The looming battle over tax hikes to fund President Joe Biden’s economic recovery bills threatens to undermine the Republican Party’s nascent, post-Trump effort to rebrand itself as the party of the working class, CNBC reported.
Over the past decade, the share of Americans with only a high school education who identified as Republicans has risen by more than 10 points, from 34% to 45%, according to NBC News/Wall Street Journal polling.
Many of these voters were initially drawn to the GOP over cultural issues, not financial ones. But Trump injected economic populism into the party platform. In the 2020 election, despite losing the presidency, he won noncollege white men by 42 percentage points, and noncollege white women by 27 points.
Over the past year, Republicans also joined Democrats in voting for massive Covid relief bills that strengthened the social safety net with cash payments and enhanced unemployment benefits — two things that Republicans rarely vote for.
Since Biden took office in January, several GOP senators have released new policy plans that boost the incomes of working families, and that defy traditional, laissez-faire conservative economics.
GOP Sens. Marco Rubio of Florida and Mike Lee of Utah proposed raising the child tax credit in Biden’s coronavirus relief bill even higher than Democrats had initially set it.
Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah has released a plan to provide a monthly cash benefit of $350 to families for each child under 6, and $250 a month for children 6-17 years old.
And Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, a staunch Trump supporter, announced legislation to give a tax credit to anyone making less than the mean hourly wage of $16.50, in the form of a quarterly check from the IRS.
“Before Trump, the GOP plan was to be hands off on the economy,” said Henry Olsen, a senior fellow at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center. “But Trump’s victories, and the fact that he mobilized large-scale support and grew the blue-collar vote for Republicans, changed all that.”
In the House, Rep. Jim Banks of Indiana , leader of the conservative Republican Study Committee, wrote a memo last month arguing that the only way for the Republican Party to win control of Congress was by “enthusiastically rebranding and reorienting as the Party of the Working Class.”
“For too long, the Republican Party fed into the narrative and the perception that the Republican Party was the party of big business or the party of Wall Street,” wrote Banks.
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