump endorsed was how many candidates endorsed him. As in Republican primaries earlier this year, no top-tier contenders in any of Tuesday’s races ran on repudiating the bruising economic and racial nationalism that Trump has solidified as the GOP’s dominant ideology. In several contests, particularly the Pennsylvania Senate race, all of the leading candidates sought to define themselves as the most committed to Trump’s MAGA agenda—even McCormick, an Army veteran and former hedge-fund CEO. And almost all of the leading candidates echoed, to varying degrees, the former president’s discredited claims that he lost the 2020 election only because of widespread fraud.

“If ’22 was going to be a test of Trump and Trumpism’s dominance of the party, so far he’s pretty dominant and it’s pretty dominant,” says Bill Kristol, a leader among the GOP’s embattled Never Trump forces.

The determination of so many candidates to identify as Trump allies is a clear marker of how Republican voters themselves continue moving to the right. In Pennsylvania, for instance, the composition of the GOP primary electorate is “pretty dramatically different” from even 20 years ago, says John Brabender, a longtime Republican consultant in the state. “It is much more blue-collar Republicans, social-conservative Republicans, and Tea Party Republicans that dominate the primaries,” he told me, and fewer white-collar moderates in the suburbs outside Philadelphia. North Carolina, where Trump endorsee Representative Ted Budd won a Senate primary on Tuesday, has undergone a similar shift, as has Ohio, where J. D. Vance, also backed by Trump, prevailed in the Republican Senate primary earlier this month.


David Frum: The J.D. Vance I knew

As the Republican electorate shifts away from the kinds of voters who might have resisted Trump, the party’s tilt toward Trumpism has become self-perpetuating. Trumpism, it seems, no longer depends on Trump himself.

Pennsylvania has a tradition of electing moderate Republican governors (Richard Thornburgh, Tom Ridge) and senators (John Heinz, Arlen Specter). But neither GOP primary this year produced a viable candidate who would qualify as a true moderate or even a Trump skeptic. The gubernatorial primary went decisively to far-right State Senator Doug Mastriano, who led efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential-election result in the state, supports banning abortion after about six weeks of pregnancy without exceptions for rape and incest, wants to repeal a state law allowing any voter to cast a ballot by mail, and has associated with figures in the extreme Christian-nationalist movement. Mastriano’s closest rival was Lou Barletta, who, as a mayor and later a U.S. representative, made his name by pushing hard-line policies against undocumented immigrants and became one of the first members of Congress to endorse Trump in 2016.

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The GOP Senate primary became a bidding war over who could demonstrate the most fealty to Trump. Oz relentlessly touted Trump’s endorsements and echoed his discredited claims of election fraud. The firebrand conservative commentator Kathy Barnette insisted, in effect, that she was more MAGA than Trump himself. Even after Trump disparaged him as a “liberal, Wall Street Republican,” McCormick, who might have been the establishment choice in another time, described himself as an “America First” conservative and promised to fight for Trump’s agenda. McCormick didn’t fully endorse Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was stolen, but neither did he refute them, speaking of “all sorts of election irregularities which have essentially created a situation where Republicans, the majority of Republicans, don’t believe in the result.”

The Pennsylvania race reprised the recent Senate primary in Ohio, another state with a fading tradition of electing moderate Republicans (among them, George Voinovich, John Kasich, and Rob Portman, the retiring senator). Not only did Republicans nominate Vance—the author and former venture capitalist who reinvented himself as a MAGA-style populist and provocateur—but all five of the serious contenders in the race had said they would support Trump if he becomes the 2024 Republican presidential nominee.

David Graham: John Fetterman wins on vibes


In North Carolina on Tuesday, the double-barreled support of Trump and the conservative Club for Growth propelled Budd, who voted against certifying the 2020 election results, to a decisive victory. As of the latest results, Budd got more than double the number of votes of the next closest candidate, former Governor and Charlotte Mayor Pat McCrory, a more traditional, business-oriented Republican, who withered under charges that he was insufficiently conservative for the Trump-era party. A Budd win in November would constitute a significant lurch to the right for the state, whose retiring Republican senator, Richard Burr, voted to convict Trump in his impeachment trial after the January 6 insurrection.

This pattern has been more mixed in races for governor than for Senate. Although Mastriano won Pennsylvania, Idaho Governor Brad Little, a staunch conservative, easily turned aside a challenge from his even more conservative lieutenant governor, Janice McGeachin, who had Trump’s endorsement. In Ohio earlier this month, Governor Mike DeWine, who positions himself closer to the center of the GOP, beat three conservative challengers (though he surprisingly received less than half of votes cast). In Georgia’s primary this coming Tuesday, Governor Brian Kemp, another staunch conservative, is expected to roll past his Trump-endorsed challenger, former Senator David Perdue.


GOP voters “don’t have the ire toward their statehouse that they do toward the U.S. Capitol,” suggests Jim Kessler, the executive vice president for policy at the centrist-Democratic group Third Way. Yet the overall tilt toward Trump-style candidates remains unmistakable this year.

That tilt reflects the fundamental shift in the GOP coalition that Brabender identified. In a process that predates Trump but has greatly accelerated since his emergence, the GOP has grown more reliant on non-college-educated, non-urban, and religiously conservative voters, many of whom express anxiety about demographic and cultural change in polls, while shedding support from college-educated and more moderate voters, especially those clustered in the nation’s largest metropolitan areas.

Pennsylvania crystallizes that change. In the early 1990s, about one-third of Republican primary votes in the state were cast across the southeast, in Philadelphia and its four surrounding suburban counties, according to calculations by Berwood Yost, the director of the Center for Opinion Research at Franklin & Marshall College, in Lancaster. But by 2018, as residents of those suburbs continued a generation-long migration toward the Democratic Party, the Philadelphia region’s share of the state’s GOP primary vote had fallen to a little over one-fifth.


Simultaneously, the mostly blue-collar counties around Pittsburgh, in southwestern Pennsylvania, slightly increased their share of the GOP vote, while the less densely populated counties in the state’s center increased their share even more, Yost found. Results as of early Wednesday suggest that these patterns largely held in this primary, with Philadelphia and its suburbs again contributing only a little more than one-fifth of GOP primary votes, the southwest a little less than one-fifth, and the interior counties the remainder.

According to statewide Franklin & Marshall polls that Yost provided to me, from 2000 to 2022 the share of registered Republicans in Pennsylvania who were college graduates has declined slightly (even while college graduates’ representation nearly doubled among Democrats and increased by almost one-third among independents). The share of Republicans who identify as moderates or liberals has fallen by about half, as has the share who support tougher gun-control measures or believe that abortion should be legal in all circumstances; the share of Republicans who own guns has soared. “We’ve all heard about the realignment along [a] religious and cultural axis, but it’s pretty clear in this state that’s what’s happened,” Yost said. “And I think that mirrors the country as a whole.”

Indeed, in Ohio’s 2006 Republican Senate primary, when then-Senator DeWine defeated two conservative alternatives, the state’s three most populous counties—Franklin, Cuyahoga, and Hamilton—accounted for 22 percent of the total primary vote. This year, their share fell to about 18 percent, with the Republican vote growing in blue-collar northeast counties that have been battered by industrial decline, as well as in economically strained smaller cities like Akron and Toledo. In North Carolina, the GOP primary vote similarly has grown less reliant on the state’s big population centers and inner suburbs around Charlotte and Raleigh, and more dependent on distant suburbs, exurbs, and rural areas, according to calculations shared with me by Michael Bitzer, the chair of the political-science department at Catawba College in Salisbury.


What does this mean for the future direction of the GOP? The challenge for the small remnant of Republican candidates who resist Trump—or even those who want to support his general direction without personally bending the knee to him—is that these changes have shrunk the audience for any alternative path. As voters who are uneasy with Trumpism—largely college-educated suburbanites in metropolitan areas—have drifted away from the party, the core left behind is more receptive to Trump-style arguments. And the more that GOP primaries produce Trump-style candidates, the less likely center-right voters will be to vote in such elections at all.

That leaves little hope in the near term for the dwindling band of conservatives and Republicans who want to see the party shift back away from Trumpism. “There was a time I thought you could remove him and save the party,” Sarah Longwell, the founder of the anti-Trump Republican Accountability Project, tweeted on Monday. “But looking at these GOP primaries—not to mention the last 18 months—it’s clear Trump has metastasized across the party. And it can’t be saved.”

While the triumph of Trumpism seems assured for now inside the GOP, less clear is whether it is a reliable formula for winning general elections. With as many as three-fourths of adults expressing discontent over the country’s direction, Republicans are highly likely to make gains in the November midterm elections, and the party’s winners inevitably will include some candidates in the Trump mold. But Democrats are optimistic—and some Republicans are wary—that GOP nominees such as Mastriano and, if he prevails, Oz will prove too extreme or flawed to win even in this environment.


“Democrats might be able to ride out the storm, so to speak, and flip a Senate seat,” says Mike Mikus, a Pittsburgh-based Democratic consultant. “And to think you can flip a Senate seat in this political environment—it’s incredible, because if [Republicans] would just stick with sane candidates, there’s no way we win that race.”

Brabender countered that it’s wrong to discount almost any Republican at a moment when voters are so unhappy. “People are going to learn that the environment is going to dominate much more than the candidates will,” he predicted.

At minimum, it appears highly unlikely that November will produce the widespread repudiation of Trump-style candidates that critics such as Kristol consider the prerequisite to any GOP course correction. And if voters don’t decisively reject Trumpism in November, the odds increase that the GOP will embrace Trumpism again in 2024, either with Trump himself or another candidate who has embraced his agenda, like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.

That likelihood has huge implications not just for the competition between the two parties, but for American democracy. Republican primary voters so far have nominated multiple candidates who echo some version of Trump’s wild claims of 2020 election fraud, who promise to make it more difficult to vote, and who signal, as in Mastriano’s case, that they might seek to overturn any Democratic victory for president. The real price of Trumpism’s grip on the GOP might be a full-scale constitutional crisis in 2024.

Ronald Brownstein is a senior editor at The Atlantic and a senior political analyst for CNN.



政治
初选揭示了特朗普主义的未来
该运动不再依赖于特朗普本人。

罗纳德-布朗斯坦报道
唐纳德-特朗普在一次集会上的剪影插图
Paul Spella / The Atlantic; Tayfun Coskun / Anadolu Agency / Getty
2022年5月18日，美国东部时间下午12:33
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关于唐纳德-特朗普支持的候选人在今年共和党初选中的表现，本周的比赛结果表明：无论特朗普的个人影响力如何，特朗普主义正在巩固其在共和党内的主导地位。

这位前总统周二的成绩单好坏参半。他支持的候选人赢得了宾夕法尼亚州州长和北卡罗来纳州参议院的共和党提名，而他偏爱的爱达荷州州长人选未能推翻现任州长，他的后期干预也未能挽救北卡罗来纳州陷入困境的年轻众议员麦迪逊-考特恩。宾夕法尼亚州共和党参议院初选在特朗普的候选人、名医梅梅特-奥兹(Mehmet Oz)和特朗普批评过的大卫-麦考密克(David McCormick)之间仍然难分胜负。


然而，比特朗普支持的候选人的情况更有说服力的是有多少候选人支持他。与今年早些时候的共和党初选一样，在周二的任何一场比赛中，没有任何顶级竞争者以否定特朗普作为共和党主导意识形态所巩固的伤痕累累的经济和种族民族主义为由进行竞选。在一些比赛中，特别是宾夕法尼亚州的参议院选举中，所有领先的候选人都试图将自己定义为最支持特朗普的MAGA议程的人，即使是退伍军人、前对冲基金CEO麦考密克。几乎所有领先的候选人都在不同程度上响应了前总统的说法，即他在2020年的选举中失利只是因为普遍的欺诈。

"如果说22年将是对特朗普和特朗普主义在党内统治地位的考验，那么到目前为止，他是相当有统治力的，而且是相当有统治力的，"比尔-克里斯托尔说，他是共和党受困的 "永不特朗普 "势力中的一位领导人。

这么多候选人确定为特朗普的盟友，是共和党选民自己继续向右移动的一个明显标志。例如，在宾夕法尼亚州，共和党初选选民的构成与20年前相比 "有相当大的不同"，该州的长期共和党顾问约翰-布拉本德说。"他告诉我，"在初选中占主导地位的更多是蓝领共和党人、社会保守派共和党人和茶党共和党人，而费城郊区的白领温和派则更少。北卡罗来纳州也发生了类似的变化，特朗普的支持者特德-巴德(Ted Budd)议员在周二的参议院初选中获胜，俄亥俄州也是如此，同样得到特朗普支持的万斯(J. D. Vance)在本月早些时候的共和党参议院初选中获胜。


大卫-弗鲁姆。我认识的J.D.万斯

随着共和党选民远离那些可能抵制特朗普的选民，该党向特朗普主义的倾斜已成为一种自我延续的现象。特朗普主义，似乎不再取决于特朗普本人。

宾夕法尼亚州有选出温和的共和党州长（理查德-索恩堡，汤姆-里奇）和参议员（约翰-海因茨，阿伦-斯佩克特）的传统。但是，今年的共和党初选没有产生一个有资格成为真正的温和派甚至是特朗普怀疑论者的可行候选人。州长初选中，极右翼的州参议员道格-马斯特里亚诺(Doug Mastriano)果断胜出，他领导了推翻该州2020年总统选举结果的努力，支持禁止怀孕6周后的堕胎，强奸和乱伦也不例外，想废除允许任何选民通过邮件投票的州法律，并与极端基督教民族主义运动的人物有联系。马斯特里亚诺最接近的对手是卢-巴莱塔，他作为市长和后来的美国代表，通过推动针对无证移民的强硬政策而成名，并在2016年成为首批支持特朗普的国会议员之一。

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美国人古怪地迷恋着纸巾
乔-平斯克（JOE PINSKER
美国共和党参议院初选变成了一场关于谁能表现出对特朗普最忠心的竞标战。奥兹无情地吹捧特朗普的背书，并附和他关于选举欺诈的不实之词。火爆的保守派评论员凯西-巴内特(Kathy Barnette)实际上坚持认为，她比特朗普本人更有MAGA。即使在特朗普把他贬为 "自由主义的华尔街共和党人 "之后，麦考密克在另一个时代可能是建制派的选择，他把自己描述为一个 "美国第一 "的保守派，并承诺为特朗普的议程而战。麦考密克没有完全赞同特朗普关于2020年选举被盗的说法，但也没有反驳，他说 "各种选举违规行为基本上造成了共和党人，大多数共和党人不相信选举结果的局面。"

宾夕法尼亚州的比赛重演了俄亥俄州最近的参议院初选，该州另一个选举温和派共和党人的传统正在消失（其中包括乔治-沃伊诺维奇、约翰-卡西奇和即将退休的参议员罗布-波特曼）。共和党人不仅提名了万斯--作家和前风险资本家，他把自己重新塑造成一个MAGA式的民粹主义者和挑衅者--而且竞选中所有五位严肃的竞争者都表示，如果特朗普成为2024年共和党总统提名人，他们将支持他。

大卫-格雷厄姆 约翰-费特曼靠气场取胜


周二在北卡罗来纳州，特朗普和保守的增长俱乐部的双重支持，推动投票反对认证2020年选举结果的巴德取得了决定性的胜利。截至最新结果，巴德获得的票数是排名第二的候选人、前州长兼夏洛特市市长帕特-麦克罗里的两倍多，后者是一个更传统的、以商业为导向的共和党人，在他被指控对特朗普时代的党不够保守的情况下萎靡不振。巴德如果在11月获胜，将构成该州向右的重大转变，该州即将退休的共和党参议员理查德-伯尔在1月6日叛乱后的弹劾审判中投票给特朗普定罪。

与参议院选举相比，这种模式在州长选举中的表现更为复杂。虽然马斯特里亚诺赢得了宾夕法尼亚州，但爱达荷州州长布拉德-利特尔是一个坚定的保守派，他轻松地拒绝了来自他的更加保守的副州长珍妮丝-麦基钦的挑战，后者有特朗普的支持。本月早些时候，俄亥俄州州长迈克-德温(Mike DeWine)将自己定位在更接近共和党中心的位置，击败了三位保守派挑战者（但他获得的票数竟然不到一半）。在佐治亚州本周二的初选中，另一位坚定的保守派州长布莱恩-坎普(Brian Kemp)预计将战胜特朗普支持的挑战者、前参议员大卫-珀杜(David Perdue)。


中间派民主团体 "第三条道路"(Third Way)负责政策的执行副总裁吉姆-凯斯勒(Jim Kessler)表示，共和党选民 "对他们的州政府的愤怒程度不如对美国国会大厦的愤怒程度"。然而，今年对特朗普式候选人的整体倾斜仍然是明确无误的。

这种倾斜反映了布拉本德所指出的美国共和党联盟的根本转变。在一个早于特朗普的过程中，但自特朗普出现后，共和党越来越依赖未受过大学教育的、非城市的和宗教上保守的选民，其中许多人在民意调查中对人口和文化的变化表示焦虑，同时失去了受过大学教育的和更温和的选民的支持，特别是那些聚集在全国最大都市地区的人。

宾夕法尼亚州是这种变化的结晶。根据位于兰开斯特的富兰克林与马歇尔学院(Franklin & Marshall College)舆论研究中心主任伯伍德-约斯特(Berwood Yost)的计算，在20世纪90年代初，该州约三分之一的共和党初选票投在东南部的费城及其周边四个郊区县。但到了2018年，随着这些郊区的居民继续向民主党迁移，费城地区在该州共和党初选投票中的份额已降至略高于五分之一。


尤斯特发现，与此同时，宾夕法尼亚州西南部的匹兹堡周围的大部分蓝领县的共和党选票份额略有增加，而该州中部人口不太密集的县的份额增加得更多。截至周三早些时候的结果表明，这些模式在本次初选中基本保持不变，费城及其郊区再次贡献了略高于五分之一的共和党初选选票，西南地区略低于五分之一，其余则是内陆县。

根据尤斯特提供给我的全州范围的富兰克林与马歇尔民意调查，从2000年到2022年，宾夕法尼亚州注册的共和党人中，大学毕业生的比例略有下降（即使在民主党人中，大学毕业生的比例几乎翻了一番，在独立人士中也增加了近1/3）。认定为温和派或自由派的共和党人的比例下降了约一半，支持更严厉的枪支管制措施或认为堕胎在任何情况下都应该合法的人的比例也下降了；拥有枪支的共和党人的比例则飙升。"我们都听说过沿着[一个]宗教和文化轴线的重新组合，但在这个州，很明显这就是发生的事情，"约斯特说。"我认为这反映了整个国家的情况。"

事实上，在俄亥俄州2006年的共和党参议院初选中，当时的参议员德温击败了两名保守派候选人，该州人口最多的三个县--富兰克林、凯霍加和汉密尔顿，占初选总票数的22%。今年，他们的份额下降到了18%左右，共和党的选票在受工业衰退打击的东北部蓝领县以及阿克伦和托莱多等经济紧张的小城市有所增加。在北卡罗来纳州，根据位于索尔兹伯里的卡托巴学院政治科学系主任迈克尔-比泽与我分享的计算结果，美国共和党的初选选票同样不再依赖该州的大人口中心和夏洛特和罗利周围的内郊，而是更加依赖遥远的郊区、外郊和农村地区。


这对美国共和党的未来方向意味着什么？对于那些抵制特朗普的共和党候选人中的一小部分人，或者甚至那些想支持特朗普的大方向而不向他屈膝的人来说，面临的挑战是，这些变化已经缩小了任何替代路径的受众。由于对特朗普主义感到不安的选民--主要是大都市地区受过高等教育的郊区居民--已经远离了该党，留下的核心成员更容易接受特朗普式的论点。美国共和党初选产生的特朗普式候选人越多，中右翼选民就越不可能在这种选举中投票。

这使得那些希望看到该党摆脱特朗普主义的保守派和共和党人在短期内希望渺茫。"曾几何时，我以为你可以把他赶走，拯救这个党，"反特朗普共和党问责项目的创始人萨拉-朗威尔周一在推特上说。"但看看这些共和党初选--更不用说过去的18个月--很明显，特朗普已经在整个党内转移了。而这是无法挽救的。"

虽然特朗普主义的胜利目前在美国共和党内似乎是确定的，但不太清楚的是它是否是赢得大选的可靠公式。由于多达四分之三的成年人对国家的发展方向表示不满，共和党人极有可能在11月的中期选举中取得胜利，而该党的赢家不可避免地会包括一些特朗普模式的候选人。但民主党人乐观地认为--一些共和党人也很警惕--共和党提名的候选人，如马斯特里亚诺，以及如果他获胜的话，奥兹将被证明过于极端或有缺陷，即使在这种环境下也无法获胜。


"匹兹堡的民主党顾问迈克-米库斯(Mike Mikus)说："民主党人也许能够渡过难关，可以说是翻转参议院席位。"认为你能在这种政治环境下翻转参议院席位--这令人难以置信，因为如果[共和党人]只是坚持使用正常的候选人，我们就不可能赢得这场比赛。"

布拉本德反驳说，在选民如此不满意的时刻，对几乎所有的共和党人打折扣是错误的。"人们将了解到，环境将比候选人更占优势，"他预测说。

至少，11月似乎不太可能产生对特朗普式候选人的广泛排斥，而克里斯托尔等批评家认为这是任何共和党路线修正的先决条件。如果选民在11月没有果断地拒绝特朗普主义，那么共和党在2024年再次拥抱特朗普主义的可能性就会增加，要么是特朗普本人，要么是另一位接受其议程的候选人，比如佛罗里达州长罗恩-德桑蒂斯。

这种可能性不仅对两党之间的竞争有巨大影响，而且对美国民主也有巨大影响。迄今为止，共和党初选选民已经提名了多名候选人，他们对特朗普关于2020年选举舞弊的某种说法表示赞同，承诺增加投票难度，并且像马斯特里亚诺那样发出信号，表示他们可能寻求推翻民主党的任何总统选举胜利。特朗普主义对共和党的控制的真正代价可能是在2024年出现全面的宪法危机。

罗纳德-布朗斯坦是《大西洋》杂志的高级编辑，也是美国有线电视新闻网的高级政治分析员。