Voting for Trump - What Would Reagan Do?

As Kamala Harris doubles down on winning the race by peeling off Republican voters, I decided to sit down with the man who knew Reagan's politics best - his political consultant Stu Spencer.

Ronald Reagan Presidential Library & Museum | Ronald Reagan

The Kamala Harris campaign is betting everything on winning a record share of Republican voters to win the White House. If she succeeds, it will be because enough Republicans believed that Democracy was worth saving and were willing to support a candidate and party they don’t typically align with in order to save the country they do.

Few people in this country have spent more money researching, targeting, and mobilizing Republicans to oppose Trump than I have. It’s not a role I ever envisioned for myself, but I've never shirked away from it either.

In the early summer of 1998, while working as a young political director for the California Republican Party, I got a phone call in my office in downtown Burbank with a gruff, older voice on the other end.

“Is this the Mexican kid, Mike Madrid?” the voice asked.

“It is,” I meekly replied, half expecting a barrage of nativist vitriol I was growing accustomed to from Republican activists pissed that a Latino staffer was publicly critical of GOP’s increasingly hostile stance on immigration.

“This is Stu Spencer. We need to talk…about the future of the Republican Party,” he said.

Stu Spencer. I immediately knew who he was. Every Republican political consultant of my generation did. He and his business partner, Bill Roberts, basically created the modern political consulting profession. Spencer was the political consultant who got Ronald Reagan elected Governor of California in 1968, advised him during his tenure, laid the groundwork for the Reagan Republican movement, and built the foundation for his rise to the Presidency in 1980.

No living person knew Ronald Reagan and his politics better than Stu Spencer. At 97, Stu is still far more lucid than most folks 30 years younger and can vividly recall meetings, attendees, and decisions made during the 1960s that defined one of the most influential politicians of the 20th century.

I drove out to the Palm Springs area a few days later to meet with Spencer.  During our daylong conversation, he imparted to me - one of the very few young Latino faces in the Republican Party - a strong sense that people like me would play a key role in saving the GOP from “the crazy right-wingers.” I laugh now when progressives call Reagan a “crazy right winger,” since it was Reagan and William F. Buckley who systematically pushed out the John Birch Society and white supremacists from the GOP, paving the way for the modern conservative movement.

Stu and I became good friends after that day-long visit, and he would call to discuss politics, give me professional advice, and warn me about what he saw building within the GOP he helped create. We spoke often over the years, but I hadn’t seen him in person until earlier this year. Like me, Stu had emerged as a vocal critic of Trump and Trumpism, decrying it not only as a threat to Reagan’s legacy and the Republican Party but to the country. Here’s a great oral history of Stu Spencer in Capitol Weekly. He’s one of the most impactful political consultants of our time, though few people know his name.

Spencer’s criticism of Trump was a reminder to me that I hadn’t lost my mind during the Trump era - it was the hundreds of Republicans around me who had transformed into MAGA zombies - supporting a charlatan who stood in stark contrast to everything Reagan had built and they themselves had zealously championed for three decades since.

This spring I found myself driving out again to the desert to see my old friend Stu Spencer. After thirty years, much had changed - the party, the country….us - we were now two Republican consultants in a very small group of people that had stood up and opposed what our party had become. I had agreed to take on the role of a Senior Fellow at UC Irvine’s School of Social Ecology and was working on a project that sought to explore why Orange County, once solidly red, “Reagan country” – had become a battleground region, emblematic of where the country was headed and potentially holding the balance of power in the House of Representatives. (You can find the podcast here Red County, Blue County, Orange County)

Because Spencer had been so instrumental in making Orange County so Republican in the 1970s and 80s, I wanted to interview him for the podcast series.

But I also had another motive.

There was a question that had been gnawing at my soul since Trump came down the golden escalator and began attacking Mexicans. I had long realized that in today’s Republican Party, Ronald Reagan wouldn’t stand a chance against Donald Trump in a primary. The death of Reagan Republicanism was something I’d mourned somewhere around the fall of 2016. My question wasn’t whether Reagan could beat Trump - I knew the answer to that. No, my question was more foundational and a matter of principle rather than tactics.

What would Reagan do during these times? Would he stand up and speak out against Trump as the obvious threat to America he is, or would he quietly slink into the shadows like so many Republicans who came of age during his era?

That was the question I needed to ask. That was the question I had to know. And there was only one living person qualified to answer it. Here’s the short clip of Stu and I talking about what Ronald Reagan would do:

Ronald Reagan would speak out against Trump. He would find a way to use the party infrastructure to fight against the threat it poses. Reagan would find a way to rationalize his opposition to the Republican nominee.

Feel free to share this video with all the Republicans you know.

Besides Nancy Reagan would be demanded it of Ronny “Knowing Nancy, she couldn’t stand the son of a bitch!”