There’s a big ideological battle going on in Republican presidential debates, the New York Times tells us. This battle is raging on immigration, war, bank bailouts, and tax cuts, and I guess it is. But the Times leaves out something kinda big: who’s winning.
On immigration, the fight is over whether to deport millions of people immediately, or be what passes for humane among Republicans by not deporting people and eventually allowing them legal status but not citizenship. This fight is Donald Trump, the Republican primary leader, joined by Sen. Ted Cruz (currently polling in fourth place according to the Huffington Post aggregate), and opposed by Jeb Bush and Gov. John Kasich, currently polling in fifth and seventh, respectively. Sen. Marco Rubio, meanwhile, is treading carefully because he doesn’t want to piss off either side too badly, having seen his past support for a path to citizenship damage his standing with the Republican base but needing establishment support as well. There’s a clear split between the establishment and the base … and the votes are overwhelmingly on one side.
Or take taxes. According to the Times,
… one might say the proposed tax cuts range from huge to yooooooge. Mr. Trump’s tax cut would appear to cost about $11 trillion — a quarter of expected government revenue — over a decade. Mr. Kasich said that was too much because a tax cut that big “will put our kids way deeper in the hole than they have been.”
But even Mr. Kasich, despite his relative restraint, is proposing to cut taxes more deeply than President George W. Bush did and Mitt Romney promised to in 2012.
So that’s a fight that’s over within the Republican Party. Even the so-called moderate in the race has blown past George W. Bush and Mitt Romney in the rush to cut, cut, cut. They may still be arguing over the details, but the entire debate has shifted to take place in the territory of devastatingly large tax cuts for the wealthy and, not talked about quite so directly but as an inevitable result, devastatingly large cuts to services for everyone else.
It’s good to know where the debate is and what specifics the different Republicans are pushing. But we need to be clear about where the party’s momentum is and which positions are drawing Republican voters.