An Interview With Senator Rob Portman ’78 (R-OH)

Editor’s Note: Digital Editor of The Dartmouth Review Lintaro Donovan (LD) interviewed former Senator Rob Portman ’78 (R-Ohio) (RP) on January 12, 2024. The interview was conducted following the Senator’s visit to campus two days earlier on behalf of the presidential campaign of former U.N. Ambassador and South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley. The interview took place prior to the 2024 Iowa Caucuses and thus does not necessarily reflect the Republican presidential campaign landscape as it currently stands.

TDR:  With Gov. Chris Christie (R-New Jersey)—who was historically quite popular in the Granite State—dropping out, how do you think the state of the race in New Hampshire has changed? 

RP: Well, I think it’s positive for Nikki Haley because a lot of his voters have expressed interest in supporting her as a second choice. There was a poll by Americans for Prosperity that showed that seven out of 10 of his voters would vote for her.

So I think it’s helpful. I think it’s also useful because I think what Ambassador Haley would like probably is more of a one-on-one race. And when you take Chris Christie out of the calculation, there really is nobody else who is in double digits. It really becomes a choice for voters. Do you want to see something new and fresh in a new conservative approach to governing? Or do you want to have more of, as Gov. Haley says, the chaos and drama that comes with the former president? So I think it’s good for her. 

TDR: With Gov. Haley the only one apart from President Trump polling well in New Hampshire, do you think that’s going to convince President Trump to attend future Republican debates?

RP: I don’t know. 

I suspect that he’s made that decision already not to do debates. He did do a town hall the other night. He is now doing meetings where he’s taking questions from people, but that’s going to be his decision.

TDR: I think at the beginning of the primary cycle, a lot of people expected Gov. DeSantis to do a lot better than he has and is. What do you think has made Gov. Haley so successful? In New Hampshire, she is polling much closer to President Trump than many expected. 

RP: There was a CNN poll showing her within seven points.

And again, that was before Chris Christie pulled out. It seems to me that she has an opportunity here. Having been up on campus at Dartmouth recently, I encourage students to get involved and engage for whomever they’re supporting, because what an amazing opportunity for Dartmouth students and other residents of New Hampshire to make a difference in terms of this election and our country’s direction.

She has an opportunity here to change the dynamic and to get people to think differently about this race. I was with Gov. Sununu last night, and he made an interesting point, which is that a lot of voters he talks to have just assumed all along, as you suggest, that Donald Trump is going to be victorious and that he’s winning all the polls.

They’re saying “I’m for Donald Trump, but because I want to be with the winner, and he’s going to win anyway. So, why are you even asking me? Of course it’s going to be him.” 

If she does win New Hampshire, which is a big if—and the expectations still are that Donald Trump would win—but if she were to be successful or even come in a close second, I think it would change people’s thinking a little bit. They would see that there is an alternative to President Trump and begin to look more closely into what the differences are between them on policy, on approach, on style.

I think that would be favorable to her. 

TDR: Before you mentioned college students and getting involved with the GOP. Of course, you met some conservative students at Dartmouth, but that crowd was small compared to what, say, Bernie Sanders would have drawn if he had come to Dartmouth. So, why do so many young people flock to the Democrats versus the GOP?

RP: First, I think that’s starting to change. There’s actually some national polling showing that the Biden Administration is not attracting young voters in the way that they did last time and certainly not the way that President Obama did in his elections. 

There’s a change because young voters, like every voter, are concerned about the economy and what’s going on with their own budgets, and what’s happening with inflation and interest rates is really affecting them. They can’t afford to buy a home because mortgage rates are so high. They’re having a tough time being able to finance a car because of interest rates being so high. There’s a shift. 

I do think that Republicans need to talk about the environment and perhaps social issues such as same-sex marriage differently, but I think it’s not so much about the policy differences in some cases, but rather the approach.

I think Republicans have more of a free-market approach that relies less on big government and more on people and the markets to make decisions that will be more cost-effective and more efficient over time in terms of the environment. I don’t think we explain that very well sometimes.

TDR: Do you think that there is a way for the national party to take a more liberal stance on social issues while not alienating the evangelical base? 

RP: Abortion is a difficult issue. It’s a very emotional issue, a very personal issue. I think it depends on how you talk about it. I’ve listened to Nikki Haley talk about it on very personal terms: her husband’s adoption, her own kids, and difficulty having kids. 

She has also said publicly, along with mentioning her faith, that she has compassion for people on the other issue we mentioned, which is gay marriage. The Republican position there has shifted a lot in the last decade significantly, and I have personal experience with this, having been the first Republican Senator to announce his support for gay marriage. But if you listen carefully to what the candidates are saying, Nikki Haley is the one saying that she thinks people ought to be treated as they are and have the freedom to be able to make that decision to be who they are. 

That issue is one that has evolved quite a bit in the Republican Party, and I think it’s now more consistent with where a lot of young people are on that issue. 

The other issue we mentioned was the environment. And again, I think there are ways to talk about what the Republican position is that are more effective. You’ve heard Nikki Haley say she does believe that global warming is going on and that it’s partly manmade. That’s an acknowledgement that a lot of Republicans weren’t willing to make until fairly recently.

Then the question is, what do you do about it? And she talks about the decisions of the Obama Administration and the Biden Administration being harmful in terms of our ability to make an energy transition in a sensible, deliberate way rather than pushing too fast and having an impact on people’s home heating bills, utility bills, and at the gas pump.

There’s a way to get there without hurting middle-class families and working families across the country. That’s what she’s trying to communicate: that there’s a differentiation on policy, not on what the problem is. As Republicans, we acknowledge the problem, but we consider how you actually come up with a solution and a more sensible transition, relying on market forces to get us there and more cost-effective ways to deal with it that are better for all Americans, but particularly for low- and middle-income Americans.

TDR: In the press as well as in media and opinion pieces about President Trump, a lot of people say that Trump has “changed” the party or that he “hijacked” the party. Sometimes they say something like “the party is going in a completely new direction.” How do you characterize what’s happened in the Republican Party since the emergence of Donald Trump?

RP: It’s part of a continual realignment. I think it started many years ago.

What Democrats will tell you today is that they are frustrated that blue collar workers are more Republican. Well, there’s a reason for that. Republicans have started to speak to workers’ issues more. That goes for things like the economy and the availability of jobs and wages.

During the Trump administration, there was a very strong record of job growth and wage increases. In the 18 months before the pandemic hit, my recollection is that there was wage growth of 3 percent or more every one of those months, and that was above inflation. And so, people were feeling it.

They were feeling like they were getting ahead, and the opposite has happened since then. People have felt like they’ve been falling behind because inflation has exceeded their wage growth, if any. That’s the sort of stuff that you can’t sort of talk people out of. They know how they feel.

They know when they go to the grocery store and the cost of groceries has gone up 18 to 20 percent on average since President Biden took office. They feel that, and they can’t be told that the economy’s fine in some macro-sense because they’re feeling it in their families and in their budgets.

That’s one reason why you see a realignment: Republicans have been focused more on these bread-and-butter issues, or kitchen-table issues, as some people call ’em. 

The second is trade. The Republican Party has shifted its position somewhat on trade to less of a pure free-trade and more of a balanced-trade approach, saying that there should be a level playing field.

I don’t believe in protectionism, but I do think that Republicans’ views on this have evolved to think we do need to be sure we have an industrial base here in this country and that we have a supply chain that is reliable and secure. This requires us to have some differences in terms of our trade policy, to be sure that, for example, China is not subsidizing illegally or dumping below cost and China is held to account for that. 

That’s a change in terms of the Republican approach to trade over the years. That’s also been helpful with regard to a lot of workers, including blue-collar workers, in Ohio, New Hampshire, and elsewhere, who feel like if they had a level playing field, they could compete and win. 

Currently, the playing field is not level, and that’s unfair. That’s something that Republicans in the past had not focused on enough, but I think they are doing that now. This helps to get a broader coalition in the Republican Party.

TDR: Another question on party politics. In 2020, we saw a lot of corporate donors, traditional groups that supported the Republican Party, shift away from supporting President Trump. Do you think that there’s any way to reconcile all these different, competing factions that we have in the GOP now? 

RP: There is a way to appeal to a broader coalition.

You may lose some people, as you say, on some of the issues on the edges, but the general approach of the party remains the same. We are the conservative party, meaning that we believe that we shouldn’t be lurching back and forward on change. We should be more conservative or traditional, but we also believe in the market.

We also believe in smaller government, not larger government. These are the basic tenets that have made America such a prosperous country and really the envy of the world in terms of our democratic capitalism. That’s what could make a broader coalition. 

I spent a lot of time thinking about these issues when I was running. I didn’t choose to run for election to a third term. But when I ran last time, in 2016, we were able to bring that sort of coalition together, and we won by 21 points, which in Ohio is a large number. It included people who were probably more traditional Republicans and people who were maybe more populist in their approach, because we were talking about the issues very specifically and about what we were doing.

There is a sort of common-sense approach consistent with our country’s traditions that is more attractive to people than some of the stuff that the Democrats have been supporting. They are pursuing the woke agenda and the green agenda in such a dramatic way that they’re really making people nervous.

When you look at what they have done in terms of our military, every time there’s a Democratic president, we seem to have a diminution in our ability to project force. We live with the consequences of that today. It’s the Houthi rebels lobbing missiles into the Red Sea, but it’s also what Russia is doing in Ukraine. It’s what China is doing in Taiwan and the South China Sea. 

The Republican approach of economic prosperity at home coupled with strong national security is more consistent with where most people are. We’ve just got to do a better job communicating it.

TDR: On the subject of your retirement, do you have any advice for your successor, freshman Senator J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), as he continues to work through his first term? 

RP: We’re friends. I’ve known him a long time. I knew him long before he got into politics, really in the context of him being from Middletown, Ohio, which is near my hometown. Of course, I’ve read his award-winning book. I know his kids and his wife. It’s a great family. 

We’re going to have some differences, and that’s fine. He’s like me: interested in getting things done. You may have seen that he’s done some projects with Democrats, and he just agreed last week on another bill on which he’ll work with a Democrat.

That’s smart because Ohio voters are looking for somebody who’s delivering for them. And I think he’s committed to doing so.

TDR: Let’s say you were elected President of the United States tomorrow. If you could change one thing in the country, public policy-related or not, what would you change?

RP: I’m an economics guy. For me, my goal is always to put America in a position where we are more competitive economically and strong militarily. The doomsday predictions of 10 years ago and 20 years ago that we’d be overtaken by China really haven’t happened because the fundamentals of our economy are strong, but we do require better policy. This means better regulatory policy, tax policy, and energy policy. 

We should be not just energy independent but also able to use our energy as an economic tool to make people’s lives better and to have better national security. We shouldn’t be relying on countries in dangerous and volatile places like the Middle East for our oil and gas.

What I would do is put in place pro-growth policies that would give America the opportunity to continue to be a beacon of hope and opportunity for the rest of the world.