It doesn’t matter whether the baker is rich in fact, it matters that the public will perceive the GOP Legislature’s actions as favoring _employers over employees_ . Fair or not, justified or not, that’s how it’ll be perceived.

It’s a bit like the minimum wage. The political debate about minimum wages in principle, whether we like it or not, ended in the late 1930s. Since then, it’s been possible for the GOP to oppose a _particular_ increase or a particular aspect of it, but every time they’ve tried to oppose it in principle they’ve gotten burned, because the electorate isn’t open to that argument.

As for optics, there’s word for political movements that ignore them: defeated.

_Optics decide electorate outcomes_, more or less. Four years of rational arguments and evidence didn’t break Democratic voters’ trust in Biden. The first fifteen minutes or so of that debate last year did it.

Glenn Younkin became Governor of Virginia because Terry McAuliffe said one sentence about parents that implied they shouldn’t control their children’s education. One sentence.

Mitch Daniels’ political career ended in 2010. He was considered a promising Presidential possibility up until that point. Then, in a 2010 interview with the then-widely-read-by-conservatives _Weekly Standard_ , Daniels made a reference to calling a ‘truce’ on social issues to focus on the deficit and economics.

That was it. He was toast. Within 24 hours he was scrambling to explain that it didn’t mean what people thought, but in politics, ‘if you’re explaining you’re losing’. His Presidential aspirations collapsed. A year or two ago he floated what looked like a trial balloon for a run of some sort, and immediately he was peppered with questions from conservatives about that ‘truce’. It was still a millstone around his neck over a decade later.

Optics matter. And the GOP electorate is hypersensitive about the dominance of the Chamber of Commerce and business interests.

Ahh, yes, they should turn their back on their base because you don’t like them. .” — mkent

No, because the _electorate_ doesn’t like them.

Business interests historically have been the dominant force in the GOP, but not the base. Since the 1980s and esp. the 1990s, the base has increasingly been social conservatives and American nationalists and increasingly working class voters. Those three groups more-or-less get along with each other, but there are deep conflicts of economic interest with business groups for each of them. To make it worse, business groups lean socially left for the most part.

It was business interests that pushed NAFTA, mass outsourcing, and open borders immigration. It was business interests who tried to ram Rudy Giuliani, John McCain, and Mitt Romney down the base voters’ throats in 2008 and 2012, and made an attempt at forcing Jeb Bush on them in 2016. ‘Any willing worker’ was business interests. Business interests backed Obamacare. In the first Trump Administration, they constantly struggled to undercut everything he tried to do except for tax cuts.

The price of making the GOP the true majority party is necessarily going to include a sharp reduction in the influence of business interests, because their agenda is fundamentally _unpopular_ .

Which is why reversing a popular electoral action less than a year later, on this subject of all things, is such utter and complete lunacy. I can already hear the attack ads now. Maybe later events will make this all a moot point, but it’s exactly the sort of wedge issue that can split the GOP coalition along its fracture lines.

MAGA, as a group, are _not_ libertarians.

Those special interest groups are not the base of Republican voters.

The individual humans who actually run small businesses might be part of that base, but the lobbying groups are not.

Who cares about all of the jobs heading out of state? That won’t cost the GOP any votes.

Blue cities stay blue despite their blue government policies that hemorrhage jobs. Check your premises. Voters vote on what matters to them, which may not be what you think is in their best interest, economically or any other way.

Of course, Moses was Pharaoh’s “grandson” by adoption…according to the story…

legislating minimum wages do no good optimum effect, it reduces the labour pool
the Chamber of Commerce, sadly has been at the forefront of the offshoring of critical infrastructure and labour, and against what one would think the native labor pool,, this is not a local phenomenon, it works the same in the UK

on another point, I was fascinating to read the Josephus account of Moses, that DeMille seems to have referred to, it dwells on his campaigns against the Ethiopians when he was in the pharoahs service,

No, it doesn’t. The GOP has control of the state 58-40, with the only areas the Democrats control being crime-ridden hellholes. The last Democrat to even be competitive in the state was Barack Obama in 2008 (in 2012 he lost to Romney easily), and the last one to actually win was Bill Clinton thanks to Ross Perot siphoning off 1/3 of the conservative vote. You have to go back to before Reagan to see the Democrat win a two-man race.

”Right now, the GOP would be well advised to have a default policy of ‘no’ to requests from the Chamber of Commerce, the ‘Job Creators’ Network’, FWD.us,
or the Hotel and Restaurant Association.”

Ahh, yes, they should turn their back on their base because you don’t like them. Who cares about all of the jobs heading out of state? That won’t cost the GOP any votes.

Still STUPID.

One of the things that has haunted the GOP ever since FDR’s time is the perception by the voters that they are ‘the party of the rich’. Now on one level that never made sense, because both parties, back then and now, are run by wealthy interests.

But what people actually _meant_ when they said it, whether they thought it out clearly or not, was that that GOP was the ‘party of business’, the ‘party of the employers’, while the Dems post-FDR were the party of the employees.

There was, from the 1930s to the 1970s, a great deal of truth in that perception.

Back then, the core of the Democratic Party base was union labor. And back then, union labor meant manufacturing, transportation, construction. The Dems were the nationalist party back then, the GOP the internationalist. It was a different world back then.

In the 1970s, the Dems transformed into the party of the educated elite class, and the working class voters started to migrate to the GOP. The ‘Reagan Democrats’ presaged the TEA party and the MAGA Republicans.

But the process was constantly slowed by the inherent conflict of interest between the business class and the working class that was coming over to the GOP. That’s a lot of why the GOP would win elections on Dem overreach, such as in 1994 and 2000, only to immediately lose support because they would try to _govern_ on business interests (NAFTA, ‘free trade’ in general, unlimited immigration). The interests of the business and corporate world are simply in conflict with those of MAGA and the working class.

At one point, IIRC, the GOP captured the governorship of freaking Maine. The new governor immediately poured precious political capital into an argument over a freaking _mural_ celebrating union labor. Maybe that mural belong on public property, maybe not. Either way, it wasn’t worth the effort he put into it, and it fed straight into the ‘party of the employers’ thing again.

The voters in Missouri vote in sick leave requirements, by a substantial majority, and the GOP legislature immediately reverses it less than a year later, because it costs money to business. No matter what protests they were hearing from the business community, doing that was self-destructively STUPID. I can just hear the Democrats rubbing their hands in glee at the PR opportunities.

Right now, the GOP would be well advised to have a default policy of ‘no’ to requests from the Chamber of Commerce, the ‘Job Creators’ Network’, FWD.us,
or the Hotel and Restaurant Association.

In one of the bilingual wards we attended on the Gulf coast, one of our American members had married a lovely woman from a South American country (I don’t remember now which one), who had a very good grasp of English. We also had members who needed translation in every meeting, because they had almost no facility in English at all, even those who had been in the US a number of years.

She sometimes expressed to me her frustration with her compatriots who hadn’t learned the language of their host country, so I asked her one time how long it had taken her. She answered, with some exasperation, “Three months!”

PS She was not the only native Spanish-speaking member who tried to get others to quit relying on their somewhat closed community and get going on their language change-over, although no one ever suggested they stop using Spanish altogether. Most of our church units in areas with large Spanish-speaking demographics sponsor free English classes. The same is true in other areas with different language concentrations.