Trump’s battle with the GOP pits ‘silent majority’ against conservative establishment
Reagan, long a favorite at NR, finally won the GOP nomination for the 1980 election. By this time, white working-class voters were a notable presence in the party’s support.
As the work of pollster Stanley Greenberg confirmed, many “Reagan Democrats” in the Detroit area were also union members.
Reagan’s nationalist rhetoric and demonization of welfare allowed him to keep white populists in his coalition even as he pursued deregulation, tax reform and assaults on workers’ rights such as his breaking of the Professional Air Traffic Controller’s Union.
Although George W. Bush had a feel for the GOP base, proclaiming his evangelical faith in a Texas drawl, popular exhaustion with his two wars and the Great Recession depleted his populist appeal, as did his political strategy of appealing to Latinos and calling for broad immigration reform.
The Great Recession makes things even worse
It was the financial crisis of 2008 that deepened the fault lines within the GOP as the stresses on the lives of the Silent Majority multiplied.
The earliest rage of what became the Tea Party movement was aimed at the Bush/Obama Toxic Asset Relief Program (TARP), commonly understood as a bailout for Wall Street.
Calling TARP “the last straw,” Tea Party icon and South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint put it this way:
There’s a lot of affection for Bush because of how passionately he fought the war on terror. But as far as domestic policy goes, conservatives felt betrayed.
By the 2010 midterm elections, Tea Party organizations were supporting 138 Republican candidates for the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate. They won approximately a third of races.
http://www.rawstory.com/2016/01/trumps-battle-with-the-gop-pits-silent-majority-against-conservative-establishment/
= new reply since forum marked as read
On economic issues, Trump separates himself even more from his closest competitor in the PEPS survey, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.). The graph below shows that Cruz outperforms Trump by about 15 percentage points among the most economically conservative Republicans. But Cruz loses to Trump by over 30 points among the quarter of Republicans who hold progressive positions on health care, taxes, the minimum wage and unions.
It appears from the PEPS data, then, that the Trump coalition unites resentment of minority groups with support for economically progressive policies.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/01/27/a-newly-released-poll-shows-the-populist-power-of-donald-trump/
Of course, "support for economically progressive policies" is relative when compared to the rest of the GOP field of candidates. Trump is hardly 'progressive' in any genuine sense of the word.