Ezra Klein has a great piece up over at VOX:
The Republican Party doesn’t want to believe its voters agree with Trump. But they do.
The Republican Party wants to believe that Trump’s success is only because of his star power but it’s not. A majority of the Republican base agree with his position on issues as vague as they may be. The Republican contenders for the Presidential election not named Trump all have their strings pulled by the wealthy 1%. That wealthy 1% don’t want to end immigration because it reduces labor costs. But no where is this divergence more obvious than in opinions about Social Security and Medicare.
The broader issue here is that both parties are, at best, imperfect reflections of their bases. There are, for instance, pro-life Democratic voters — but you wouldn’t know it watching congressional Democrats legislate. Similarly, there are Republicans who believe in taxing the rich and spending much more on programs for the poor, but those beliefs aren’t reflected by the day-to-day actions of their elected representatives.
The gap between the rigid agendas followed by the party establishments and the more diverse opinions of loyal partisans leaves both parties vulnerable to a candidate like Trump who has the money, and the star power, to campaign on a platform that party elites would normally suppress.
Take spending cuts. It’s table stakes in a Republican primary to talk about how you’ll cut spending on Social Security and Medicare. The GOP’s policy apparatus loathes both programs and considers their long-term cost to be among the most pressing economic threats facing the nation. Any Republican candidate who wants to be taken seriously by Republican Party elites needs to show they understand the urgency of cutting Social Security and Medicare spending.
One problem? Republican voters don’t understand the urgency of cutting entitlement spending. In fact, they oppose cutting entitlement spending. More Republicans want to increase spending on Social Security and Medicare than decrease it. They think keeping entitlement benefits at current levels is more important than reducing the deficit.
That’s right, the vast majority of the Republican base want to keep Social Security and Medicare the same or even increase spending on those programs while the leaders of the party have been trying to kill Social Security for 80 years and Medicare for over 50 years. Trump says he agrees with them.
As Paul Krugman points out the Republican elite apparently learned nothing from George W Bush’s aborted attempt to do away with Social Security as we know it in 2005. The Republican candidates not named Trump are are playing political suicide by getting too close to the third rail of American politics.
What this means, in turn, is that the eventual Republican nominee — assuming that it’s not Mr. Trump —will be committed not just to a renewed attack on Social Security but to a broader plutocratic agenda. Whatever the rhetoric, the GOP is on track to nominate someone who has won over the big money by promising government by the 1 percent, for the 1 percent.
Now when I retired the age for full benefits had already been increased from 65 to 66. It’s soon to rise to 67. Like the top 1% I was primarily a desk jockey most of my life although I never had a corner office. For those he did hard manual labor this is a real hardship and these people make up a good chunk of the Republican base. Those are the people Trump is speaking to and while many of them are religious conservatives they really don’t care that Trump is probably a a heathen because he is still talking about their hopes and fears.