Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore (Flickr CC)
After talking with an old Lee Dreyfus Republican (Dreyfus was the moderate Wisconsin Republican governor elected in 1978) who is trying to save his beloved party, he expressed concerns about a little talked about GOP issue. We hear a lot about the fact that Republicans are losing their future voters, but not only did the Republicans lose the popular vote in 2018 by a near record amount, it appears that it is only going to get worse.
Candid Republicans will freely admit that they are losing young voters, minority voters, urban voters and, now, educated suburban white women voters; but, overall, they are also losing educated voters of all kinds. Well-educated individuals and professionals are definitely voting more heavily Democrat. In the last election, Republicans won the non-college educated men by two to one and non-college educated women by 14 points, but they only won college-educated men by just four points and lost college-educated women by 20 points.
The Republicans have also been winning elections with the help of various legal—though dubious—policies such as voter ID, limiting early voting hours and gerrymandering, but the smart Republicans understand that these tricks are not a viable long-term strategy.
The Republicans are currently winning big with uneducated, often rural white voters, especially white males. Trump is clear about this. He has told his crowds, “I loved uneducated people” and got a roaring applause for that line. It was the uneducated, “forgotten Americans” who gave Trump his electoral college victory two years ago. With the help of biased, right-wing media like Fox News, the National Enquirer and extremist “nationalist” websites, he continues to keep their loyalty despite pushing policies that benefit the very wealthy and the big corporations at their expense. The uneducated citizens are hurting and gravitating toward the simplistic answers, and the Republicans are there to provide them.
So, we are beginning to see the choices for voters becoming clearer. On the one hand, you can vote Republican and have a president—and unfortunately a Republican Congress afraid to challenge their Republican president—who is trying to make America more of a blue-collar country where education is not highly valued. They want to bring back industries like coal instead of seizing the opportunity to develop more non-polluting alternative energy sources that actually creates many more jobs at higher salaries. In Wisconsin, outgoing Gov. Scott Walker and other Republicans have been limiting the amount of money going into all levels of education, viewing teachers and their unions as the enemy, denying science, including human-made climate change, and supporting various deregulatory policies that are destroying our environment.
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On the other hand, you can vote for Democrats who want to invest in education, raise taxes primarily on the wealthy and big corporations to pay for increased education spending, support carefully-thought-out regulations on business that protects workers’ safety and the environment.
So, the wise Republicans are concerned about their party’s short-term choices and long-term disastrous outcomes. They understand that if you want a strong growing economy going forward, you must invest more heavily in education and high-skilled training because the robots will replace many basic or moderately complex jobs—or these jobs will continue to move to low-wage nations. They also understand that unless they continue their policy of cutting taxes on the wealthy and cutting regulations on business, they won’t get the hundreds of millions of dollars from the special interest groups like the Koch Brothers to fund their campaigns.
If they support policies that are good for America, the U.S. economy and our citizens, it means that more money must be allocated for education with a fair taxation system to pay for it. However, as more people become better educated and develop strong critical thinking skills, understand science and have a broader understanding of the world, they tend to vote less for Republicans and more for Democrats. This is a serious internal contradiction that could eventually cause the Republican Party to implode. Once again, the Republicans have the arc of history working against them.
