THE TRENDS THAT LED TO TRUMP:
Tom Edsall and Michael Lind have pieces this week advancing similar arguments about the rise of Donald Trump. On Edsall’s side, it’s that Republicans were inevitably becoming the representative of angry white voters ever since the “Southern Strategy”. http://vlt.tc/22xm.
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On Lind’s, it’s that Trump is an indication the Tea Party stood for nothing more than what these angry white populist voters wanted – that it had no significant ideological component of limited government at all, and was really just another in a long line of white anti-immigrant populism. http://vlt.tc/22xn
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Lind’s piece, as is typical of his work, relies on virtually no data and copious amounts of historical revisionism – this is the man, after all, who argues that libertarianism is nothing more than a racist cult (really) and claimed Calvin Coolidge was a terrible racist. http://vlt.tc/wnv (To his credit, he is the American Poet Laureate when it comes to writing love poems about actual racist Woodrow Wilson.) http://vlt.tc/wl5 So let’s set that aside and focus instead on Edsall’s piece, which repeats a number of tropes that I hear regularly from smart people, which ought to be reconsidered.
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Here is Edsall’s argument, in a thumbnail: “The Trump phenomenon arguably represents a culmination of the 50-plus-year transformation of the Republican Party. That transformation was set in motion in 1964, when Barry Goldwater, the Republican presidential nominee, opposed the newly enacted Civil Rights Act. What remained of longstanding black support for the Republican Party disappeared overnight. In the four presidential elections before 1964, according to American National Election Studies, Republican candidates had won an average of 30 percent of the minority vote. From 1964 to 2008, the Republican share dropped to an average of 6.1 percent of the minority vote. Since 1964, the Republican Party has become, in effect, a white party.”
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First, I think anyone interested in politics needs to be aware of the work of Sean Trende in rebutting this concept. He has advanced a very capable argument that the actual trendline we see historically is a 1928-present trend of southern white voters moving into the Republican Party – a trend that was not tied to the "Southern Strategy" but to white voters’ break with increasing Democratic progressivism. http://vlt.tc/22xo “The gradual realignment of the South had been going for nearly forty years by 1964, and continued at a glacial pace after that…”
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In 1928, Herbert Hoover “won 47.6 percent of the South's popular vote… The Great Depression set Republicans back, but post-1948, Republicans began seriously working to pick the Democrats' lock on the South. In 1952, Eisenhower carried three Southern states. In 1956, he carried five, including deep Southern states like Louisiana… Eisenhower received at least one-third of the vote in every state in the Old Confederacy. The same is true for Nixon in 1960, when the pro-Civil Rights Nixon, who, as Kornacki observes, was representing an Administration that enforced Brown v. Board, carried Virginia, Tennessee and Florida. Texas, North Carolina and South Carolina were all decided by five points or less.”
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The point is that this idea that the “Southern Strategy” dramatically transformed the Republican Party “overnight”, as Edsall suggests, is just not justified by the data. The trendline is clear and steady, and the 1964 election was not the spark for a new realignment. Dan McLaughlin has more here. http://vlt.tc/22xp Larry Sabato has trends back to 1952 on this point, also predating civil rights. http://vlt.tc/22xr And Gerard Alexander is also worth reading on this point. http://vlt.tc/22xq
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There’s a good argument to be made that the Democratic Party has been losing whites as much as the Republican Party has been gaining them. And when it comes to mourning the loss of the Democratic white voter, I suggest you read Tom Edsall himself. http://vlt.tc/22xs Indeed, the most significant pre-Trump example of identity politics for white people in the modern era also came within the Appalachian context – and the Democratic push for Barack Obama. http://vlt.tc/22xt “The southwestern region, rising from the Roanoke Valley up to the Appalachian Plateau, is a place of small farms, coal mines, and chronic economic hard times. It was settled in the eighteenth century by Scots-Irish Calvinists who fled Anglican-dominated Ulster and, eventually, came to that portion of Virginia which the planter aristocracy didn’t want. Their descendants live in small hill towns that are nearer, in mileage and in spirit, to the old factory town of Ironton, Ohio, than to the glass office towers of northern Virginia. Three weeks after the Virginia primary, the mostly white, working-class voters of southern Ohio, a significant portion of them of Scots-Irish descent, helped deliver that state to Hillary Clinton. In the next weeks, their kin did the same in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Indiana, and Kentucky.”
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In 2012, many of these same white voters stayed home, denying Mitt Romney the support he needed. http://vlt.tc/22y0 They did not believe he stood for them – even as the more ideologically driven Tea Party voters swallowed hard and pulled the lever. And while that’s bad for the GOP, it’s an indication that the idea that Republicans are becoming an exclusively white party, and that the seeds for this are found in 50 year old decisions, is just not justified. Nor is it borne out by recent election results (and you don’t just need to point to the success of George W. Bush); Republicans, including many conservative Republicans, had dramatic success among Hispanic and Asian voters in the 2014 midterms. http://vlt.tc/22xu
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Demographic trends showing rising ethnic populations do not spell doom for the GOP. Trump’s base with its xenophobia is an organic phenomenon that draws upon preexisting sentiment and trends. So too is Obama’s base with its authoritarian elitism. But to suggest that Trump is a natural product of 1964, as Edsall does, or that he is a representation that we were all wrong about the Tea Party, as Lind does, is just wrong. Polling consistently indicates that Trump’s strongest supporters don't match up with Tea Party demographics – his voters are more moderate, less well off, more disaffected. Take just one aspect of his polling success: Trump does best at attracting Republicans who don't typically vote in primaries. http://vlt.tc/22j7 That’s pretty much the opposite of a Tea Partier.
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It is therefore an error to regard the Trump phenomenon as restricted to just the Republican Party – and it’s why, had Trump decided to occupy the Democratic Party or an Independent status instead, I expect we would be seeing many of the same reactions and tensions emerge. It is highly mediagenic representation of a society-wide problem: a collapse in popular faith in institutions and elites. http://vlt.tc/22xw Anyone thinking they will be spared its effects is deluding themselves. http://vlt.tc/22xx It’s not just the Republicans: it’s the whole country. http://vlt.tc/22xy The American people no longer trust our leaders to lead, our thinkers to think, our governors to govern. http://vlt.tc/22xz They are mad as hell about being ignored for so long – and so they are now backing an authoritarian who they believe speaks for them. Honestly – can you blame them?
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Oh, and what’s the Republican Party leadership’s answer to all of this? A loyalty pledge. http://vlt.tc/22y2 Really.
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