Appeals to bigotry are nothing new for Trump. The modern Republican Party itself has been shaped in crucial ways by racial division long before he entered politics.
But what’s striking now, nine months before midterm elections, is how explicitly Trump and his GOP followers have embraced a theme that inverts the onus of racism in America. Whatever history shows, they insist, White people today represent its victims at least as much as Blacks and other minorities.
“The message,” as Democratic pollster Cornell Belcher puts it, “is to pour as much gasoline on the fire of White grievance and victimhood as possible to energize and mobilize their vote.”
Trump’s rise has been both cause and effect of that swelling grievance. The so-called “Southern strategy,” from which Republicans harvested support from racial conservatives after Democrats nationally embraced the civil rights movement in the mid-1960s, proved a formative event in the party’s evolution.
Race-driven wedge issues, from school busing to welfare to criminal justice, subsequently gained increasing prominence in Republican politics. In deference to the sensibilities of more socially liberal voters, as the late strategist Lee Atwater once explained, GOP candidates over time stripped overt racial references from discussion of those issues.
The GOP rank and file has followed suit. With the Census Bureau projecting that demographic change will make America a majority-minority nation within a generation, most White Republicans now claim the status of victim.
In October 2015, for example, polling by the Public Religion Research Institute showed that a 61% majority of White Republicans rejected the idea that White people faced “a lot of discrimination” and just 38% said they did.
By January 2021, those views had flipped. A 55% majority of White Republicans said White people face a lot of discrimination, while 45% said they did not. Among all Americans aside from White Republicans, 26% said White people face a lot of discrimination, while 72% said they did not.
Emily Ekins of the libertarian Cato Institute, who has closely tracked Trump’s following, found that 73% of his 2020 voters believe that “today discrimination against whites has become as big a problem as discrimination against blacks and other minorities.” A similar proportion disagree that “American society systematically advantages white people,” while an even larger 87% reject the view that “white people should feel guilty about racial inequality.”
Nor are appeals to White grievance assured of enhancing Republican results next November. The better-educated suburban swing voters least likely to respond to them turn out at disproportionate rates in midterm elections.
“Every year these appeals are getting less and less powerful,” said Celinda Lake, a pollster who advised Biden’s 2020 campaign. “Just because it’s happening doesn’t mean it’s a winning strategy.”
