Henry Olsen's "Four Faces of the GOP" Presentation

Henry Olsen, scholar at AEI and the Ethics & Public Policy Center, contributor to National Affairs as well as the National Review, offers his breakdown of both the Republican Party factions as well how these factions will interplay in the coming primaries. For those interested in "the Trump factor," Olsen argues that Trump is a meaningful outlier toward the traditional model. Trump, he argues, can be thought more in terms of a European working class warfare, anti-immigrant candidate. Trump receives relatively stable support across all four factions, however, is slightly more prominent in the moderate/liberal camp of the Party.



His book with the same title can be purchased below.

The Four Faces of the Republican Party: The Fight for the 2016 Presidential Nomination - Kindle edition by Henry Olsen, Dante J. Scala. Politics & Social Sciences Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com.

Did you read the book, Fiddy? The video is over an hour long....so perhaps you can tell us what the four factions are?


I'm just going to take a guess....


Republican leaders
Teaparty
Blue Dog Democrats
White supramacists

Henry Olsen's "Four Faces of the GOP" Presentation

Moot said:

Did you read the book, Fiddy? The video is over an hour long....so perhaps you can tell us what the four factions are?


I'm just going to take a guess....


Republican leaders
Teaparty
Blue Dog Democrats
White supramacists

Click to expand...

Not yet, no.

The presentation itself is roughly a half hour long. After the intro there is a 30 minute presentation by Olsen followed by a half hour q&a session.

Here's a brief summary with examples, from what I can recall off the top of my head. Some of the past examples might be fuzzy.

Moderate/Liberal (Christie, McCain)
Somewhat conservative (Rubio, Romney)
Conservative Evangelical (Cruz, Buchanan)
Secular Conservative (probably Rand Paul)

Olsen sees this as a race between Cruz and Rubio, with Rubio eventually taking the nomination, in some degree thanks to the RNC's own primary rules and scheduling. Though lately he has slightly wavered in his confidence about Cruz losing.

Only if Trump succeeds in "remaking the GOP in his own image" is he able to pull something off with the nomination process.