Conservative College Crusader On Moderate Democrats Versus Identity Politics

Charles Copeland is the former chairman of Delaware Republican Party and minority leader in the Delaware State Senate. He currently heads the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, an organization dedicated to bringing conservative thought to college campuses. The Resurgent caught up with Mr. Copeland this week to talk about Amy Klobuchar’s candidacy and whether a moderate Democrat could win against Donald Trump in 2020.

“From an intellectual perspective,” Copeland says, “I don’t think that the president really spent a lot of time during his life worried about conservative or even libertarian philosophy. I think he worried about what price the union cement contractor was giving him for whatever his next project was. He was somewhat of an unwritten page and I know a lot of people that were very, very worried, but I would submit that, from a policy perspective, what he’s implemented since being in office has been very conservative policy.”

Copeland doesn’t consider himself a Trump critic, saying, “I would not consider myself a Never Trumper nor would I consider myself an Always Trumper. On my board at ISI, I have both.”

“As a friend of mine once described it, it’s a bit like having a dull limo driver,” he adds. “He’s getting you where you want to go, but you just want to put the glass up.”

Despite the fact that Copeland seems pleased with much of the Trump Administration, he acknowledges that the president is in trouble with moderate voters. The Republican defeats in the House in the 2018 midterms were largely due to a loss of moderate voters in the suburbs.

“Where I live, it’s a suburb of Philadelphia, even though we’re in Delaware and that was one of the areas where Republicans got crushed in the 2018 elections,” he says. “Maybe it wasn’t a wave election in other places, but, in my area, it was a wave election and I consider this to be a fairly moderate area.”

“I think that a lot of moderates said, ‘We want somebody to put a brake on what is going on or, perhaps, on the president directly,” Copeland continues, adding, “I’m not expressing my own opinion, I’m just trying to call balls and strikes.”

“If you think back to the 2016 election,” he adds, “there were about 60,000 people in three states that called the election. If 11,000 people in a Pittsburgh suburb and 11,000 people in a Milwaukee suburb and 11,000 people in a Detroit suburb changed their votes, you change the outcome. Add to that the fact that the president’s approval rating has never in his entire administration broken 50 percent and normally sits around 40 percent. Meanwhile, there are some Never Trampers out there, 43 percent or so, who say they want to impeach the guy. He starts a little behind in a generic situation.”

“I think that if a moderate Democrat made it through their primary system, it would be a much more difficult race” for President Trump, he continues but adds that the Democrat primary system is stacked against moderates.

Copeland says that the large number of Democratic candidates will make it very difficult for any one of them to win a majority of delegates. If five or six prominent candidates such as Kamala Harris, Corey Booker, Beta O’Rourke, Kirsten Gillibrand and Amy Klobuchar each win about 15-20 percent of the delegates, it would conceivably be possible for a moderate like Klobuchar to emerge as a consensus candidate.

“From a structural perspective,” he adds, “they’ve got a real hard time getting a candidate who actually has crossover appeal, but, if they did, I think that would be a very, very challenging environment for the current administration.”

Copeland adds that he believes that President Trump will shift gears over the next two years to make himself more amenable to moderates, especially when compared with the radical left-wing Democratic candidates, and notes that the State of the Union may have been the beginning of such a shift in tone.

“I didn’t think the speech was huge as the speech goes,” he says, “but compared to how he’s framed by the media, he came across as a guy that likes people” such as immigrants, war heroes, childhood cancer victims, and Jews, contrary to allegations of anti-Semitism. “It’s kind of hard to frame the guy as a xenophobic hater if he stands in front of people and says, ‘Look at all the people I like.’’’

“I think he’s starting to change tacks,” Copeland says, but adds, “How long that stays, who knows?”

Indeed, a few days later, the kinder, gentler Trump fell by the wayside as the president proclaimed a national emergency in an attempt to bypass the congressional refusal to appropriate money for his signature border barrier.

When asked about the possibility that Joe Biden might enter the race, Copeland jokes, “Joe Biden lives about a mile from where I’m standing right now. Of course, the state is small.”

“I’ve known Joe for a long, long time and Joe loves the sharp elbows of politics,” he says. “If you could go and sit with God and make the perfect human for politics, it would look something like Joe Biden from a skill set. From a policy perspective, I disagree with him on almost everything, but he loves politics and is skilled at it.”

“The problem that he’s got on the Democrat side is he’s an old white guy,” he continues. “How do the Democrats that are dominated by identity politics today” nominate “an old white guy?”

“He’s hugely skilled, but I think that, at the end of the day, it’s going to be very tough to pull that off,” Copeland muses. “But, as I said, if you got to the convention and everybody had 15 percent, could he be somebody that they rallied around because he would be a holding cell for the future? Could be. That’s something that I think, that if I’m Amy Klobuchar, I would be thinking about.”

Copeland takes a swipe at Corey Booker and the identity politics of the Democratic Party, saying, “Corey Booker is now aiming to be the first vegan guy who shaves his head and it’s just an absurdity. I don’t understand the allure to somebody saying that I’m going to be the first vegan president. We’ve got serious issues to face in this country and whether you like McDonald’s hamburgers is not one of them.”

There are deep divisions between even moderate Democrats and conservative Republican voters. Two issues where the differences are most apparent are abortion and immigration. Of the two, Copeland believes that immigration would be the easier gap to bridge.

“The majority of Americans, and I think it’s a good-sized majority, maybe 60-65 percent, want some sort of immigration reform that takes people that are in the United States and gives them legal status or a pathway to legal citizenship,” he says. “They don’t want to uproot families and nobody wants to see the ICE agents coming into a house, pulling out mom and dad and leaving a crying kid standing there as their parents are taken away.”

“I think the majority of Americans want to see that, but they also want to see border security,” he says, adding that “the mainstream media has vilified border security in such a way that” many people don’t want to admit supporting a wall but see the value in adding security to “control the border and bring those people who we believe will be valuable citizens into the country and keep out the criminal element and MS-13.”

Copeland sees the possibility that a split government after the 2020 elections might act on immigration reform. Even if President Trump is re-elected, the two parties might find a middle ground on the issue. Copeland notes that several pieces of landmark legislation such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which was passed with strong Republican support and signed by President Johnson, “a racist cad,” and welfare reform under Bill Clinton, were passed with government control split between the two parties rather than when one party controlled both houses of Congress and the presidency.

“Abortion is a little different, “he says, “because the Supreme Court with Roe v. Wade jumped into the middle of it and put it on ice. Until that’s dealt with, I don’t believe that either side has any interest in doing anything except using it as a club.”

Even though Copeland is a fan of President Trump’s policy, he does acknowledge that the president’s behavior has made him somewhat unpopular among the college students that ISI works with. “I think that President Trump’s problems with aggressiveness in his tweets and in name-calling, some of those things are manifest. In kindergarten, we all learned how to be polite and hold doors for other people and speak in our inside voices and I do think that rubs a lot of people the wrong way,” he admits.

But that does not mean all is lost. He goes on, “I think that there is a large portion of the student body who like what the president has done because they have job opportunities when they graduate. They like what the president has done because they look around the world and it is a safer place.”

Copeland points out that 18 percent of college humanities professors are Marxists compared to only five percent who are conservative. “And Marxism is a political theory that has never worked. It’s 0-for-40…. Conservative policies that have worked almost every time and every place they’ve been tried, maybe they’re 37-and-three, and yet it is the minority opinion on campus.”

Many conservatives and moderates on campus are afraid to speak up because of the leftist practices of public shaming and doxing their opponents, posting personal contact information, including phone numbers and home addresses publicly. Conservatives and Trump supporters “are afraid to say anything because they don’t know if the student next to them is a rabid left-winger who is going to start shrieking at them like that woman did to Jeff Flake in the elevator. People don’t want that kind of stuff, they just want to go about their life and live their life the way they want and to go to their classes and believe in free markets and opportunity and limited government and property rights.”

ISI’s mission is help educate students in these conservative, small government principles. Copeland says that ISI is different from some organizations that preach the simplistic message that, “socialism is terrible and capitalism is great.”

“We talk about the fundamentals and let students make their own decision. We’ve had debates in which we’ve had open borders and closed borders people debate one another” with debaters from the libertarian Cato Institute and the conservative Heritage Foundation, Copeland says. “Even in debates like that, we’ll have protesters because they don’t want to have an opinion other than their own talked about. I think that’s largely because they’re afraid that their own opinion lacks any deep intellectual underpinnings. They’ve just got an emotion.”

“I think that there is a vocal minority on campus that is led by an increasingly strident faculty that is driving this social justice, identity politics debate,” Copeland says, “Many students look at it and go, ‘Well, I’m just going to keep my head down and drive forward and get out.’ And that’s what they do. And it’s a shame.”

Originally published on The Resurgent

Let's Face It: Conservatives Are Not a Majority

The news of Colin Kaepernick’s endorsement deal with Nike came as shock to conservatives. It seemed that Kaepernick was a has-been after his departure from the NFL, but suddenly he’s back with a lucrative deal to be the face of Nike. That should be a wake-up call that conservatives do not represent a majority of Americans.

If conservatives were a majority, then selecting the man whose claim to fame lies in taking a knee during the National Anthem as a spokesman would be an act of corporate suicide. In that case, one would expect that the stock would tank and a meaningful boycott would occur. And that’s exactly what many conservative news outlets were reporting.

The truth is a little different.

The deal was announced on Sept. 3. Nike stock closed on the previous day at $82.20 per share. By the close of trading on Sept. 4, Nike stock had indeed plunged… all the way to $79.60, a loss of a little over three percent. On Wednesday, the stock closed just under $79.92, not far under the 52-week high of $83.68. Trading in Nike was much higher than is the norm. 18,548,800 shares changed hands on Tuesday as opposed to an average volume of 7,073,191.

Nike’s stock declined, but it is only slightly off from prior to the announcement. There were a lot of sellers, but there were also a lot of buyers. That observation says a lot about American politics in general.

What’s more, most conservatives have not heard that Nike received an estimated $43 million in media exposure after the rollout of Kaepernick’s ad campaign. Bloomberg reports that almost half of the exposure was positive. Less than a quarter of the media coverage was negative.

The nature of modern communication is that most of us live in an echo chamber. Conservatives read conservative blogs, listen to conservative radio, watch Fox News and talk to other conservatives on Facebook and Twitter. When we don’t have contact with many – or any – people with opposing viewpoints, we lose sight of the fact that not everyone thinks like we do.

The story goes that Pauline Kael, a film critic for the New Yorker, said after the 1972 election, “I can’t believe Nixon won. I don’t know anyone who voted for him.” The story is somewhat apocryphal. The quote has been paraphrased to make Kael seem more out of touch than she really was, but the sentiment is real.

This week it is conservatives’ turn to say, “I can’t believe they hired Kaepernick. No one likes him.” Two years ago, it was the Democrats. Just substitute Donald Trump’s name.

If conservatives are to be successful in the long term, they need to face some hard truths. The first is that conservatives do not represent a majority of Americans. Close on the heels of that bitter pill is the fact that most voters do not like Donald Trump. Finally, some conservative ideas are popular, but some are not.

We can look back at Gallup’s survey of political ideology to see that, for the 30 years that the poll has been taken, conservatives have never represented a majority. The survey, taken in December 2017, actually shows a slight decline in conservative identification since the Tea Party revolution. About 35 percent of Americans now identify as conservative.

How do conservatives win elections then? The good news is that liberals are actually doing worse. About 26 percent currently identify as liberals. This represents a long slow climb from 17 percent in 1992.

The mathematically astute are probably thinking that liberals and conservatives only represent about half of the people polled. They’re right. The third major group in American politics is the moderates. Weighing in at 35 percent, the moderate group is as large as conservatives and larger than liberals. With neither conservatives nor liberals constituting a majority on their own, moderates are the deciding factor in elections.

The problem faced by both parties is that they need moderates to win, but moderates don’t like extremism from either party. Primary voters, on the other hand, love to vote for the candidates that promise to deliver the most change for their respective ideology.

What happens often is that a party will win an election by a slim margin and then proceed to govern as if they have an enormous mandate. It happened to Barack Obama, who answered a Republican offer of compromise with the words “I won,” and it is happening to Donald Trump now.

The Trump Administration is pushing an agenda that many voters are not happy with, but Republican voters are ecstatic with the “winning.” The problem for the GOP is that rather than winning the hearts and minds of voters, they have pushed their advantage with party-line votes and executive actions while ignoring public opinion. This is basically the same strategy that cost Democrats both houses of Congress and more than 1,000 legislative seats under Obama.

There is a disconnect on several core issues between the Republicans and the rest of the country. The most notable achievement of the Trump Administration is the tax reform bill, but Republicans have not sold the new law to the public. Nine months after passage of the law, numerous polls show that the country is split but the tax plan remains slightly more unpopular than popular.

Opinion on the president’s policy of separating families at the border as a disincentive to immigration is not even close. Numerous polls found that Americans opposed the separations by more than a two-to-one margin. However, the opinion of Republicans was just the opposite with an average of about half of Republicans supporting the plan.

On Colin Kaepernick and the anthem protests, opinion is also split. A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll taken last week before the current brouhaha erupted found that voters felt that taking a knee during the National Anthem was not appropriate by a margin of 54-43 percent. However, a Quinnipiac poll from June showed almost exactly the opposite.

The bottom line here is that the target market for the Nike campaign is not white conservatives. Nike almost certainly test-marketed the Kaepernick campaign before they launched what they had to know was going to erupt into a tornado of fecal material, yet Nike is confident enough that the campaign will make money for them that they did it anyway. The logical answer is that Nike understands that, while millions of people will be angered by the ad, those millions of people are still a minority. In fact, Nike may be banking on conservative outrage to generate more publicity… just as Kaepernick has used the outrage to make his name a household word over the past few years.

The collective clout of American conservatives showing their anger can’t make a mainstream sports apparel company decide against hiring one of the most infamous men in sports because aggrieved conservatives are just one small segment of the population. Nike has apparently determined that angry conservatives don’t buy enough of their merchandise to make a difference. The left learned the same lesson with protests of Chick-fil-a and Hobby Lobby.

What both parties seem never to learn is that in order to propagate real and lasting change, you have to win over the voters in the middle. That isn’t likely to happen by being shrill and calling athletes traitors. If conservatives could find a coherent spokesman for the movement who could reach the moderates in the middle, then maybe one day conservatives will be a majority. Until that day, conservatives do not have the mandate to force their will on the rest of the country. They must remember that or pay the price.

 Originally published on The Resurgent

Survey showing most conservative states is good news for Republicans

Gallup has just released a new survey showing the most conservative and liberal states in the nation. Overall, the picture looks just as you’d expect with liberal states concentrated on the West Coast and in the Northeast while the South and upper Rocky Mountains are the most conservative areas.

Contrary to popular belief, neither liberals nor conservatives hold an absolute majority in any state, although conservatives are very close in Wyoming, the most conservative state in the country. Forty-nine percent of Wyomingites self-identify as conservative. This yields a 35-point advantage over the 14 percent of the Wyoming population considered to be liberal.

A number of other states have conservative populations in excess of 40 percent as well. In fact, Alabama, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Idaho all have conservative populations of greater than 45 percent.

Vermont tops the list of most liberal states. With 40 percent liberal and only 26 percent conservative, liberals have a 14-point advantage.

Interestingly, far fewer voters identify as liberal in blue states than do conservatives in red states. Many deep blue states are characterized by a difference of only a few points. For example, in Massachusetts, the second most liberal state, liberals only lead conservatives by eight points. In the next two most liberal states, Connecticut and New York, the difference is four and two points respectively. Believe it or not, in deep blue, far left California, conservatives actually outnumber liberals 30-29 percent.

When the state totals are examined, the share of moderate voters remains relatively constant. Moderates make up about a third of the electorate in almost every state. With neither party at a majority anywhere, moderates are the decisive group in most elections.

Even though the poor showing for liberals in blue states may indicate an unwillingness of some liberals to accept the liberal label, the polling results indicate an opening for conservatives in many blue states. If the ideological groups are statistically equal in a state like California, Republicans can win this Democratic stronghold by making inroads to the moderates in the mushy middle of the political spectrum. Splitting the moderate vote could swing the state to the GOP.

Conversely, in the 19 states where Republicans make up more than 40 percent of the electorate, Democrats would need to win virtually all moderate votes to move any of these states to the blue column.

The problem for Republicans is that a Gallup poll from last year showing party identification indicated that almost all of the state’s moderates identified as Democrats.  California’s actual election results showed that, at 32 percent, the Trump vote in California was almost identical to Gallup’s estimates of conservatives and Republicans for the state. Donald Trump lost practically all moderate and independent voters for the state.

The trend is national as well. CNN exit polls show a breakdown of 26 percent liberal, 39 percent moderate and 35 percent conservative in the 2016 election. Trump lost the moderate vote 40-52 percent, but still won the election.

Moderates didn’t flock to Trump, whose share of the group was almost identical to Mitt Romney, but many did abandon Clinton. Trump’s victory was partly due to the eight percent of moderates, the largest ideological demographic, who voted for “someone else.”

Gallup’s survey also showed that the usual swing states all have about a 10-point conservative advantage. Colorado and New Hampshire, both with a 9-point conservative advantage, were the most liberal swing states.

The polling data indicates that winning blue states, as Donald Trump did, is a realistic goal for Republicans. A winning strategy would be to nominate conservative candidates who also have a strong appeal to moderate and independent voters.

Go here to find out how conservative your state is.

Originally published on The Resurgent

You'll never guess which candidate polls best on the economy!

The results are in on a new Gallup poll that checks the opinions of potential American voters on the economic prospects of presidential candidates. The results will be shocking to many political observers and activists. Few readers will guess which candidate ranked as most trusted on the economy.

The poll of 1,015 adults who are potential voters had a margin of error of four percentage points and tested how the respondents viewed the five remaining candidates for president. The benchmark against which the candidates were measured was another recent Gallup poll which found that 50 percent still had a “great deal” or a “fair amount” of confidence in President Obama’s economic leadership. None of the 2016 candidates beat President Obama.

Shockingly, the candidate who scored best on the economy was none other than avowed socialist Bernie Sanders. Forty-seven percent had a “great deal” or a “fair amount” of confidence in the Vermont senator. The top three candidates were in a statistical tie with John Kasich at 46 percent and Hillary Clinton at 43 percent. The poll is another reminder that Sanders could mount a very formidable campaign and that conservatives should take him seriously.

The pair of Republican frontrunners finished a distant fourth and fifth. Ted Cruz had the confidence of 35 percent. Donald Trump was trusted by only 30 percent.

John Kasich was the only one of the five with a net positive confidence rating. Kasich’s 46 percent confidence was greater than the 43 percent who had “only a little” or “almost no confidence” in him, giving him a net confidence rating of 3 percent. Barack Obama’s net rating was two percent due to the 48 percent with little or no confidence in his economic policy.

Every other candidate had a negative rating. Forty-nine percent had little or no confidence in Sanders for a net of -2 percent. Clinton’s net was -13 percent (43/56). Ted Cruz scored a -25 (35/60). As with overall approval ratings, the big loser was Donald Trump with lowest confidence score and the highest score of little or no confidence. Trump’s net rating was an abysmal -38 (30/68).

The poll does offer a glimmer of hope for Republicans. In the breakdown by party ideology, Sanders and Kasich also lead among independents by 46 and 43 percent respectively. Neither Sanders nor Kasich is likely to be the eventual nominee however.

Hillary Clinton, the likely Democratic nominee, fares much more poorly among independents (35 percent) than she does among voters overall. On the other hand, Cruz and Trump do almost as well among independents as they do among the general electorate (32 and 30 percent respectively). The Republican candidate will have to do well with moderates and independents to beat Mrs. Clinton and these numbers indicate a weakness for her on the economy with these voters.

Another recent Gallup poll indicates that almost 40 percent of voters rate the economy as the most important problem facing the country. With voter trust between Cruz, Trump and Clinton essentially tied on handling of the economy, it may give the Republican candidate a chance to erase Mrs. Clinton’s current lead in the polls.

One last takeaway from the poll is the curious fact that, as noted with candidate approval ratings earlier this month, the candidates that are liked most by voters at large are rejected by large numbers of the faithful of both parties. This may be an indication that both parties are moving farther apart and leaving a large number of disaffected voters in the middle who are unhappy with all three frontrunners. This may lead to a low turnout election or provide an opening for a third party.

Read it on Conservative Firing Line or Freedom Daily!

New poll shows conservatives outnumber liberals in 47 states

A new Gallup poll released on January 31 shows that conservatives outnumber liberals in 47 states. Although liberal identification has reached a new high in the wake of Barack Obama’s reelection, conservatives still make up the largest ideological group in most states. Nevertheless, the average gap between conservatives and liberals shrank from 15.9 to 14.6 percent since 2012.

The three states in which liberals outnumbered conservatives were Hawaii, Massachusetts and Vermont. Other states that rounded out the liberal top ten were Delaware, New York, Oregon, Maine, California, and New Jersey. The District of Columbia is the most liberal “state” with 38 percent of its population identifying as liberal.

Wyoming is the most conservative state with 51 percent of its population considering themselves conservative. Mississippi, Idaho, Utah, Montana, Arkansas, South Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Alabama make up the rest of the conservative top ten, all with greater than 44 percent conservatives. Last year’s most conservative state, Alabama, fell to number 10.

The swing states from recent elections all boast a double-digit conservative advantage leading one to question why Florida, Virginia, Iowa, Colorado, and Ohio all voted for Barack Obama. According to Gallup, the answer lies with moderate voters.

Even though conservatives are the largest ideological group in most states as well as nationally, the fact that they make up less than 50 percent of the electorate means that Republicans need to reach out to moderate voters, something that they have had problems with in recent years. An Examiner analysis of exit polls from 2008 and 2012 found that moderates made up 44 and 41 percent of the electorate in the two elections. In both years, Barack Obama won moderates handily. In 2008, Obama won 60 percent of the moderate vote. In 2012, he won 56 percent. North Carolina was the only swing state in which Mitt Romney was able to eke out a victory even as he lost moderates.

Gallup notes that the percentage of liberals has been slowly increasing since the 1990s and suggests that the resurgence in liberal identification may be a result of Americans becoming comfortable with the term once again. After being popular in the civil rights era and 1970s, the term “liberal” fell into disfavor in the 1980s and early 1990s. Many liberals eschewed the label and chose to identify themselves as “progressives” or “moderates.”

Originally published on National Elections Examiner