Up For Grabs
Democrats need to figure out that they no longer have a lock on the multiracial working class.
I’m in New York City right now, where I attended a small conference a couple of days ago on the future of the Democratic Party. I don’t particularly care about the future of the Democratic Party per se, any more than I care about the future of the Republican Party — I’m not a partisan type of person. But I do care about the future of democracy and the future of our country, and both parties are an important part of that equation. So for that reason, the topic interests me greatly.
Out of all of the presentations given, one stood out to me. I’m not allowed to say who gave it, but I think it’s ok to say that she’s a former Republican operative who became a Never Trumper and eventually started working for the opposing team. So she had the résumé to speak on the subject of her presentation, which was how the Republican Party plans to defeat the Democratic Party permanently.
This is what it came down to: “The Republican Party,” she said, “wants to become a multi-ethnic, multicultural, working class movement.”
This isn’t news to anyone who paid much attention during the Trump years — it’s specifically Steve Bannon’s vision for the GOP, and it’s why the Trump administration ended America’s global free trade project and made protectionism the lynchpin of its foreign policy. But if you’re old enough to have lived through the younger Bush administration, or for that matter through the Reagan years, it never stops feeling a little surreal to hear it out loud.
The presenter went on: “The Republican Party today is shaped by two things: Rejection of the Bush era foreign policy, and Romney-Ryan business Republicans.”
Again, this is vintage Bannon — no breaking news here. But if being reminded of this tectonic shift in the Republicans’ self-conception doesn’t deliver at least a pin prick of a jolt nonetheless, you may not be fully grasping its implications. Trump lost re-election, but he indisputably won the argument he started inside of the GOP. The party’s future trajectory is inexorable. Within another election cycle, there will be no more old school Republicans left in Congress. They’ll either be voted out, switch parties, or do a wholesale conversion and become something completely unrecognizable to their former selves. For an old hat country club Republican to survive in the party, the latter is their only option. Lindsay Graham, one of the most shamelessly malleable Senators alive, may have thought he could pivot back to his pre-Trump, moderate identity after Trump’s ignominious loss. He learned otherwise.
There’s a deep irony in the way that this change came about. In 2013, after losing re-election to Barack Obama in a shock wave that was, to the Republican side, comparable in its psychological trauma to the Democratic loss to Trump four years later, the Republican National Committee issued its so-called “autopsy report.” The party, the report concluded, had come to be perceived by voters as mean-spirited and unsympathetic to their travails. It had earned a reputation for being unfriendly to non-white Americans in particular, and to Hispanics most of all. Among dozens of recommendations, the report advocated for softening the party’s rhetoric on immigrants and re-embracing comprehensive immigration reform.
Two years later, Trump rode down his golden escalator and blew that entire plan out of the water. He referred to (some) undocumented Mexican immigrants as “rapists,” announced his plan to Build The Wall, and kicked off one of the most overtly nativist presidential campaigns in American history. And he won. The party playbook was rewritten — or rather, the playbook the RNC had tried to jettison was re-embraced, with newfound zeal.
According to the RNC’s thinking, that should have been it for the future of the Republican Party with the ever-growing Latino electorate. But something weird happened between Trump’s first and second run: after four years of a presidency that was, when it came to immigration policy, entirely consistent with his xenophobic campaign in both tone and substance, his support among Hispanics grew by 8 points over 2016. In 2020, Trump won the votes of 41 percent of non-college-educated Latinos.
Not only that, but even after the 2020 summer of Black Lives Matter, support for Democrats among black voters dropped by three percentage points, continuing a slow but steady decline. Even the Asian vote nudged down for the Democrats a smidgeon, while white support increased by three percent.
Trump had repudiated the autopsy report’s recommendations for a nicer Republican Party. And yet, the outcome was exactly what the autopsy report aimed to achieve: a reversal of the GOP’s stagnation with minority voters. If you subscribe to the progressive race-centric view of American politics, this makes no sense at all. Under Trump, the Republicans are supposed to have become the party of white supremacy. How did they improve their standing among non-white voters, while the Democrats are doing better among white Americans?
The short answer is that the Republicans’ plan is working. In order to see that, you have to drop the racial lens and look at the electorate by social class. Latinos are drifting toward Republicans not because the RNC has any particular special sauce for Latinos, but because the overwhelming majority (80 percent) of them are working class. They’re starting to vote Republican for the same reason working class whites have been doing so for decades: because they have begun to perceive of the Democrats as the party of an overeducated elite that looks down on them, whether they do so with paternalistic empathy or with plain contempt. And if that’s the case with Latinos, there’s no reason to believe the same tendency won’t accelerate among working class blacks and working class Asians. Ruy Texeira has been beating this drum forever.
Every time a working class swing voter of any race or gender is asked to state his or her pronouns, every time they hear a progressive activist on TV saying that having breasts and ovaries doesn’t necessarily make you a woman, every time they’re told that all white people are hateful bigots and that America is a uniquely evil place, every time they see calls to abolish the police as crime rises around them, they grow more perplexed and alienated from a party whose intelligentsia speaks in bizarre idioms and seems to wield its strange beliefs as instruments of exclusion against the uninitiated. “Swing voters,” said the presenter, who has spent a great deal of time studying focus groups of regular American voters, “think Democrats sound like aliens.”
Every swing voter that walks away from the Democrats, scratching their head in confusion, will find the Republicans waiting to embrace them. Liberals can keep sneering and laughing at Tucker Carlson for obsessing week after week over one woke excess after another, but the whole point of the exercise is to flood the brains of working class swing voters with the Democrats’ weird avant-garde morality, driving them in droves from the Democratic fold. Carlson, along with the entire GOP, is trying to heighten the contradictions within the Democratic Party. And it’s working.
You may think I’m overstating the case based on voting trends that are, after all, still in the single digits. But bear in mind that the Democratic Party has been hemorrhaging white working class voters — the largest single tranche of the electorate — for decades. (I don’t know for certain what accounts for the small pickup among white non-college-educated voters for Biden, but my guess is it reflects the unique level of hostility Hillary Clinton elicited from those voters.) The Democratic coalition has become increasingly comprised of white college-educated Americans (relatively speaking, a small demographic) plus non-white voters. That doesn’t leave a wide margin for slippage. For the coalition to sustain itself, it should be gaining among non-white voters — particularly Hispanics — not losing them. The opposite is happening, and there’s no reason to believe it’s likely to plateau any time soon.
Democrats are so accustomed to thinking of themselves as heroes of the downtrodden and of the Republicans as the party of Scrooge McDuck that there’s a visceral resistance to even conceiving of the possibility of non-white working class voters re-aligning behind the GOP. But that failure of imagination only serves the Republican Party. Every day that the Democrats continue to bury their heads in the sand about the takeover of their institutions by the new ruling class is another day for the Republicans to reap the electoral bounty.
What really struck me, living out here in the micro-flyover land between Seattle and Portland, is that conditions for the working class, and in particular Latinos, really did improve noticeably during the Trump years. One of the dumbest things I often hear liberals ask is why people like that vote against their interests, which to me says they don't know a thing about what those people's interests actually are.
Thank you for another great piece.
God, I love this line: This is what it came down to: “The Republican Party,” she said, “wants to become a multi-ethnic, multicultural, working class movement.” As if that's an evil goal. But really she should have shortened it to "The Republican party wants to be a . . . working class movement." The rest comes naturally. You need no malevolent intention behind it. And of course the only way you become a working class movement is by paying attention to the working class.
I often find it strange how the smartest people can miss the simplest points. How we identify ourselves, or how we see ourselves, comes down to a list of characteristics or labels, as much as I hate them, and how we rank them in importance to our self-image. And the parties use those labels to gear their tactics and "scare" voters. The Republicans in the past have done this. I still know conservatives who are convinced Christianity is under attack. I remind them there is a church on every corner and those churches are richer than God. I personally could put that space to better use and tax the hell out of them, but the laws protect those buildings and spaces, so, no, "Christianity" is safe.
But as one example of this blindness on the Democrat side, they think that all people of Hispanic descent, no matter how long they have been in the US, should identify first and foremost as Hispanic. In other words, they are Hispanics who just happen to be American and working class. But where the rubber meets the road, in the Democrat theories, the *only* label that should matter to these people is "Hispanic." However, America has progressed. And ironically enough, the party that kept reminding us that America is a melting pot has forgotten that America is a melting pot. These days, more people with "brown skin" are thinking of themselves as American and working class who just *happen* to be Hispanic, which makes all the difference.
Which leads me to my next point. When I hear someone call Trump and by extension the Trump-influenced segment of the Republican Party "xenophobic," what they're really trying to say is they hate anyone who is not white. But I don't think non-white working class people are reading it that way. I think "xenophobic" means to them what it actually means, which is a fear of outsiders, which they may or may not agree with but is certainly a much smaller sin than hating all people who are not white. And in this case the whole Mexicans are rapist thing rang a little true for them. We are being flooded by gangs and drugs due to an unwillingness to screen the people coming in. We also are importing a group of people that are willing to work for far less than most Americans are willing to or even should be willing to work for simply because their papers aren't quite in order and that leaves them vulnerable to exploitation. So in that case, it doesn't matter that the last names are similar nor the skin color or place of origin. The people switching sides see themselves as American workers first and Hispanics second. You add in the fact that Hispanics are by and large Catholic, either devoutly or as a matter of heritage, and the socially conservative nature of the Republican Party is attractive to them. And, yes, other ethnicities will follow unless the Democrats have an epiphany, which I honestly don't see happening.
The other thing that is happening is Democrats are losing the "you're racist" war. I can't honestly think of anything more racist than reducing an entire group of people to a single label and accusing them of being traitors if they don't follow your expectations of that label. If there is anything to "white privilege," it is that we are allowed or even forced into a certain degree of diversity in thought, but minorities are not. Joe Biden's "gaffes" are always interesting for the amount of truth they contain: two of my favorites are "if you don't know who to vote for, you ain't black" and "poor kids are just as intelligent as white kids." That is the worst of Democrat philosophy in a nutshell, and I doubt I'm the only one who noticed. And I'd say it's because Joe is old and from that era, but that attitude pervades the Democrat Party and the media that spins for it.
I agree with you about the need for two thriving parties, but at the moment, the Democrats have true and well backed themselves into a corner.