MAGA abuses its own rural base. Does the base care?

They'll probably get away with it

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I’ve mostly avoided writing about the Republican Party’s “Big Beautiful Bill”, the signature piece of tax and spending legislation that they’ve been working on all this year.¹ That’s not because it isn’t important - it will almost certainly be the most important piece of legislation passed this Congress. It’s more that the process of Congressional sausage-making has involved so many tweaks and amendments that I wanted to wait until it took on something like its final form before commenting on it.

Well folks, it is here, and let me tell you - it’s a doozy.

Yesterday, after a roughly 25 hour session, the Senate passed its version of BBB on a 51-50 vote, with Vice President J.D. Vance breaking the tie. Three Senate Republicans - Rand Paul, Thom Tillis and Susan Collins - voted against it, with Tillis going so far as announce that he is retiring from politics rather than supporting it. The other main waverer, Lisa Murkowski, eventually lined up behind it after securing some pork for her home state of Alaska.

Republican senators have now fled Washington to be home for the holiday weekend, leaving no time for additional changes before Trump’s deadline of July 4th to have the bill passed. That means the House of Representatives must now swallow the Senate bill, or incur Trump’s wrath by missing the deadline. In legislative parlance, the Senate has “jammed” the House.

The main feature of the bill is a massive tax cut, funded by slashing social welfare programs and by huge increases in the budget deficit. It also directs hundreds of billions of dollars more to defense and immigration enforcement.

And the bill is, I would argue, a microcosm - or perhaps a macrocosm - of today’s Republican Party and the way that it uses cultural and racial grievance to mask an attack on the material interests of its own voters.

The part of the bill that has attracted the most controversy are the healthcare provisions, which nonpartisan analysts say will cause nearly 12 million people to lose health coverage in the coming years. The losses come from changes that the bill makes to Medicaid, a federal program which provides healthcare to low-income people, and the Affordable Care Act, Barack Obama’s signature health policy.

The Republican Party has long been obsessed with cutting these programs, which it sees as hand-outs to undeserving poor people who just need to go out and get a job. But what’s particularly notable is that the party’s efforts to cut Medicaid haven’t lost any of their zeal even as the political realignment of the Trump era means that more and more Medicaid recipients are actually voting Republican.

The impact of the bill on predominantly white, rural districts will be devastating. It’s not just that many of the voters in these areas rely on Medicaid to pay their medical bills - it’s that the very existence of rural hospitals relies on a local pool of welfare recipients able to pay for their services and keep their doors open. Rural hospital groups are warning that the bill could reduce their revenues from Medicaid by nearly a quarter, forcing widespread closures.

Nor is this just some liberal talking point - many Republican politicians and figures in the MAGA movement have been warning about it too. It’s the main reason that Tillis announced that he will step down from politics rather than passing a Trumpian loyalty test by voting for it. Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri also criticized the healthcare cuts, saying: “We can’t be cutting health care for working people and for poor people in order to constantly give special tax treatment to corporations and other entities. The party has a lot of thinking to do.”

But then - LOL - Hawley voted for the legislation anyway, saying that he’ll work to have the provisions repealed in a future bill (let me get out my crystal ball and predict that this is not going to happen).

What I find interesting about all of this is what it tells you about the relationship of the Republican Party to its white rural base. It’s clear that Republicans think that they have this constituency so well locked down that its loyalty will survive even a brazen attack on its material interests. And they might be right.

Over the past few decades, the United States has undergone a stunning process of urban/rural polarization. As recently as the 1990s, whether someone lived in an urban or rural area told you very little about how they would vote, whereas today it is one of the most reliable predictors. Basically, the denser the area, the bluer it is - Democrats overwhelmingly win cities and Republicans predominate in sparsely populated rural counties.

This shift began before Donald Trump, but his transformation of the Republican Party has exacerbated it. As he has brought unabashed racial and cultural grievance to the fore of the party’s politics, rural white voters have lapped it up. The MAGA narrative that the America is a nation in decline, beset by dangerous foreigners and deindustrialization, plays well in places like West Virginia and rural Pennsylvania.

But a little-noticed feature of Trump’s hostile takeover of the party was the way that he also, for a long time at least, changed the way it talked about welfare. Whereas pre-Trump GOP politics was dominated by fiscal conservatives like Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney who had made it their life’s mission to slash welfare programs. It can be difficult to remember now, but things like privatizing Social Security were mainstream GOP orthodoxy in the early 2010s.

Trump mostly put that agenda aside, for a time at least. One reason is that he’s not a fiscal conservative - as his massive tax cuts show, he doesn’t care about the budget deficit. But another is that he seemed to intuit on some level that certain welfare programs were widely used by his own voters, and that taking them away would be bad politics.

So what changed? I think the most fundamental thing is that Trump - and the GOP’s - grip on its base is now so absolute that the party thinks it can even survive taking millions of people’s healthcare away. The mind meld between MAGA and the base is rooted in cultural and racial grievances that are not going away. The Democratic Party finds it extremely hard to appeal to these voters, both because of who is running the party and because doing so would mean shedding the more urban and liberal parts of the party’s coalition.

Rural whites are discovering the curse that affects party base voters everywhere: when your votes become such a sure thing, you tend to get taken for granted. The transformation of the GOP into a personality cult focused on one individual creates a particularly strong version of that dynamic. Being a good member of the movement is defined by supporting whatever Donald Trump decides to do on a given day - even if what he decides to do is shaft you.

1. American politics aficionados will remember that a big part of Biden’s legislative agenda also bore the acronym BBB - Build Back Better. Whether that symmetry is a coincidence or an epic troll I haven’t been able to discover.

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