Trump drifts further from GOP orthodoxy in bid to beat Harris

Fast forward 20 years later, and the former president is once again navigating a political middle ground that is as much about defeating Vice President Kamala Harris as it is leaving a permanent mark on his adopted home, the Republican Party.

Over the past several months, Trump has made a rhetorical shift, dropping the label “conservative” in favor of describing his politics as “commonsense.” In March, he explicitly said he is “not conservative.”

Trump has taken that label to describe the GOP as a whole, telling a crowd in Arizona a week ago, “You say what you want — it’s nice to say conservative, but really, we’re the party of common sense.”

Pivot to the middle

But Trump’s words are coinciding with a pivot to the middle on policy that is challenging virtually every tenet of modern conservatism. He’s vowed not to “touch” Social Security, moving the party further from calls to raise the retirement age, while on Thursday, he prompted Obamacare-era hand-wringing with his proposal to mandate that private insurance companies cover the cost of in vitro fertilization procedures.

That final proposal, which follows his rejection of a federal abortion ban, has rankled the religious Right. At the same time, he’s ignored deficit hawks with proposals including “no tax on tips” that, according to the Penn Wharton Budget Model, would increase deficits by more than $4 trillion over the next decade.

Ironically, Trump largely governed as a conservative during his four years in the White House, ushering through Congress a large decrease in the corporate tax rate and appointing three Supreme Court justices who helped overturn Roe v. Wade.

But Trump has long been ideologically flexible. In office, he pushed the boundaries of what it meant to be a Republican, particularly with his protectionist and noninterventionist tendencies on trade and foreign wars. Four years later, and with the party more firmly in his control, he is testing those limits again.

“What you’re seeing is, in broad strokes, the evolution of the Republican, the continuing evolution of the Republican Party,” said Ronald Reagan biographer Craig Shirley, who called Trump a “change agent” akin to the 40th president.

The shift has sent the party in an “anti-elitist, pro-populist” direction, Shirley said, but he also alluded to the ways in which that change could help Republicans with a more immediate concern: winning in November.

“In a micro sense, it’s a winning strategy,” Shirley said, naming his hawkishness on trade and China in particular.

Trump has not steered his party without resistance. Congress, with the help of the Republican-led House, still passed tens of billions of dollars in Ukraine aid earlier this year despite Trump’s opposition to the war with Russia, while his stance on abortion, meant to assure centrist voters with Roe overturned, has become a political lightening rod among social conservatives.

He successfully changed the GOP platform to close off the possibility of a federal abortion ban, leaving the issue to the states, but his latest moves have upset anti-abortion activists in a manner that could hurt turnout from his base in two months.

Lila Rose, the head of the anti-abortion group Live Action, said this week she won’t vote for Trump on Nov. 5 unless he returns to his earlier embrace of her movement and is urging others not to either.

Trump took a step in that direction on Friday, revealing he would vote against an abortion referendum in Florida that would have overridden his home state’s six-week ban.

“Trump created a new Republican coalition by separating himself from traditional Republican orthodoxy” a long time ago, said Dan Schnur, communications director for the late Sen. John McCain‘s 2000 presidential campaign. “Now, the question is whether conservatives will stick with him if he begins to move on abortion and other social issues.”

Taking a leaf from the Biden playbook

Trump’s pivot is not dissimilar to how President Joe Biden steered his own party in 2020. He went on to win four years in office by rejecting “Medicare for All” and calls to defund the police.

His endeavor at moderation has had some longevity. Harris, running to replace Biden in the White House, has adopted his views in a series of flip-flops from her own progressive run for president in 2020.

But the defund the police movement was a temporary reaction to the murder of George Floyd at the hands of police, while Trump is threatening to steer his party away from beliefs it has held for decades.

Republican strategist Alex Conant argued the party was “pretty united,” pointing to last month’s Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.

“There is ideological debate within the party between conservatives and populists, but I think Trump has been able to unite them over the last eight years, which is why he’s seen political success,” he told the Washington Examiner. “At least in 2016 he was able to attract, you know, union workers, some independents. This year, he seems to be doing better than Republicans normally do with black voters, with Hispanic voters.”

‘Reproductive rights’ red flag

But Conant had a word of warning regarding Trump’s equivocation on abortion, mindful that “for the most part, people have made up their minds about Trump.”

“There’s a lot of single-issue, pro-life voters, and he has done a terrific job delivering for them, you know, more than any other president,” Conant said. “But when he talks about protecting reproductive rights, that’s a red flag for some vote season voters he’s going to need to turn out.”

He acknowledged that the choice is difficult for Trump, however. Democrats overperformed in the 2022 elections in part because the Supreme Court had just issued its abortion decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, and the former president is attempting to avoid a similar fate this cycle.

Abortion access is “clearly something that has helped Democrats since the Dobbs decision,” said Conant, and “to the extent that Trump’s able to muddy the waters on that issue, that’s probably to his advantage.”

The Trump campaign appears to recognize the fact that it will be required to grow its tent to win in 2024. Trump beat former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2016 by bringing low-propensity voters into the GOP fold that he dubbed the “forgotten men and women of America.”

But high-propensity swing voters in suburban areas, some of whom he lost in 2020, are just as important. Moderation on abortion is one way to win their vote, but Trump has put public safety, illegal immigration, and the economy at the center of his election pitch.

“Americans are craving commonsense solutions that will lower costs, secure the border, and stop violent crime, which is why President Trump’s agenda is not only resonating with the Republican Party faithful but bringing new voters into the fold of his ‘big tent’ campaign,” Anna Kelly, a spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee, said in a statement.

The Democrats believe Harris, too, can build a bridge that expands its coalition to include center-right and Republican voters. She pledged on Thursday in her first interview since becoming the Democratic nominee that she would consider appointing a Republican to her Cabinet.

Simultaneously, she is relying on a coalition of “old guard” Republicans turned off by Trump’s rhetoric and efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

This past week, more than 200 former staffers to past Republican nominees, including McCain, George W. Bush, and Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT), endorsed Harris, while a number of speakers at the Democrats’ convention in Chicago were GOP Trump critics.

Most of the party, including Trump’s longtime foe Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), has made amends with Trump. A week ago, Trump even buried the hatchet with Gov. Brian Kemp (R-GA), who had a falling out with Trump over his election fraud claims.

But the pockets of GOP resistance underscore the ways in which Trump remains at odds with segments of his party on not only policy but also temperament.

One problem Trump will have is skepticism from voters that he will follow through on his promises, according to Costas Panagopoulos, a political science professor at Northeastern University, or that “he will be able to overcome judicial and legislative obstacles to achieve these goals.”

But he judged that Trump setting himself apart from his party on select issues could also help him frame himself as the anti-establishment candidate almost a decade after he entered politics.

“Rejecting orthodox views and approaches can also reinforce Trump’s efforts to portray himself as an outsider who repudiates the establishment, a perception that appeals to many of his supporters who are frustrated with politicians and the status quo,” said Panagopoulos. “They want to shake things up, if not dismantle tradition altogether.”

Commonsense conservative

Cesar Conda, former chief of staff to Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) and founding partner of Republican lobbying firm Navigators Global, advised against overstating Trump’s drift from conservatism. He noted that cutting taxes and regulations, strengthening the military, and securing the border are “all commonsense conservative solutions.”

“Trump has always been an outsider who doesn’t fit establishment labels,” Conda said.

But the election could hinge on how convincingly each side negates the pivot to the middle seen with Harris and Trump.

Trump has disavowed Project 2025, a conservative policy agenda that Democrats have used to paint him as extreme. But he’s done so by calling the Republicans who devised the blueprint, some of whom worked in the Trump administration, “seriously extreme.”

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“Like some on the Right, severe Right, came up with this Project ’25, I don’t even know, some of them I know who they are, but they’re very, very conservative,” Trump said in July. “They’re sort of the opposite of the radical Left.”

Meanwhile, he has begun to mock Harris as a “copycat” for her rebrand, quipping she should wear a “MAGA” hat for the policy positions she has adopted since launching her run for president.