that s what the american people want to see us focused on, but i, for one, believe we ought to quit fighting each other, everywhere we can, and focus focus on the substantive issues. bring in tonight s pam. michael steele, former adviser to george bush and house speaker john boehner. dare we call him mr. establishment. and eugene, a washington post calm um lift. establishment. and amy, political reporter and new york times establishment. here at nbc. establishment. i have teased michael steele, started with you. put up percentages breakdown here. i thought against, a great job of splitting this us uniquely. core conservatives, market conservatives, market republican and new era enterpriser, put them, four coalitions here. so i guess michael steele, the majority clearly right now is this fused together country. you sthaep?
accept that, driving the party no. less gap between the core conservatives and the enterprisers. i think most smart core conservatives, the first category, understands the party has to grow for the future meaning bring more latinos they don t believe this. the middle categories. exactly. if the first and fourth categories work together as they usually do, what happened that was unusual in the 2016 presidential nominating process, those two categories were split among at times eight or ten presidential candidates, whereas the two in the middle, ohcoalesd around one. the history of presidential primaries is almost always a mainstream candidate challenged from the right, defeating that challenge moving slightly to the right and tacking back. partial for ronald reagan. generally speaking, that s the pattern and not what we saw this time. eugene, you covered more of these campaigns than i have. fair to say instead of that, the other way around.
we could take a lot of this off and throw it in the trash can. folks, if you want to understand why the party s civil war seems to have hit a tipping point, check this out. the pew report, exhaustive project every few years revealing deep fissures inside the party. divided into four distinction groups. first and biggest, you might call the core conservatives. they make up 13% of the push lick and you might think of the establishment republicans like bob corker, jeff flake, they tend to be financially comfortable. they want smaller government. also want lower corporate taxes and don t want the u.s. taking a less active role on the world stage. they want a more active role. as the largest and most politically active group you might think they have the most influence inside the gop. but then how do you explain why flake and corker s attacks on the president haven t led to more condemnations of the president? well, one explanation starts with this group called the
year a little bit. the establishment has essentially lost at the ballot box. the core conservatives. your wing of the party lost at the ballot box. a lot in 16 and seeing it now. what do you think the lesson should be? is your group out of touch with where the republican party is headed, or where the republican bad at messaging where you want to take the party? i think bad at delivering significant results that benefit the middle class. and so maybe we have been used to talking to each other rather than to the people, and they think we haven t been listening to them, that we don t understand them, appreciate their angst. i m not a creature of washington today. i don t live in the washington, d.c. area. yes, i m a product, a political product of the washington, d.c. experience. but i think there is frustration on both sides. i think the democrats have had frustration manifested in bernie sanders. republicans frustration manifested in, first, ron paul
country-first conservatives. immigration hard-liners. unhappy with the country s direction. think of steve king, or roy moore that you believe fits this group best. this group makes up only 6% of the public but in some respects teamed up with the market skeptic republicans who are nearly as big a chunk of the population as the core conservatives. this group is deeply critical of many major instooness in government. perhaps best fit in respects father/son duo of ron and rand fall. steve bannon seemingly knitted together the country-first conservatives and skeptic republicans and combined, guess what? they outnumber the core conservatives. lastly, the new era republicans. they re more culturally diverse and pro-business. don t view immigrants as a burden on country. you might want to say the best representatives of those folks are people like marco rubio and jeb bush. bottom line, mainstream republican party has a lot of work to do if it wants to take