MATTHEW CONTINETTI: America’s Political Realignment Is Real.
The latest example: AEI researcher Nate Moore investigated Trump’s growing favorability rating and found that the former president is more popular now than at any point since he left office. The source of this newfound popularity is minority voters. “While his support has ticked up among white and black Americans,” Moore wrote this week in The Liberal Patriot, “the share of Hispanic Americans who have a favorable view of Trump has doubled over the last year from around 20 percent to 40 percent.”
John Burn-Murdoch, chief data reporter for the Financial Times, analyzed election surveys going back to the 1950s. He found that the Democrats’ advantage among nonwhite voters is at its lowest point since JFK was president. Black and Hispanic voters are matching their party preferences with their ideological preferences. Fewer self-identified conservative nonwhites vote Democratic for communal reasons.
“The migration we’re seeing today is not so much natural Democrats becoming disillusioned,” writes Burn-Murdoch, “but natural Republicans realising they’ve been voting for the wrong party.” That has made Trump’s GOP more diverse, more non-college, and more conservative.
Realignment proceeds in stages. Non-college-educated white voters were the first to abandon the Democrats, beginning in the late 1960s. Nixon’s “hardhats” and the Reagan Democrats disliked their former party’s positions on crime, busing, inflation, Vietnam, and the counterculture.
In the second stage, college-educated white voters in the suburbs began drifting away from the GOP in the 1990s. President Bill Clinton’s soccer moms couldn’t vote for Republican candidates affiliated with the Religious Right and the NRA. By 1998, journalist David Brooks was visiting well-heeled suburbs such as Winnetka, Ill., and finding that the rich Republicans were turning into Democrats.
Trump’s election in 2016 marked the onset of the third stage. College-educated white voters left the GOP in droves, but the Republican Party remained competitive because Trump drew in large numbers of non-college-educated white voters spread throughout the country. The white working class felt a gut connection to Trump, who also began picking up support among Hispanic voters and black men—despite the media narrative that he and MAGA are racist.
Biden’s presidency has catalyzed the educational realignment. Though “Joe from Scranton” presents himself as a champion of the working class, his spending, energy, and environmental policies have worsened living standards by contributing to rising prices and interest rates. The crisis on the southern border alarms voters concerned about security, civic disorder, and the rule of law. The world has become more dangerous, with Russia invading Ukraine, Iranian proxies wreaking havoc in the Middle East, and China and North Korea testing American willpower. State collapse in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Venezuela, and Haiti fuels migration and unrest. Biden will turn 82 in November. He doesn’t look up to the job.
As Glenn wrote in the New York Post in September: Here’s how Republicans can get minority voters to abandon the Democrats.
I propose that Republicans, or GOP-aligned groups, start an education and outreach program aimed at those immigrants, explaining to them what Democrats actually support.
It should include pictures of teenage girls whose breasts have been removed as they transition to being male, with their mothers standing proudly by them (these pictures are already out there on social media, circulated by the pro-transition crowd).
It should include Democratic officials’ own words about removing police from urban neighborhoods and letting social workers deal with violent crime.
And it should include environmentalists’ vows to get rid of air conditioning, automobiles, cheap electricity and inexpensive housing — you know, the kinds of things immigrants come to America to get.
Automobiles, you say? Biden Campaign, Establishment Media Attack Trump with Fake Interpretation of ‘Bloodbath’ Comments in Ohio Rally.