This surely wasn’t the plan, but by placing their second candidate debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, Republican officials put a spotlight on how far their party has moved from positions that made the 40th president a conservative icon.
The GOP has kept the social conservatism that made Reagan the preferred candidate for evangelical Christians — a constituency that now dominates many Republican primaries.
That’s been clear throughout the campaign, as the candidates have sparred over how far to go to impose national bans on abortion, a goal sought by many Republican primary voters but opposed by a majority of Americans.
On Wednesday night, several of the candidates pushed a different front in the culture wars, declaring their opposition to gender-affirming medical care, with former Vice President Mike Pence and businessman Vivek Ramaswamy endorsing a blanket federal ban on such treatment.
On multiple other issues, however — including foreign policy, Social Security and Medicare and trade — the party of Donald Trump has sharply shifted away from that of Reagan.
A clear example came early in the debate when moderators showed a clip of Reagan as he discussed amnesty for immigrants in the country without authorization. He later signed the most sweeping amnesty law in U.S. history.
In the years since, Republicans have shifted sharply toward a nativist position, with many in the party backing cuts to both legal and illegal immigration. After watching the Reagan clip, the candidates competed to advocate tough positions.
The U.S. needs to make clear that “if you come here illegally, we will apprehend you and send you back,” former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said. “We have to treat this like the law enforcement problem that it is.”
Ramaswamy went further, saying that the U.S. should “militarize the southern border” and that he would push to reinterpret the Constitution to no longer give citizenship to children born in the U.S. to unauthorized immigrants.
Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, speaking next, also endorsed ending birthright citizenship.
While such policy departures from Reagan’s approach are striking, an even bigger shift involves the party’s underlying view of America’s future.
Reagan’s “undying faith that in this nation under God, the future will be ours” has little in common with Trump’s grim warnings of a “nation in decline.”
That shift reflects a change in national mood, especially among the white voters who make up the vast majority of the GOP. Among white Americans, the share who view the country’s future optimistically has dropped precipitously in recent decades, from roughly 3 out of 4 in 2000 to just 4 in 10 currently, according to the General Social Survey conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago.
In the current field of major candidates, the clearest divide is between those who embrace that shift away from Reagan’s outlook and those who resist it.
Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, Pence and Christie have most clearly stuck to the pre-Trump, Reaganite consensus on major policy issues.
Ramaswamy and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis have both tried to position themselves as younger versions of Trump. Scott has mostly avoided drawing sharp contrasts with his rivals — although on Wednesday night, he fired off several attacks on Ramaswamy. The seventh candidate onstage, North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, has remained largely unknown to most voters.
“A lot of this is less about ideology than it is about temperament and approach,” said GOP strategist Kevin Spillane, a strong Trump critic, in an interview before the debate. “Trump’s campaign is not about policy. It’s about Trump and tone and temperament and message and vibe.” The effect, however, has been to “undermine” the pillars of traditional conservative policy, he added.
Not that anyone publicly acknowledges a change. Reagan remains a hero for many Republican voters: Four in 10 Republicans named him as the best president of the last 40 years in polling by the Pew Research Center this summer, slightly edging out the share who picked Trump.
And so the candidates praised Reagan even as several of them buried his legacy.
Another clear policy split with Reaganism involves the war in Ukraine.
“The concept underlying the Reagan Doctrine was aiding those who are willing to fight for their own freedom,” said David Trulio, president of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute, the private group that shares grounds with the publicly run library.
“That’s a concept that’s very directly applicable in the context of Ukraine, where Russia was an aggressor and the Ukrainians are willing to fight for their own freedom,” Trulio said in an interview before the debate. “There has certainly been division and those who disagree — I think that’s a really critical issue for all of us to be listening for.”
Those who disagree, as Trulio put it, include a majority of Republican voters. In a poll released this week by YouGov and the Economist magazine, 60% of Republicans sad they wanted aid to Ukraine cut, and 29% said aid should be eliminated entirely.
Prominent far-right Republicans, like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, have vowed to block more U.S. money for Kyiv even as traditional party figures, like Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, have pushed for more funds. That division has played a big part in blocking House Republicans from passing legislation to fund government agencies, leading to a likely shutdown starting this weekend.
Trump’s peculiar admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin has helped shift Republican opinion toward Russia. But more broadly, his denigration of NATO and other U.S. alliances and opposition to U.S. involvement overseas has revived isolationism, which was a major force in Republican politics before World War II and the Cold War.
Wednesday night, DeSantis said that “we must end this war.” Ramaswamy repeated his criticism of Ukraine, saying that “just because Putin is an evil dictator does not mean Ukraine is good.”
That set off a furious exchange in which Scott, Haley and Pence denounced Ramaswamy and declared their support for Ukraine.
“Our national, vital interest is in degrading the Russian military,” Scott said, asserting that aid to Ukraine “keeps our homeland safer.”
GOP traditionalists also differ from Trump on government spending, which may be most important when it comes to the two huge programs for retirees, Social Security and Medicare, which together account for about one-third of what Washington spends.
Before Trump, the GOP consistently called for efforts to hold down the cost of those programs, referred to in budget lingo as entitlements. In his 2016 campaign, Trump promised not to touch either program. In the current campaign, he has attacked several of his rivals, most notably DeSantis, for past congressional votes in favor of limits on entitlement spending.
Haley has most openly stuck with the pre-Trump view of entitlements.
“We need to slow the biggest drivers of our national debt. Democrats and Republicans don’t want to admit it, but Americans deserve the hard truth. Entitlement spending is unsustainable,” she said last week in what her campaign billed as a major economic policy speech in New Hampshire.
Her deft advocacy of such positions has helped Haley consolidate support among the party’s traditionalist wing. But while the debate onstage may be lively, there’s not much question which side is winning in the contest between Reaganism and Trumpism.
The Reaganite trio — Haley, Christie and Pence — collectively draws support from about 1 in 7 Republican voters nationwide, according to the average of polls maintained by the FiveThirtyEight website. Trump alone consistently has the support of more than half.
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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
