So Long, Grand Old Party; Hello, White People’s
Party
A Donald Trump
nomination paints Republicans even further into a demographic corner.
07/18/2016
Huffingtonpost.com
S.V. Date Senior Political Correspondent, The Huffington Post
CLEVELAND – As it officially puts Donald Trump atop its ticket this week, theGrand Old Party is rushing headlong toward an
unofficial label it is desperately trying to avoid: the White People’s Party.
With his harsh tone
toward Mexicans, his proposed ban on Muslims from entering the United States
and his seeming tolerance of white nationalist groups, the reality TV star is
painting Republicans ever further into a demographic corner that could threaten
their viability as a national political organization in the coming decades.
“If we don’t expand
our ability to reach voters, particularly Hispanic voters, and the rising tide
of Asian voters, we’re going to have a generational wipeout,” said Florida’s
Rick Wilson, a Republican political consultant and longtime Trump critic.
Trump’s language and
positions appear to be translating into dismal poll numbers already,
particularly in those states where it could matter most. In Florida, a June poll found Trump receiving 20 percent
support from Latino voters compared to 68 percent for presumptive Democratic
nominee Hillary Clinton.
And in Ohio and Pennsylvania,
a Marist College poll for NBC News and The Wall Street Journal released last
week actually showed Trump with zero percent supportamong
African-American voters.
It wasn’t supposed to
be this way at all. Just three years ago, the Republican National Committee
published a report detailing the relentless demographic changes the country was
undergoing, and how the party’s very existence was at stake if it failed to
expand beyond its traditional base.
“If we want ethnic
minority voters to support Republicans, we have to engage them and show our
sincerity,” wrote the authors of the “Growth and Opportunity Project,” giving
the example of 2012 nominee Mitt Romney’s poor showing with Latinos. “If
Hispanics think we do not want them here, they will close their ears to our
policies.”
Many Latino
Republicans are already doing so, thanks to Trump. One California delegate said
he tried to give away guest passes to the Cleveland convention to Mexican-American friends – longtime
GOP donors from the Los Angeles area – as a way to get more black and brown
faces in the Quicken Loans Arena. He was unable to find a single taker, he
said, on condition of anonymity to speak freely about his party’s nominee. “Not
even one,” he said.
But Trump campaign
chairman Paul Manafort said the candidate’s appeal would transcend race and
ethnicity. “We think that the message that Donald Trump is talking about ―
jobs, security, trying to bring law and order to a community with no preference
to any particular ethnic group ― we think those messages will resonate,” he
said at a Sunday news conference, and then predicted: “We do think that our
Hispanic support is growing. ... I expect to do much better that Romney did in
2012 in the Hispanic community.”
Other Republicans
remain unpersuaded.
One of the authors of
that 2013 report, Ari Fleischer, said Trump’s nomination will at least test the
validity of their conclusions. “Certainly Donald Trump has gone in the opposite
direction from what we recommended,” said the former top aide to President
George W. Bush. “If he loses, he’ll give even more credence to our report.”
Republicans’ Long, Uneasy History With Race
At Trump rallies
across the country, even in racially diverse communities like San Pedro,
California, and Fairfax County, Virginia, black or brown faces are few and far
between.
At the Iowa State Fair
last summer, two middle-aged white men who had just dropped kernels of corn
into Trump’s jar at a makeshift straw poll there discussed how important it was
to end both illegal and legal immigration because the newcomers’ children would
be American citizens ― and by dint of their ethnicity further change this
country. (Neither wanted to share his name with a reporter.)
At a June Trump
campaign event in St. Clairsville, Ohio, 62-year-old Brenda Johnson also railed
against immigrants, and explained how much it upset her to hear them speak in
other languages. “They should speak English in public,” she said. “It’s fine if
they want to speak in their own language at home.”
Such attitudes, of
course, are not new among voters, and Trump is certainly not the first
Republican presidential candidate to use racially tinged language and identity
politics.
That began in earnest
in 1968, when Richard Nixon took advantage of Southern Democrats’ anger over
President Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 Civil Rights Act to make inroads into the Deep
South. While openly segregationist George Wallace ran a third-party campaign
that year and won five of those states, Nixon’s use of the “Southern Strategy”
led to what aide Kevin Phillips called “the beginning of a new Republican era”
in his 1969 book The Emerging Republican Majority.
It was a dramatic
reversal for a party that was founded to abolish slavery a century earlier, and
which through the first half of the 20th century consistently supported civil
rights laws for African-Americans. But from 1968 forward, Republican
presidential candidates, to varying degrees, used phrases that appealed to
working-class white voters who believed that Democrats were, at the expense of
poorer white people, favoring blacks and other minorities.
Nixon’s appeal for
“law and order,” Ronald Reagan’s story of the Cadillac-driving welfare mom, and
George W. Bush’s refusal to condemn South Carolina’s display of the Confederate
battle flag from atop its state capitol all spoke to a constituency that delivered
Republicans the White House in every election between 1968 and 1988, with the
exception of the post-Watergate election in 1976, when former Georgia
Gov. Jimmy Carter won narrowly.
But in 1992,
California flipped from Republican to Democratic, as Mexican-American voters
responded to Republican efforts to crack down on undocumented immigrants.
Republicans quickly learned that the “Solid South” no longer gave them a lock
on the Electoral College.
In the subsequent
years, Florida, then Colorado and Virginia, also came into play in presidential
elections as their minority populations increased ― to the point where
demographics now actually favor a Democrat over a Republican.
Ironically, Trump’s
racially polarizing candidacy could actually accelerate that shift. North
Carolina, which President Barack Obama narrowly won in 2008 but narrowly lost
four years later, currently is leaning slightly toward Clinton. Georgia could
also wind up closer than the 8-point win for Mitt Romney in 2012, while
traditionally red Arizona, with its large Mexican-American population, could
actually break for Clinton.
As it happens, this
was exactly the sort of demographic change the party warned about in its 2013
report. Between 2000 and 2012, the Republican presidential candidate got
between 87 and 88 percent of his total votes from white people. But as the
electorate has gradually become less white, white votes are no longer enough to
win. Only once in the past six elections has the GOP candidate won the popular
vote: 2004, when George W. Bush took 43 percent of the Hispanic vote. In the
2012 election, Romney won only 27 percent of that vote.
“The nation’s
demographic changes add to the urgency of recognizing how precarious our
position has become,” the report stated. “According to the Pew Hispanic Center,
in 2050, whites will be 47 percent of the country while Hispanics will grow to
29 percent and Asians to 9 percent.”
Minority Outreach Undone By Trump
At the RNC’s meeting in Boston the summer after the 2012 loss to
Obama, party Chairman Reince Priebus fairly scolded Romney for suggesting
during the primary season that immigrants living in the country illegally
should “self-deport.”
“Using the word
‘self-deportation’ ― I mean, it’s a horrific comment to make,”Priebus said.
“It’s not something that has anything to do with our party. But when a
candidate makes those comments, obviously it hurts us.”
For party leaders, the
need to adapt was not only for the next presidential election, but for the
presidential elections in decades to come. Mainstream Republicans got behind a
comprehensive immigration overhaul, as the “autopsy” recommended, and watched it
pass the Senate only to founder in the House as the party’s disproportionately
Southern, disproportionately working-class base revolted.
In perhaps the most
ominous sign of where things were headed, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio (R), a
co-sponsor of the bill in that chamber, reversed himself and opposed it as he
positioned himself for his presidential run.
The rejection of the
party’s received wisdom was complete when Trump in his announcement speech
called undocumented immigrants from Mexico “rapists” (although he allowed that
some might be good people) and promised to build a wall along the southern
border. In the coming months, he vowed to ban Muslims from entering the United
States as a response to terrorist attacks, declined at first to criticize
former KKK leader David Duke, and most recently defended the use of an image
that resembled the Star of David badge that Nazis forced Jews to wear in
Hitler’s Germany before they systematically rounded them up and murdered them.
Even this week, when
offered the opportunity to speak at the NAACP conference in Cincinnati ― a mere
30 minutes away on his 757 jet ― Trump declined, even though he was afforded
the flexibility to speak at the time and day of his choosing. Every recent GOP
nominee has spoken at the conference, going back to George W. Bush in 2000.
The promise to “take
our country back” and “make America great again” appeals to lesser-educated
whites who wish for a return to an era when a college degree was not necessary
to earn a middle-class living and the population was overwhelmingly white, said
Alan Abramowitz, a demographer at Emory University. “He’s trying to appeal to a
sense of displacement, a sense of being left out, of being left behind,” he
said. “Elect me and we’ll finally have a leader who will undo all these
terribles.”
Priebus, in the wake
of a new poll showing Trump’s overall standing with Latinos down to 14 percent, told Fox News on Sunday that Trump appreciates the
need to do better.
“I know Donald Trump’s
going to be doing a Hispanic engagement tour coming up soon,” Priebus said. “He
understands we need to grow the party ― it’s the party of the open door,
tone, rhetoric, spirit ― all those things matter when communicating to the
American people.”
That statement,
though, is somewhat of a departure from the party’s typical response since
Trump became the presumptive nominee, which is to ignore the Growth and Opportunity
Project report and the long-term strategy behind it. Instead, they focus on the
tactics for this coming election, and how, despite everything, Trump can still
triumph by winning big among white working-class voters in places like
Pennsylvania and Ohio and Wisconsin.
RNC members and
officials, in fact, even insist that Trump will exceed expectations among
Latino and African-American voters, his rhetoric to date and current polling
notwithstanding.
Even in her hometown
of Miami, where two of the three Cuban-American members of Congress have
disavowed Trump, Ferre said Trump has the potential to do well. She pointed to
his 22 percent showing in Miami-Dade County, Rubio’s home, in the March 15
primary. “I think that speaks volumes,” she said, adding that Trump’s campaign
will work hard to win over those Latino voters in November. “I think they’re
waiting to be courted.”
And North Carolina’s Ada
Fisher, one of only a handful of African-American RNC members, said Trump will
exceed expectations with black voters, too. “I think Trump will do quite fine.
I think he will do great things,” she said, showing off the “Make America Great
Again” hat his campaign had given her. “I’ve been a supporter of Donald Trump
since the beginning.”
To Florida consultant
Wilson, the official party line on Trump ― from the idea that he will do well
with minorities to the hope that he can drive up working-class white voter
turnout enough to win ― is just plain silly, especially with Trump’s weakness
with college-educated white voters and women voters generally.
“This is them trying
to whistle past the graveyard, pretending like Donald Trump isn’t happening,”
he said. “Math is math, it doesn’t negotiate.”
