The Revenge of Donorism

There were plenty of reasons for Ken Cuccinelli’s defeat last night in Virginia at the well-greased hands of Terry McAuliffe, but because the race turned out to be so surprisingly close we’re going to hear a lot about the money: McAuliffe (of course) had it, Cuccinelli did not, the national Republican Party did not exactly go all-in on his behalf, and so the campaign ended up being defined, and possibly won, by a Democratic advertising blitz that the G.O.P. barely countered.

For Team Cuccinelli, this has already prompted some finger-pointing at the Republican Governors Association and its chairman, Bobby Jindal. But Cuccinelli didn’t just have money woes because the national party read too much into McAuliffe’s polling lead and decided to write their candidate off too early. He had money woes for ideological reasons: His combination of combative social conservatism and anti-crony capitalist populism gave a lot of Northern Virginian, developer-class money a reason to either sit the race out or side with the “one hand washes the other” Democrat instead. Cuccinelli has won statewide races in the past while being outspent handily — but it shouldn’t be surprising that in a high-profile, hard-fought gubernatorial election in a leftward trending state, the money gap would be more devastating to his chances.

Which means that there’s a cautionary tale here for all those conservatives — libertarian, reformist, anti-cronyist — who like to argue that a more principled and politically-successful Republican Party would necessarily have a less cozy relationship with big business and the rich. I’ve been extremely critical, since 2012, of what I’ve called the “donorist” worldview within the G.O.P., which basically imagines that the party’s only problem is its stance on social issues, and that with the right mix of immigration boosterism and gay marriage flip-flopping, Republicans can cruise to victory without so much as tweaking their “1980 forever” economic agenda. This strikes me as politically blinkered as well as mistaken on the policy merits, and given a choice between a conservatism founded on donorist ideas and a conservatism founded on the more populist alternatives, I’ll take the latter, faults and all, every time. (Bill Bolling, Cuccinelli’s more business-friendly rival for the G.O.P. nomination, might have eked out a win over McAuliffe, but a Republican Party organized around Bill Bolling’s worldview would be a permanent minority party, having essentially cut its base adrift in exchange for better fundraising and a few more suburban votes.)

But when thinking about the limits of the populist model — or a specific theory of the case like libertarian populism, which Cuccinelli was too combative on social issues to really embody, but which he made a game attempt to channel — you can’t ignore its potential downside for Republican fundraising, or the hard reality that the party’s donor class has the ability to kill a candidate they don’t link in a general election as thoroughly as the party’s populist wing can kill a candidate in a primary. Which is why, for a conservative populism to really work, it needs to have a clear appeal to the political center that the party’s current populist standard-bearers haven’t managed (yet!) to quite formulate. You need a lot of non-Republicans, as voters and small donors alike, to make up for the reality on display in Virginia yesterday — which is that if G.O.P. donors don’t get the party they want, some of them will find a perfectly comfortable home as Clinton-McAuliffe Democrats instead.