WASHINGTON, D.C. – The race is on for Republicans seeking to regain the White House. One big roadblock is the issue of unity. The GOP goes into the 2024 presidential race fractured.
Former President Trump uses the term, “final battle” to describe the upcoming 2024 presidential race, but what about the battle from within the party itself? Trump is the leader of the GOP but national polling shows only 42% of Republicans identify as “MAGA” Republicans. The majority, 58%, say they aren’t.
While there seems to be general agreement on the social issues, there’s no doubt, however, that the GOP became more populist under Trump.
In his new book, Superpower in Peril, former Pennsylvania senate candidate David McCormick argues it’s time to think differently about the future of the party.
“I make the case for embracing a number of those populist frustrations with policies that rely on traditional conservative principles but go a step further,” McCormick tells CBN News. “The old way of thinking about it as a conservative just isn’t solving the problems of America and we need to deal with that.”
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McCormick’s book is a blueprint to do just that, including a big focus on confronting China. But the schism in the GOP has become truly apparent over the war in Ukraine. At the recent conservative CPAC conference, nearly 80% of GOP attendees said they disapprove of the U.S. giving billions of dollars in aid to help Ukraine.
Likely presidential contender Ron DeSantis got caught up in this when he first sided with MAGA by saying, “while the U.S. has many vital national interests…becoming further entangled in a territorial dispute between Ukraine and Russia is not one of them.” Days later, after being criticized by traditional Republicans, he came out for war crimes against Russian President Vladimir Putin. “I think he is a war criminal,” DeSantis said in a recent interview.
That, in a nutshell, is the conundrum. The GOP is a party that is split.
The former vice president points out that Trump’s views on trade, China, foreign policy, and more have given the party a more populist feel and he argues that’s good.
“More hard-working Americans, more blue-collar Americans, more African-Americans, and Hispanic Americans than in recent history voted for Republican candidates up and down the line. I think that’s because we were the party that was articulating that broad, conservative, traditional American agenda, and that’s the pathway for the future,” Pence said.
Ultimately, for the GOP to be successful as a political party, David McCormick says they’ll have to apply an age-old principle.
“We have, as conservatives, we agree on 80% of things, and we spend the majority of our time talking about the 20% that we disagree with,” he says. “So one of the things I argue for, the plea is, listen, let’s rally around the 80% that we agree on. Let’s embrace candidates in the primaries that can win primaries and general elections while staying true to conservatism, the movement conservatism, and let’s go change the direction of the country.”
The remainder of this article is available in its entirety at CBN