Opinion: How the GOP used ‘Joe the Plumber’ to sell a myth

Editor’s Note: Nicole Hemmer is an associate professor of history and director of the Carolyn T. and Robert M. Rogers Center for the Study of the Presidency at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of “Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s” and cohosts the podcasts “Past Present” and “This Day in Esoteric Political History.” The views expressed in this commentary are her own. View more opinion on CNN.

For a few weeks in the fall of 2008, Samuel Wurzelbacher, who died earlier this week, played a central role in the presidential campaign between Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain. The headlines marking his passing — an untimely and unfortunate death from cancer at 49 — are also a window into the past, a moment to look back at Wurzelbacher’s particular role in history, when he became the face of debates over economic policy unfolding at a pivotal crossroads in America.

With the economy in freefall, Obama had made his way to a working-class Ohio neighborhood to explain how his programs, from tax policy to health care reform, would aid working- and middle-class Americans. Introducing himself as Joe (his middle name), Wurzelbacher stepped out from the crowd to challenge Obama: He claimed he was about to buy a plumbing business that would make $250,000 to $280,000 a year, which would mean higher taxes if Obama were elected.

Obama not only told him that it would be a marginal increase largely offset for his small business by a tax credit for health care costs, but also that he envisioned a tax system that required high earners — like those making over a quarter-million dollars a year — to “spread the wealth” so that people just starting out could one day own their own business, too.

The McCain campaign saw their exchange as a golden opportunity: Here was someone who appeared to be working-class guy, Joe the Plumber, who believed that the Republican plan to cut taxes and government services was exactly what blue-collar Americans needed. They ran with it, bringing Wurzelbacher out on the campaign trail, creating “Joe the Plumbers” groups of tradespeople who supported McCain, and invoking Wurzelbacher dozens of times in debates, interviews and speeches. Wurzelbacher was the missing piece: evidence that the Republican Party was the real party of working-class Americans.

For years, the claim that Republicans are the true blue-collar party in the US has been a constant refrain from the right. It is an intoxicating mix of political strategy and political fantasy, one strengthened when then-candidate Donald Trump attracted White Rust Belt voters to his coalition. But while it feels like a product of the past eight years — reinforced by the right’s obsession with Oliver Anthony’s viral hit “Rich Men North of Richmond” and repeated assertions that the Republican Party is the workers’ party — Wurzelbacher serves as a reminder that the right has been pursuing this argument for a very long time.

And as Wurzelbacher’s example also shows, Republicans have mostly offered cultural politics, rather than economic policies, in their efforts to sell a blue-collar image. While couching public appeals to middle- and working-class voters in the guise of figures like Wurzelbacher, whose persona invoked class, the GOP has simultaneously served up messaging on a litany of other social issues, including guns, abortion and gay rights — and especially race — to attract those same voters.

The story reaches back well beyond 2008. In the late 1960s and 1970s, President Richard Nixon’s administration saw an opportunity to wrest White working-class voters from the Democratic Party, a belief bolstered after the hard-hat riot in 1970, where construction workers clashed with antiwar protesters in New York City. Nixon began aggressively wooing construction trade groups, quickly expanding their outreach to working-class White voters across the country.

The administration’s approach depended more on appeals to racism and patriotism than economic policy, though Nixon wasn’t opposed to using state power to boost the economy (he was hardly a doctrinaire conservative). But it was talk about the “silent majority” of patriotic Americans who supported the war in Vietnam and feared rising crime rates and inflation that dominated Nixon’s working-class appeals.

Which worked, to an extent. In 1972, the AFL-CIO refrained from endorsing a presidential candidate, the first time it failed to support the Democratic nominee since its founding in 1955. White voters flocked to the Nixon campaign, delivering him a landslide in the election. But the blue-collar White vote wasn’t simply won over by the Nixon campaign; it was being loosened from the Democratic coalition both because of the party’s embrace of Black civil rights and its weakness on the economic front — a weakness that, thanks to de-industrialization, the collapse of union membership and the party’s turn toward finance and tech capitalism, would persist for decades.

In the face of that weakness, right-wing writers and strategists have scrambled to develop a platform that looks plausibly blue-collar despite the party’s commitment to tax breaks, public-sector cuts and anti-union politics. But precisely because the party’s policies support the wealthy over workers, it has struggled to offer anything more than cultural and racial politics, sprinkled with the promise that working-class Americans can also one day became millionaires and then benefit from the party’s economic policies.

Some Republicans did break from the party’s economic orthodoxy to try to make genuine appeals to blue-collar voters. Pat Buchanan, running for president in 1992, broke with his party in a number of ways, running in opposition to the North American Free Trade Agreement (negotiated under President George H.W. Bush and signed into law under President Bill Clinton), calling for a moratorium on non-White immigration, endorsing protectionist economic policies and vowing to end affirmative action.

By the time Wurzelbacher made his appearance in the 2008 campaign, right-wing writers and politicians were regularly returning to the theme of a working-class coalition while tacitly admitting that the modern GOP had never successfully created one. In 2008, conservative writers Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam wrote the book “Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream.”

Four years later it was Fox News commentator and presidential candidate Rick Santorum’s turn. His campaign leaned heavily on his grandfather’s years laboring in Pennsylvania’s mines, talking incessantly about people who worked with their hands. A few years later, he reinforced that message with his book, “Blue Collar Conservatives: Recommitting to an America That Works.”

Wurzelbacher’s own example showed how little these policies delivered. He was not about to buy a plumbing business as he’d claimed — that was a fantasy. He had no plumber’s license, nor had he apprenticed in the trade. He struggled to pay his bills and taxes; he did not appear to have a deep well of savings that would allow him to buy the business he worked for.

The Obama tax cuts, analysts showed, would save both him and his employer money. Several years later, when Wurzelbacher found a new job, it was in the auto industry that Obama had saved in the first year of his presidency. (Wurzelbacher also joined the United Auto Workers union, which supported Obama’s elections.)

In areas where Obama’s policies did hurt the working class, Republicans made things worse, not better. After the Supreme Court gutted the part of the Affordable Care Act that would have required states to expand Medicaid, millions of Americans found themselves facing skyrocketing health insurance rates that the even government supplements couldn’t ease.

Faced with the choice of helping working-class Americans with those costs, Republican state legislatures and governors repeatedly refused to expand Medicaid on their own — despite the wide popularity of Medicaid expansion and subsidies from the federal government that would have made it virtually free for states to do so.

In the Biden years, Republicans face an even greater uphill battle. The Biden administration has worked to strengthen its base with working-class Americans, not only through funding major infrastructure projects but also by strengthening labor organizing rights. Just this week, the National Labor Relations Board made a powerful move to counter companies’ anti-union politics, empowering workers who want to form unions with leverage they haven’t had in decades. And Republicans? They’re holding up new nominations to the board so that it won’t have a quorum to continue expanding workers’ rights. So much for being the pro-worker party.

A new generation of right-wing writers are attempting to theorize a working-class conservatism, furthering the work of Douthat, Salam and others. American Compass, a conservative nonprofit dedicated to the task, recently released a manifesto outlining what such a conservatism might look like. And Sens. Josh Hawley and J.D. Vance have made working-class rhetoric central to their brands. But little has yet been done in terms of policy, where the GOP still seems quite far from the party of the working class.

Of course, economic policy isn’t all that matters to White blue-collar voters, as Republicans have shown again and again. Class in America is material but it is also a claim to a set of values and a way of life, as well as an argument about who is an authentic member of “real America.” It is an identity deeply inflected by race and gender, and sometimes has little to do with dollar amounts. For many, throwing an $80 cut of steak on a $1,000 grill is more working-class than spending $5 on a latte; driving an $80,000 beast of a pick-up truck is more blue-collar than shelling out $40,000 for a Toyota Prius.

Wurzelbacher was a conservative long before he met Obama; he would become a devotee of the Tea Party and then a Trump supporter. His financial struggles didn’t define his politics. And that, in the end, is the key to understanding the GOP’s working-class appeals — and why those waiting for economic liberalism from the Republican Party may be waiting a very, very long time.