Legendary House Speaker Tip O’Neill famously said, “All politics is local.” Scott Walker’s political career was shaped by the most politically polarized piece of geography in America. Southeast Wisconsin — Milwaukee and its environs — is a place where everyone’s mind is made up, nobody’s vote is up for grabs, and neighborhoods are politically segregated — a place where Republicans and Democrats don’t live next door to each other. Walker once joked that Wisconsin has only five or six swing voters. In other words, he’s a creature of polarization, and its purest practitioner in either party.
Jamelle Bouie of Slate argues the GOP has two possible paths to national power. One path, he writes, is to move their policies farther toward middle and low income Americans to make inroads in communities which don’t normally vote Republican, for example by winning over more Latino voters. They don’t have to win these places, just improve their showing by a few percent. The other path is to double down, run polarizing campaigns, and try to “run the table” with their mostly white, rural and suburban base. You can read his detailed analysis here.
Walker was the candidate of the second path. “If any candidate could run a rigid campaign of polarization—aimed at winning as many white voters as possible—it’s Walker,” Bouie opined. Walker offered the GOP “the chance to win without broadening [their] base or changing [their] priorities.” For the party’s hardcore ideologues, that should have been an irresistible temptation.
For whatever reason, it didn’t work. In the end, Walker was supported by less than 1% of Iowa’s Republican voters, albeit in a crowded field. This may be partly due to his lackluster debate performances, or other personal shortcomings, such as an inability to connect with voters on a personal level. Practically speaking, he was forced out of the race because money dried up, but that’s a symptom, not a cause, of a failing campaign. But at a deeper level, his campaign may have failed because his brand of politics is not what his party’s voters are looking for.
It’s true there’s widespread dissatisfaction within the ranks of both parties with America’s dysfunctional politics. More Americans have become fiercely partisan than perhaps at any time since the Civil War, yet hardly anyone likes the polarized state of American politics, and voters of all stripes are frustrated by the inability of opposing politicians to work together and get things done. At the same time, it is the unyielding partisanship of voters that makes it impossible for them to do so.
But there may be a crack in the GOP’s ideological partisanship. If you look closely, you’ll see that the GOP’s current frontrunner, Donald Trump, deviates from Republican orthodoxy on many issues. He, at least in policy terms, represents the first path more than any other GOP candidate — although that’s obscured by his self-destructive jibes against the people — women, and racial and religious minorities — that first-path Republicans need to reach.
Trump’s early success, and Walker’s precipitate fall, should serve as a warning to the remaining GOP candidates that only one door is open to them and their party. They may not see it, or fail to go through it, in which case their party will lose the 2016 election.