Jeff Greenfield is a five-time Emmy-winning network television analyst and author.

Three Republican candidates, three surprising, highly personal revelations—all within days of each other.

Gov. Chris Christie, well-known for his in-your-face, confrontational style, riveted a town meeting in New Hampshire with a double-barreled story that recounted the death of his tobacco-addicted mother and the death of a law school friend from a prescription drug overdose.


“When I sat there as the governor of New Jersey at his funeral, and looked across the pew at [my friend’s] three daughters, sobbing because their dad is gone—there but for the grace of God go I,” he said. “It can happen to anyone. And so we need to start treating people in this country, not jailing them.”

The video of Christie was well on its way to viral status when Jeb Bush, whose family is famously resistant to personal revelations, sat down with the Huffington Post on his campaign bus in New Hampshire to talk about the most painful part of his life: his daughter’s drug addiction. “I visited her in jail. Never expected to see my beautiful daughter in jail,” he said. “She went through hell.”

Within a day, Sen. Ted Cruz, as polished a wordsmith as anyone in politics, was telling CNN’s Jake Tapper about the crippling drug habit of his half-sister and his futile efforts to persuade her to leave a crack house. “I sometimes found it hard to reconcile the bright, fun and charismatic sister I adored with the person who would lie to me without hesitation and who stole money from her teenage brother to feed her various addictions.”

Listening to these candidates, it’s hard to detect the strident moralizing of the party that gave us “Just say no.” The GOP’s softening on drug addiction has quickly become one of the most striking themes of the 2016 campaign, even if it gets less attention than illegal immigration or repealing Obamacare. Suddenly, in a crowded and topsy-turvy primary season that seems to be rewarding outsiders who have torn up the political script, a number of Republicans are dispensing with the antiseptic bios and have found that voters are engaging with the messiest episodes of their lives.

What’s going on here? This is not a coincidence, or parallel “messaging.” In fact, if you look under the hood, you’ll find this is a convergence of important trends in both political style and demographics that could signal a rewrite of the American playbook on drugs and crime.

Violent crime, the urban kind that fixated voters in the 80s and 90s has dropped precipitously. But at the very same time a wave of drug crime driven by prescription drugs and now heroin has swept into every corner of American society, respecting now geographic, social or political boundaries. Hollow-eyed addicts were suddenly just as much a feature of red state back roads as they were on the boulevards of big cities. Heroin use has climbed among all demographic groups, but it has skyrocketed among whites; nearly 90 percent of those who tried heroin for the first time in the last decade were white.

All this has changed the way GOP politicians are engaging with their voters. Multimillionaires like the ones who make up most of the presidential field might not have a lot in common economically with most voters, but when it comes to addiction they are discovering points of empathy with a wide cross section of the electorate.

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Remember when FDR told America that he would beat the Depression the way he beat polio? Remember when JFK told us how he learned to endure pain during his ordeal in the Pacific and his life-threatening surgeries? Remember when Reagan talked of putting his alcoholic father to bed?

Of course you don’t—because they never said those things. In earlier days (and Reagan was very much a product of earlier times) that’s not how politicians talked. Today, a personal “narrative” is as crucial an element of a campaign as a super-PAC and a micro-targeter.

“I see it as one of the more positive movements in our political culture,” says longtime Republican consultant Stu Stevens, who is unworried about the possibility of artifice on the part of candidates, “People have a good bullshit detector to pick up whether people are being sincere or not.”

Maybe the seeds were planted in Nixon’s 1952 “Checkers” speech when he answered charges of financial misconduct with a detailed account of his assets and debts, including his wife’s “good Republican cloth coat.” Maybe it was fed by Jimmy Carter’s intensely personal case for his candidacy—the peanut farmer/evangelical who would never lie to us. Maybe Bill Clinton’s 1992 acceptance speech blazed a path (“I never knew my father”). Or Al Gore’s two vice-presidential acceptance speeches-one invoking his son’s near-fatal auto accident, the other his sister’s harrowing death from lung cancer. Maybe it was Bush the father painting himself as a risk-taking entrepreneur or Bush the son’s story of his meeting with juvenile offenders, or guardedly acknowledging his own struggles with substance abuse.

Whatever the sources, the need for prospective presidents to connect on a visceral, personal level is profound. And there’s no more effective tool than recounting some personal travail. Indeed, when linked to the policy proposals that accompany such testimonials, they act as enhancers of credibility: I know what drugs can do because I have seen it firsthand.

Christie’s viral video notwithstanding, the effectiveness of these personal revelations is hard to measure. Christie has fallen to the second-tier debate and Bush remains mired in the single digits in many polls. But there is no sign that they, or the rest of the crowded GOP field, are going to stop sharing. And that might say more about the electorate than it does the candidates.

There was a time when it was possible for Middle America to think of drugs as something that happened to “them”—to the black and brown urban poor. Today, there is no “them.” Drugs are in Our Town, Pleasantville, Farmville.

The evidence is in the statistics. Drug overdoses are the leading cause of “injury death” among Americans—greater than from motor vehicle crashes and firearms. And of those overdoses, more than half were from heroin or prescription drugs. Substance abuse is one key reason why the death rate among less educated white Americans has risen over the last several years. The evidence is also anecdotal: In January 2014, Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin devoted his entire State of the State address to the epidemic of addiction in the Green Mountain State. “The time has come for us to stop quietly averting our eyes from the growing heroin addiction in our front yards,” Shumlin said, “while we fear and fight treatment facilities in our backyards.”

So whether it’s Oxycontin or heroin, it is simply impossible to assume that the problem lies in those fetid big cities far removed from the “real America.” As the New York Times reported late last month: “When the nation’s long-running war against drugs was defined by the crack epidemic and based in poor, predominantly black urban areas, the public response was defined by zero tolerance and stiff prison sentences.”

And the growing army of families of those lost to heroin—many of them in the suburbs and small towns—are now using their influence, anger and grief to cushion the country’s approach to drugs, from altering the language around addiction to prodding government to treat it not as a crime, but as a disease. One of the longest-running themes in national politics—the “war on drugs”—has become a lot less potent now that drug abuse increasingly affects “us” and not just “them.”

Stevens, the GOP consultant who steered Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign, adds a personal dimension to this. “When I was in Iowa, I’d go on morning runs in small towns,” he remembers, “and in every town there was a halfway house, or a treatment center. It’s something people are living with all over the country.”

It’s an inexact analogy, but when people began to learn that a friend, a colleague, a family member was gay, they stopped seeing gays as residents of some alien culture. It’s one of the reasons why attitudes toward gay marriage changed so sharply and quickly. So when people began to discover that they might have a friend or family member grappling with substance abuse, it was simply impossible to see them as strangers, unworthy of their compassion.

This empathy, however, may come with more than a whiff of special pleading (“Jail them? Great! Jail my kid? Uh uh.”) And that may explain why relatively hard lines on other issues—like immigration and welfare—remain the coin of the realm in the GOP universe. Not many Republicans identify with “them.”

But it’s also true that these recent comments by candidates come in the wake of a strong movement among conservatives that prison sentences for non-violent drug abusers is neither compassionate nor cost-effective, merging the outlooks of evangelicals and bean-counters. The organization “Right on Crime” has compiled an impressive collection of views from some of the most ardent of politicians on the Right. Typical are the comments of ex-Texas Gov. Rick Perry: “There are thousands of non-violent offenders in the system whose future we cannot ignore. Let’s focus more resources on rehabilitating those offenders so we can ultimately spend less money locking them up again. … The idea that we lock people up, throw them away, never give them a chance at redemption, is not what America is about.”

This argument gets push back from some elements of the Republican base. Matt Dowd, who helped President George W. Bush win re-election in 2004, notes, “This reform message is problematic with a big chunk of GOP base which has a throw-away-the-key attitude, and feels [that] if you broke the law, you do the time. [They] would just as soon cut expenses on prisons (metal cots and take away their TV sets) and not worry about rehabilitation.”

“It is a two-edged sword right now in the GOP base,” he said. The argument needs to be made using conservative principles of values, Christianity and accountability.”

In debates and on the campaign trail, Carly Fiorina often says that she has “buried a child” to drug addiction. When she mentions her stepdaughter Lori’s death in 2009, she speaks of the need for rehabilitation rather than punishment. She speaks of her faith, which she says was tested by the ordeal. And she equates Lori’s downward spiral to the same hopelessness that Fiorina says she has seen in the eyes of the chronically unemployed. Fiorina and the other candidates know that such narratives help connect them to a constituency that may well have its own personal link to the issue—and that likely has heard similar calls for reform from deep within the political Right.

The impetus to roll back a couple of decades of overly punitive prison sentences has benefited from an uninterrupted decline in violent crime. The fear that drove Richard Nixon’s “law and order” campaign in 1968, the first time that crime became an issue in a presidential campaign, just doesn’t hold the same sway as it did when murder rates were climbing.

Back then the public response was swift and clear. Voters removed judges who were deemed insufficiently tough on crime. A presidential candidate who had as governor continued a furlough program for criminals was fatally wounded at the polls by accounts of the depredations of one such prisoner. Bill Clinton was sufficiently concerned about the issue to fly back to Arkansas to preside over the execution of a mentally disabled inmate.

Today—despite the headlines from Ferguson to Baltimore—crime rates have plummeted. In 2013, the most recent year for complete statistics, there were 1.16 million violent crimes, the lowest amount since 1978. In 1990, in New York City there more than 2,000 homicides. Last year there were 328, the lowest in more than 50 years.

It’s a hypothesis I’m offering, but it seems plausible that if citizens demand draconian measures when crime is high, they may be willing to consider less harsh measures when crime is low. And politicians may be more willing to offer alternatives, especially if it suggests that taxpayer money might be saved.

So when you combine the impulse of candidates to reveal themselves with the new understanding of who are victims of the drug epidemic with a less threatened, more open electorate, maybe the surprising notes of empathy from the campaign trail are really not all that surprising.

