Republican voters seem to think differently about their economic interests in the party reshaped by former President Donald J. Trump.
As part of an August survey of 1,000 Republican voters, American Compass and YouGov asked respondents to make sense of recent complaints of worker shortages.
Eighty-five percent of respondents described the situation as a “tight labor market,” meaning that “employers should offer better jobs and higher pay if they need more workers.”
Just 15 percent of the surveyed GOP voters described the situation as a “labor shortage,” meaning that “policymakers should consider solutions like higher immigration to provide more workers.”
In addition, the most conservative respondents were more likely than moderates to characterize a “worker shortage” as a “tight labor market” that ought to result in higher wages.
Before President Trump’s victory in 2016, some GOP standard-bearers appealed to immigration as a source of economic growth and a means of keeping Social Security and Medicare solvent.
Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, President Trump’s main Republican rival during the 2016 primary season, argued that immigrants would be key to maintaining the United States’ social safety net. At one point during that campaign, he said newcomers to the country “create far more businesses than native-born Americans” over recent decades and are “more fertile.”
“Our legal immigration system is utterly inadequate to meet our nation’s economic needs,” the authors of that analysis wrote, describing the current number of employment-based visas as “extremely low.”
By contrast, the America First Policy Institute, a think tank created by Linda McMahon and other alumni of the Trump administration, has stressed what they see as the risks of overreliance on such visas.
on “Worker Power.” The survey was outlined in more detail in a Sept. 2023 report by American Compass, “The New Conservative Voter.”The think tank and YouGov also found that Republican voters were more concerned about cultural issues, including transgender activism and critical race theory, than tax rates, free trade, and regulation. Respondents also frequently ranked illegal immigration and globalization among their top priorities, above family and fertility, higher education, and one of American Compass’s signature issues, “worker power.”
In addition, 90 percent of respondents indicated they were closer to thinking “it has gotten harder for a family to achieve middle-class security in America” than to thinking “it is easier than ever to achieve middle-class security in America.”
Those developments may or may not lead to concrete policies that advance “worker power.” Yet, they do suggest a Trump-inspired realignment in the Republican Party is here to stay.
