In 2012, the GOP nominated Mitt Romney; four years later, it nominated Donald Trump. In an interesting conversation with Ezra Klein in today’s NYT, Ben Shapiro says the dramatic change in tone was due to Obama’s divisive behavior during and after the 2012 election. Is he right?
The argument has some surface plausibility, but I don’t agree with it, for three reasons. First, Obama’s 2012 campaign, which focused on Romney’s support for billionaires against workers, was consistent with Democratic campaigns practically since the beginning of time. Second, Obama did very little that was unusually divisive by anyone’s standards during his second term; most of the actions and events that would have riled the right occurred before the 2012 election. Finally, Romney won in 2012 because he outflanked his opponents to the right on the hot button immigration issue and because his principal opponents were both reactionaries: the social conservative Rick Santorum (think Ted Cruz in 2016 here) and the more secular Trump prequel Newt Gingrich. Trump, on the other hand, ran in an open lane against a group of PBPs and CDs in 2016. His victory was due more to the failure of his opponents to unite against him than to a fundamental change in the GOP electorate.