Since the 1960s, the voter base of the Republican Party has been made up primarily of older, suburban, white, middle-class, small businesspeople, professionals, and managers, and a minority of older white workers. Until recently, the particular passions of that base — especially its hostility to the democratic gains of people of color, women, and LGBT people — could be contained. Minor concessions to social conservatives on abortion, affirmative action, voter restrictions, and same-sex marriage/legal equality maintained their loyalty, while capitalists set the substantive neoliberal agenda for the Republicans. As with the Democrats, the non-capitalist elements of the Republican coalition were clearly junior partners to capital.
The Bush and Obama administrations’ bailouts of banks, the auto industry, and some homeowners changed this dynamic, catalyzing a radicalization of the Republican electorate. The Tea Party began as an alliance between a grassroots rebellion of older, white, suburban small businesspeople, professionals, and managers, and elements of the capitalist class. While the middle-class ranks of the Tea Party railed against “corporate welfare” and “bailouts for undeserving homeowners,” in particular people of color who held subprime mortgages, capitalists like the Koch brothers saw an opportunity to advance their libertarian agenda of defeating Obamacare and privatizing Medicare and Social Security. Broader layers of the capitalist class encouraged the Tea Party’s mobilizations as long as they targeted unions and social services, and supported the continued deregulation of capital. [...]
The two most important “business lobbying” organizations — the US Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable — oppose wholesale deportations and other policies that reduce the size of the immigrant workforce. Instead, they are leading the fight for an immigration reform that would create massive “guest worker” programs and a difficult “path to citizenship” for those in the United States without papers. [...]
What made Trump unacceptable to the Republican establishment and their corporate backers was not merely his unabashed racism and misogyny, or his casual references to his penis size. Trump champions an economic nationalism that rejects central tenets of the bipartisan neoliberal agenda that has impoverished segments of the middle and working classes. Capital was uneasy with Trump’s stance on immigration and the federal debt — he floated the idea of trying to persuade creditors to accept less than full payment on loans to the US government. [...]
Trump’s nomination sent the majority of the capitalist class, including traditionally Republican capitalists, running to support the reliable neoliberal imperialist, Hillary Clinton. According to OpenSecrets.org, Clinton received over 92 percent of corporate contributions in the 2016 election cycle, including over 80 percent of the contributions from finance, insurance, and real estate; communications/electronics; health care, defense, and “miscellaneous business.” Trump’s support was limited to 60–70 percent of contributions from construction, energy and natural resources, transportation, and agribusiness — which together accounted for less than 10 percent of total capitalist donations. [...]
Trump’s margin of victory came from a small minority of voters who had supported Obama in 2008 and 2012. Of 700 counties that had voted for Obama twice, nearly one-third (209) swung to Trump; and of 207 counties that Obama won once, almost 94 percent (194) went to Trump. The shift to Trump was concentrated in traditionally Democratic states of the Great Lakes and Midwest that had suffered the loss of manufacturing jobs and were experiencing a rise in the Latino population. However, Trump’s victory was primarily a result of a sharp drop in the participation of traditionally Democratic voters, rather than a sharp swing to Trump.
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