The “modern Republican” Party is scrapping its old-guard corporate ties and business special interests, an Axios report details, as Breitbart News and small-dollar donors to former President Trump steer the party’s future.
Fourteen of the top GOP consultants and operatives detail how the Republican Party has shifted away from the Chamber of Commerce, the Koch brothers’ network of donor class organizations, National Review, and economic libertarian groups toward Trump’s small-dollar donors, populist-nationalist outlets like Breitbart News, and Tucker Carlson.
These days, it is Trump’s voters, Breitbart News readers, and Carlson viewers that Republicans hope to win over in elections rather than seeking out corporate campaign contributions through endorsements from Heritage Action, FreedomWorks, and the Senate Conservatives Fund.
“You don’t want Breitbart on your ass,” a GOP operative told Axios.
J.D. Vance, the New York Times best-selling author now running for Senate in Ohio, said the party’s shift comes as beltway conservative orthodoxy has been busted through by the likes of Trump, Breitbart News, and Carlson.
“We all owe Donald Trump a great deal for singlehandedly destroying the corrupt globalist and corporatist orthodoxies that previously defined the Republican Party, in favor of a new Republican Party, that is pro-worker and always puts America first,” Vance told Breitbart News.
That shift seeks to increasingly align Republican lawmakers and those running for office with the nation’s largest voting bloc: economic populists who are socially conservative.