Analysis: Republicans try to square pro-worker rhetoric with anti-union policies

MILWAUKEE - The unity around Donald Trump’s candidacy is on full display at the Republican National Convention here this week, most evident in the emotional moment late Monday night when the former president came to the convention floor for the first time since the attempt on his life and received thunderous applause.

Along with that unity, however, are tension, division and contradiction over the direction of the party that Trump has remade over the past eight years. Are Republicans the party of big corporations? Of small businesses? Of union and working-class voters? In some ways, the answer to all three is yes, and because of that, despite all of Trump’s influence, Republicans are still a party in transition, their identity not entirely fixed.

Republicans continue to struggle to reconcile appeals for votes and voter groups that have not traditionally supported them with the policies that Trump and other GOP elected officials espouse - big tax cuts for wealthy Americans being one example. Are they for the little guy or the billionaire class, for policies to promote unions or to curtail union power, for workers or chief executives?

Two events Monday highlighted these tensions. The first was the selection of Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio as Trump’s running mate. Vance has morphed over the past eight years from a sharp Trump critic to one of the leading enthusiasts of the Make America Great Again movement.

Once he was celebrated as a translator for liberal elites puzzled and alarmed by Trump’s victory in 2016. Through his best-selling book, “Hillbilly Elegy,” Vance helped explain why so many working-class voters sided with Trump in that election. Now he has become one of the leading voices for Trump’s populist, “America First” message, one that is antiglobalist and pro-tariff, with explicit appeals to working-class Americans.

Vance is polarizing in ways that two other vice-presidential finalists, North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum and Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.), would not have been. He is not a running mate picked to appeal to swing voters. His selection has been interpreted by some analysts as evidence that Trump is confident he will defeat President Biden in November.

Vance’s Midwestern working-class roots might be seen as an asset in Trump’s efforts to win Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. But the results of his 2022 Senate race, when he ran far behind other Ohio Republicans, provide no such evidence.

[Where JD Vance stands on key issues: Abortion, guns, Ukraine and more]

New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, who has known Vance for many years, made this observation after the selection was announced Monday. In a roundtable with other Times columnists, he said, “It sends an unusually clear policy signal about Trump’s second term - indicating that on at least a subset of issues, from trade and tariffs and immigration to foreign policy, he (Trump) intends to govern in a more focused and intentional way than he ever did in his first term, as a populist in full.”

The second example of the contradictions within the party was the final speech of Monday’s prime-time program, delivered by Sean O’Brien, the general president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. O’Brien’s speech was the longest of the evening by far and was set in a time slot often reserved for a convention keynoter.

O’Brien said he was the first Teamsters president to speak to a Republican convention, and he praised Trump for the invitation. He described Trump in flattering terms, as a “tough S.O.B.” after surviving Saturday’s assassination attempt.

But the speech stopped short of an endorsement of Trump’s candidacy. Instead, O’Brien used his platform for his own purposes, to deliver a full-throated bashing of big corporations in language rarely, if ever, heard at a Republican convention.

For many Republicans, either on the convention floor or watching from afar, O’Brien’s rhetorical punches must have been jarring and disconcerting. But for some, the focus on working-class priorities may have struck a chord.

“Never forget, American workers own this nation,” he said. “We are not renters. We are not tenants, but the corporate elite treat us like squatters, and that is a crime. We have got to fix it.”

At another point, he said: “For a century, major employers have waged a war against labor by forming corporate unions of their own. We need to call the Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtables what they are. They are unions for big business.”

O’Brien outlined policies that few Republicans in Congress support, and in calling for “corporate welfare reform,” he sounded more like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) than Trump or almost anyone else in the GOP. He took his opportunity to reach a different audience, perhaps to tell Democrats not to take union votes for granted. He also might have given more union workers a green light to think about supporting Trump in November.

That’s much of what this is about: votes. Trump wants to expand his vote share among working people - and if that broadens the Republican coalition in the long run, so much the better.

The shift of White, working-class voters began many years ago. Republican President Ronald Reagan’s appeal to those voters spawned the term “Reagan Democrats.” Today, these voters are as much or more a part of the Republican coalition than the Democratic coalition, despite the rhetoric of Democratic elected officials about being the party of working families.

Trump’s opposition to free-trade agreements and his harsh anti-immigration language and policies have found an audience among those voters. His rhetorical attacks on elites, whether political or cultural, have also won him support in those communities.

In 2020, among White men without college degrees, Trump won 72% of the vote, according to exit polls. Among White women without college degrees, he won 63%. He won 64% of White men without college degrees in Michigan, 72% in Pennsylvania and 65% in Wisconsin. Among White women without degrees, his percentages in those three states were 56, 61 and 52, respectively.

In 2016, running against Democrat Hillary Clinton, Trump won 42% of the votes in union households, and those households made up 18% of the electorate. In 2020, with Biden as his opponent, his percentage slipped to 40%, and union households accounted for 20% of the electorate.

No modern president has been as pro-union as Biden. He met last week with leaders at the AFL-CIO as he sought to fend off calls for him to leave the race after his poor debate performance.

Biden’s policies more closely align with those of union workers than do Trump’s. He has said that one reason he has sided so clearly with organized labor, walking a United Auto Workers picket line as one example, is his recognition of the inroads Republicans have made with these voters and the imperative to reverse them.

Whether Trump’s appeals to working-class and union voters will change more of his policies is an open question. The newly adopted Republican Party platform doesn’t answer that question, even though it was written by Trump’s allies.

The platform states that “our politicians sold our jobs and livelihoods to the highest bidders overseas with unfair Trade Deals and a blind faith in the siren song of globalism.” It calls on the GOP to “return to its roots as the Party of Industry, Manufacturing, Infrastructure, and Workers.”

The platform also calls for “large tax cuts for workers,” without much specificity. But Trump has also told wealthy donors they should contribute to his campaign to protect the tax cuts benefiting them that he signed when he was president and that are due to expire in the near future.

Convention rhetoric is worth little in the long run. What matters more is what a reelected Trump would do from the Oval Office. The selection of Vance points in one direction, but the makeover of the Republican Party remains a work in progress.