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The South Didn’t Rise Again (For The President), But a Post-Trump Conversation Already Has

This article is more than 4 years old.

Here’s a pop quiz for you.

Choose which of these two performers had a worse weekend in the Deep South: Tua Tagovailoa, the University of Alabama’s star quarterback, whose season (and possibly his college career) came to an abrupt end on this play; or President Trump, the Republicans’ quarterback, who was unceremoniously sacked in Louisiana’s gubernatorial race as he tried to push a GOP challenger across the goal line.

It’s a trick question, actually, as the long-term damage to both individuals remains in question.

With time and rehab, Tua may one day play in the National Football League; for Trump, it’s still a long way to the first Tuesday in November of next year.

About Trump’s setback, the second time this month he’s interjected himself in a governor’s race in deep-red Dixie, only to see his candidate lose.

Is such failure, on the part of a Trump acolyte and despite the President’s very public urging to vote accordingly, a sign that this presidency is living on borrowed time?

Of course not.

Consider what happened in New Jersey during the previous presidency.

In 2009, a year after Barack Obama’s landslide win (in the process, pulling down 57.1% of New Jersey’s vote), the Garden State tossed aside a sitting Democratic governor in favor of Republican Chris Christie.

In 2013, a year after Obama’s re-election (58.4% support in New Jersey this time), Christie likewise cruised to a second term with 60.3% of the vote in his contest.

One can go back to a similar occurrence a decade earlier. Democrat Kathleen Blanco was the winner in Louisiana’s 2003 gubernatorial contest. The following year, George W. Bush received nearly 57% of the vote in the Bayou State.

Of course, this isn’t very compelling political spin. While Trump lost in Kentucky and Louisiana, those two states haven’t gone Democratic since Bill Clinton’s re-election in 1996. Trump carried both by 20 points or more in 2016; both are certain to go his way in 2020.

It’s the failure of Trump to swing Louisiana’s election his way – he visited the Bayou State three times in support of Republican hopeful Eddie Rispone – that has me asking this question: what comes after Trumpism?

One of the takeaways of the Kentucky race was personality contributing to the Kentucky governor’s defeat as much any one policy choice (one such example: a reporter asking Bevin, “Governor, do you think you rub people the wrong way?” To which Bevin replied, “I think it happens on a regular basis. It’s called the truth.”)

But in Louisiana, personality wasn’t a decider. Rispone ran as a “conservative, outsider, businessman” (sound familiar?). And yet on the day of the election’s runoff vote, despite Trump repeatedly in the state and thus dominating news coverage, enthusiasm shifted the other way. In this year’s Louisiana contest, the runoff turnout across the  state was about 12% higher than the Oct. 12 primary – the spike mostly a result of a huge increase on the Democratic side.

And that raises this question: if the not-Trump-but-Trump-like messenger can prove to be a problem, what about the message itself?

Do Republicans need to be thinking in terms – brace yourself – “kinder, gentler.” Or, to borrow an adjective from the other Bush: something a little more “compassionate.”

Earlier this month, in a speech at Catholic University, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio fired a warning shot across the conservative bow – claiming the right is too apt to defend businesses and shareholders’ rights to make a buck, while neglecting workers’ rights to likewise share in gains (Rubio also chastised the left, by saying liberals do just the opposite – they’re too obsessed with championing workers’ rights and too quick to punish businesses).

Rubio’s theme – “Catholic Social Doctrine and the Dignity of Work” – posits that America possesses “an economy and a society that no one is happy with” – a discontent that’s curable if businesses deploy “profits productively for the benefit of the workers and the society that made it possible.”  

If Rubio’s goal was to get noticed, then he succeeded.

If the goal was the draw the wrath of the right, then he over-overachieved.

According to The National Review, “If Senator Rubio cares about the common good, then he can butt out right now while the people who produce the goods and innovation that bring with them such ancillary benefits as jobs and tax payments do what they do.”

Another TNR column notes, [T]he former Tea Partier now blames capitalism for stifling innovation, undermining religious institutions, stripping workers of their dignity, corroding good will among men, and driving childlessness, hopelessness and suicides.”

Rubio’s speech isn’t so much a last stand as it is an early marker – his starting point for the 2024 election. Keep in mind (this disregards the remote possibility that Trump loses next year, then runs a third time four years later): regardless of next November’s outcome, Republicans will be shopping for a new presidential nominee in 2024. And with that: an intellectual sequel to Trump-brand conservatism and populism.

That Rubio would deliver such a speech in the first week of November 2019 – a full year before Election Night, when the next group of presidential hopefuls will be vying for air time even as the results are pouring in – suggests that the post-Trump conversation’s already begun.

That Rubio’s remarks would draw a mixed response also suggests: it won’t be a gentle transition.

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