The withdrawal of Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) from the Republican presidential primary has turned the race into a two-person contest that perfectly encapsulates the class civil war within the Republican Party.
When Donald Trump rode down the escalator in 2015 to announce his ultimately successful candidacy for president, he shined a light on a brewing civil war in the party between less educated working-class voters who had recently abandoned the Democratic Party and the historically corporate-friendly and more educated Republicans that had dominated that party for decades.
Fast forward to today, there is a concerted effort by donors and legacy Republican institutions such as Americans for Prosperity to reassert that vision of the Republican Party through former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley.
But Trump is once again standing in the way of a return to the corporate-friendly Republican politics of previous election cycles. And with DeSantis out of the race, the Haley vs. Trump race has coalesced the class warfare that exists within the Republican Party behind the two candidates.
Prior to Trump, maintaining the status quo on entitlements such as Social Security and Medicare or placing tariffs on foreign goods was a nonstarter for Republican politicians. But since the billionaire burst onto the political scene, they have become party orthodoxy.
In many ways those two issues embody the differences between the corporate Republicans that dominated the pre-Trump era and the populism that the former president has championed for the past eight years.
At the core of this difference is class warfare — the bourgeoisie versus the proletariat, the haves versus the have-nots, the working class versus the elite.
While the corporate-friendly Republicans see tariffs as a tax on consumers and immigration as necessary for economic growth, populist voters see tariffs and controlled immigration as necessary to protecting their jobs and communities.
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Haley’s candidacy is likely the last semi-viable attempt to challenge the GOP’s shift toward a working-class party dominated by voters without college degrees. It is no surprise that her appeal is strongest among disaffected Democrats and liberal independents who tend to live in wealthier areas, as these voters tend to work white-collar jobs.
Trump and Haley could not offer a starker difference in governing philosophy for a Republican primary. With a two-person race, Republican primary voters have been afforded a binary choice that will show with finality whether or not the working-class populism is truly ascendant in a GOP rife with class warfare.