US economy

The Political Power of the Trump Economy


Prospects for the midterms (and 2020) may well turn on how swing voters feel about their lives, not how they feel about the president.

By Christopher Buskirk

Mr. Buskirk is editor and publisher of the journal American Greatness and a contributing opinion writer.

President Trump addressed steel workers in Granite City, Ill. last month.CreditJ.B. Forbes/St. Louis Post-Dispatch, via Associated Press

Rather than phasing out tellers, banks are giving them raises, according to a report published Monday by Bloomberg. Earlier this year, JP Morgan Chase raised wages to between $15-$18 per hour for 22,000 hourly workers. It wasn’t alone. Companies like Apple, Boeing and Comcast handed out bonuses and other perks. Such is the power of the Trump economy.

Unemployment is low. The economy grew at 4.1 percent in the second quarter. Real wages have yet to catch up, but in general things are humming along nicely. That’s usually good news for the party in power, but will it be enough for Republicans in this year’s midterms?

Henry Olsen, the author of “Working Class Republican: Ronald Reagan and the Return of Blue-Collar Conservatism,” talks about a decisive subset of swing voters who are driven not so much by ideology but by jobs and economic security. As a candidate, Donald Trump appealed to them in a way that no Republican had done since Ronald Reagan won working-class Democrats in Macomb County, Mich. These are the “Reagan Democrats” who helped him win two terms in office.

The midterms will be, in part, a battle for these voters. The strength of the Trump economy on one hand and of the democratic socialist clarion call on the other sets up an interesting choice for Democrats. The party has yet to decide on a single, unifying platform like the Contract with America that Republicans won with in the 1994 wave election. Will Democrats emphasize the politics of personal destruction and make every local election a referendum on Trump or offer a competing policy agenda the way Republicans did 24 years ago?

These choices help explain why, believe it or not, Bernie Sanders is one of my favorite Democrats. I think of him as the political umami of the American left — even if he sometimes gives off an overbearing flavor. And though I believe his policies would impoverish the country, he and his followers get credit for seeming to understand that the bipartisan ruling class is playing the game for its own benefit. George Orwell, himself a democratic socialist, neatly described the political dilemma faced by the Sanders crowd: “The inability of mankind to imagine happiness except in the form of relief, either from effort or pain, presents Socialists with a serious problem.”

Republicans have a similar problem to the one Democrats face. How do they re-energize the wages-and-jobs voters who came out for Trump in 2016? Whoever figures out how to persuade them that they have a secure economic future is likely to have a good night.

This article is part of the Opinion Today newsletter. David Leonhardt, the newsletter’s author, is on a break until Aug. 27. While he’s gone, several outside writers are taking his place. This week’s authors is Chris Buskirk, a contributing Op-Ed writer for The Times and the editor of American Greatness, a conservative publication. You can sign up here to receive the newsletter each weekday.

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