Conventional wisdom has held that the populist resentment that fueled the political ascendency of Donald Trump is evidence that the political right in America has grown more extreme, more reactionary, and more radicalized. Progressives have used this narrative to double down on identitarian politics, and the political right has used it to justify new types of political tactics and nationalist policy proposals.
Conventional wisdom among elites has had a patchy record over the past 15 years, and the radical-GOP-voter narrative is yet another example of how it has gone awry. Political scientist George Hawley’s book, The Moderate Majority: Real GOP Voters and the Myth of Mass Republican Radicalization, is the most comprehensive account to date showing how Republican voters are more mainstream than radical, more ordinary than extreme. At the outset, Hawley writes “claims about Republican extremism have been overstated” and that the “notion that the Republican Party in the electorate is dominated by crazed radicals has little empirical backing.” Instead, he aims “to provide a sober analysis of Republican voters, noting their demographic traits, geographic distribution, policy preferences, religious identities, ideological constraints, and cultural attitudes.”
Hawley’s “sober analysis” is a welcome corrective to the fixation that left-wing critics and right-wing influencers alike have on the oddballs within the Republican party. He acknowledges that white supremacists and conspiracy theorists exist within the GOP, but also demonstrates empirically “that these groups are a small minority within the party.” By overstating the influence of nutjobs on the right, progressives have pushed Democrats too far to the left in a gross act of overcorrection, and Republicans have adopted clownish ideas and tactics in an attempt to appeal to a “base” that is much fringier than actual rank-and-file Republicans.
Republican voters, Hawley shows, have been consistent over time on policy issues. For instance, they care less about cutting government spending than Democrats do, but not by the margins common in higher-order Republican discourse, and they have long been more economically moderate than the more libertarian-minded leadership within the conservative movement. Republican voters have also had a patchwork of foreign policy views with no clearly identifiable common theme. Republicans have changed over time by becoming more conservative, as they understand the term, which also changes. In other words, how rank-and-file Republicans understand “conservatism” is a moving target, but a greater share of them now, compared to a generation ago, say they are conservative.
This coheres with polling by YouGov and others after the Tea Party election of 2010, which found Republican voters much more supportive of cutting discretionary federal spending than entitlements, even though entitlements were the key driver of deficit spending. Like good conservatives, they believed in a smaller government—so long as it didn’t come at the expense of their Social Security and Medicare benefits. News reports in the Tea Party era portrayed the average Republican voter as more extreme than in the past, when in fact their views were both consistent with Republican principles on spending and with mainstream American views on social welfare.
There are many useful takeaways from Hawley’s book for anyone who has spent too much time marinating in the conventional wisdom of the radicalized Republican voter, but two are especially worth highlighting.
Hawley’s “sober analysis” is a welcome corrective to the fixation that left-wing critics and right-wing influencers alike have on the oddballs within the Republican party.
The first is the role and importance of cultural issues in how ordinary Republicans see the world. The gap between Republicans and Democrats, Hawley shows, is wider on cultural attitudes than on views on economic policy. There is nothing surprising in his findings on the differences between the two camps on issues related to same-sex marriage, LGBT issues, and feminism, for example, including that Republicans have grown more comfortable with same-sex marriage over the past twenty years. The more salient point in the data is the consistent, long-standing distrust of government, and increasingly, of mainstream media among Republican voters. The anger that political commentators observe among Republican voters seems to be rooted more in their reaction to elite, institutional bias against their values than outright hostility to specific hot-button cultural issues that commentators tend to focus on.
Trumpism has always been more of an anti-elitist cultural than economic phenomenon. My former American Enterprise Institute colleagues and I found little support in large national surveys during and after Trump’s first presidential term for the idea that Trump’s voters supported economic populist policy ideas. In fact, working-class Trump voters were less interested in such ideas than those with college degrees and were more optimistic about their future. They cared about what most Americans care about: living in a country where their kids could own a company or achieve whatever else they set their minds to. What united Trump voters, rather, was a strong anti-elitist, anti-leftist sentiment, which expressed itself more intensely the higher a Trump voter’s level of education and income.
Republican voters are still committed to lower taxes, Hawley shows, but not for the wealthy as is often assumed. They want the federal government to spend less on welfare, but they do not support cuts on public safety and infrastructure. This consistent moderation gets overlooked by partisan bias. Progressives see support for reduced spending as evidence of Republican voters’ heartlessness. Nationalists and the MAGA right see their lack of support for tax breaks for the wealthy as evidence of support for redistributionist policies. The reality, it seems, is that average Republican voters still think high taxes are bad for everyone except the super-rich and that welfare spending on able-bodied people is bad. They are, as Hawley’s title suggests, much more part of a “moderate majority” than anything radical or extreme.
An important takeaway from Hawley’s book in the current political landscape in America is that the new face of the GOP, as has been popularized in recent years as socially conservative and economically liberal, may not describe as much of the electorate as its adherents claim. The anti-elitism of Republican voters is strong, but their concerns about the economy are pretty mainstream: they want inflation lower, and the economy more vibrant. Immigration ranks high, too, but that has been as much an issue of elite failure than an economic issue. And Hawley points out that hot-button culture war issues, such as gender identity, did not animate Republican voters as much as one would expect given the constant media attention to them. The bottom line is that moderation marks conservative voters on both cultural and economic issues in ways that the more online, publicly visible voices of the New Right and MAGA Republicanism acknowledge.
A second important lesson from Hawley’s book is that Republican voters, contrary to conventional wisdom, are happier and more optimistic about their upward mobility prospects than liberal voters. Over four decades, there has never been a year in the General Social Survey in which Democrats have been happier than Republicans. Even the last time Democrats simultaneously controlled the White House and both houses of Congress, Republicans were happier than Democrats overall. When asked during the pandemic whether it is harder than in the past to improve one’s economic status, 47 percent of Republicans said yes compared to 73 percent of Democrats. These data track with other survey findings that conservatives are more likely than liberals to believe that hard work pays off and that agency and responsibility are essential to upward mobility.
Arthur Brooks discovered years ago that the “happiness gap between conservatives and liberals is, in fact, astonishingly large and enduring, and it doesn’t have anything to do with who is winning elections.” In his best-selling Gross National Happiness, Brooks wrote that until he studied the data for himself, like any good social scientist, he bought into the common narrative among academics and elites that conservatives are an unhappy lot compared to liberals. It turns out that conservatives’ views and practices related to religion, family, and individual effort combine to boost their assessment of their lives, Brooks writes, in ways that liberals lose out on. There has been plenty of research between Brooks’ and Hawley’s work to corroborate the claim that drivers of human happiness tend to correlate better with conservatives’ values and principles. By ignoring the data and running with unproven narratives about conservative anger and angst, progressives consistently miss the motivation behind conservative voter behavior, and the overly online political class on the right assumes there is more pent-up demand for what they are selling than actually exists.
Caricatures of Republican voters have led to policy ideas and political tactics that most Americans do not like, which is why a book like Hawley’s provides such a valuable service. We could use a little more sobriety in our politics, so let’s hope as the next political cycle ramps up that more people in the political class and media give Hawley’s “sober analysis” a read.