Even if Trump loses, his gains among Hispanic voters and others have some recalling the way Nixon cleaved like-minded immigrants from the New Deal coalition.
Even if Trump loses, his gains among Hispanic voters and others have some recalling the way Nixon cleaved like-minded immigrants from the New Deal coalition.
I n the attempt to understand Donald Trump’s rise and place in our national politics, commentators and historians have reached for a number of current and historical analogies, most of them implausible. Some of his enemies hold that he is a “Putinist” and tie him to the rise of illiberal democracy as a threat within the world. Some of his admirers think of him as an Andrew Jackson–like figure. Some of his enemies see in him a figure of American backlash against racial progress, and look at the era of Reconstruction and Redemption.
But, sitting here at National Review, it’s impossible not to think of Nixon. Just as then, now liberals believe the entire psychology of the president can only be explained in the word “resentment.” And just as then, now National Review did not have a warm relationship with the man in the White House. But the most significant parallel is that just as then, now that man — with all his political faults, all his neuroses, and his self-destructive streak — leaves the Republican Party with a different voting base from the one it had before. He has done so, in part, by being heterodox on economic questions, nationalist in orientation, populist in tone, and confrontational with the press. He has done so by being not a typical conservative.
Some reports based on early exit polls show that the Republican Party in 2020 won its largest share of non-white voters in 60 years this week. Trump won nearly one in five black men, according to these exit polls. The biggest surges were seen among Hispanic voters, particularly in Florida but also in Texas and beyond. It has sharp political thinkers recalling the way Nixon cleaved “ethnic whites” from the New Deal coalition.
Nixon’s political earthquake was documented in Pat Buchanan’s essay “The New Majority” and Michael Novak’s “The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics.” Descendants of Irish, Italian, Polish, Greek, and Slavic immigrants found themselves alienated from a rapidly liberalizing Democratic Party, and Nixon capitalized on it.
Eric Levitz writes in New York magazine:
For a few years now, Democratic strategists have seen an emerging blue majority in the Sun Belt as a potential replacement for an increasingly tenuous Rust Belt coalition. But the former was and is highly dependent on the party retaining the lion’s share of the Hispanic vote. If non-college-educated Latinos assimilate into Republicanism like the “white ethnics” of yore, the Democrats’ electoral math in Nevada and Arizona could become more challenging.
Now, what Trump has done is only partly accomplished. It may yet be reversed. Nixon won a 49-state landslide in his reelection bid. Trump is looking more likely to be projected a loser, though the race remains unsettled as of this writing. But it is a consequential thing, and the Republican Party needs to take stock of its current voters if it’s to formulate any plan for becoming a true majority party in the U.S.
The term Hispanic, like “white ethnic” before it, is almost too large a catchall for the variety of nationalities that fall into it. And it obscures the regional and class nuances.
In many ways, by appealing to white working-class voters more directly, Trump kicked open a door to more Hispanic voters. Some descendants of Mexican or Puerto Rican immigrants really are a kind of addition to the white working class, working for small and medium owner-operated local enterprises, sometimes as the owners themselves. By doing so, they sit outside the larger educational and corporate institutions where the managerial Left has formative power. Many of them do so out of their own choice. And they connect with Trump’s businessman persona and his rejection of political correctness.
Anti-communism also plays an enormous role in bringing non-white voters into the GOP. The Cuban vote concentrated in Florida, which seemed to be drifting away from Republicans 15 years ago, has steered back to it. It has been helped along by anti-communist reinforcements among Venezuelan immigrants and refugees. The consolidation of the Venezuelan vote for the GOP was not just a matter of Trump’s style or messaging, but actual spade work by Republicans in the state. They came to America to escape self-styled “progressive” leaders and socialism. Though not Hispanic, Vietnamese-descended voters were also attracted to Trump’s GOP for similar reasons.
If Trump is leaving the GOP electoral scene, he is leaving it in much better health than George W. Bush did in 2008. Republicans are much nearer to taking the House. They face a much weaker president, and they may have a Senate majority. But more important, the ability of Trump’s GOP to execute something of a repeat of Nixon’s expansionary strategy has gone some way to depolarizing America’s racial politics. The GOP of Bush, McCain, and Romney fell to its absolute nadir among non-white voters. And there is little more poisonous to the politics of a multi-racial democracy than political factions that fall almost entirely along racial lines. Now the next step is to build on these gains by pushing westward with them in states such as Arizona, New Mexico, and even California.