The president changed the way we talk about race. Now 2020 is a referendum on diversity.
U.S. 2020 Democrats Donald Trump GOP Today, we started a big, beautiful wall.” It was mid-February, and President Donald Trump was crowing at his first MAGA rally of 2019. There was no new wall, of course, and everyone in the border town of El Paso, Texas, could see that. But in the sea of red hats at the County Coliseum, the line was met with roars of approval.
What they were “not saying,” of course, had mostly to do with race. And Trump has said quite a bit over the past two years, from defending the “very fine people” at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, to disparaging the “shithole countries” to shutting down the government and declaring a national emergency over an “invasion” of migrants that could “infest our country.”
Trump is unique in the scale and depth of his appeal to WHITENESS, his sustained racially charged campaign to “Make America great again” UNMATCHED in modern political history. President Lyndon Johnson shakes hands with Martin Luther King Jr. and hands him a pen after using it to sign the Civil Rights Act on July 2, 1964. Bettmann Archive/Getty
And before the 2016 election, few appreciated the magnitude of the audience for such a message. According to Ashley Jardina, a Duke political scientist who studies whites and American politics, at least 40 percent of Caucasians acknowledge having some degree of “white identity,” a loose term that exists on a spectrum. Racists who support hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan are a small minority of these so-called white identifiers, about 10 percent.
White identity, he argues, is bogus because it doesn’t stem from the kind of historical discrimination suffered by women, gays and people of color. In other words, whites have always and still do dominate the nation, economically and politically, so to proclaim one’s white identity is to celebrate a supremacist status.
In addition to the perceived threat of a growing minority population, whites without a college education faced a very real problem: death. Those with no more than a high school diploma were dying off at rates 30 percent higher than African-Americans, many to “deaths of despair,” as Princeton professors Anne Case and Angus Deaton, a Nobel Prize–winning economist, put it in 2015, attributable to drugs, alcohol and suicide.
Trump, with his pledge to “make America great again,” activated the equivalent of a political sleeper cell. Two-thirds of whites without a college education backed the Republican nominee, the largest margin in a presidential election since 1980, although without support from white wealthy Republicans he likely would not have won the election. Not surprisingly, the data finds a strong correlation between “white identity” and support for the candidate in the red MAGA hat.
The moral authority fell to Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, the GOP’s lone black member in the Senate. “Some in our party wonder why Republicans are constantly accused of racism,” he wrote in The Washington Post. “It is because of our silence when things like this are said.”So diversity is the winner, right? Not so fast.
Why? “It’s different when you have a white male making the arguments. They carry more weight,” he said. “Should they carry more weight? Absolutely not. But do they? Yes.” This assessment, of course, comes as news to the most diverse slate of candidates the party has ever seen. “It’s pretty insulting to white people,” Senator Kamala Harris of California told Vanity Fair. “People seem to have a need to fit others into these discrete, neat compartments of their brains. It undervalues the intelligence of the American people.
That talk resonates with voters like Eric Ash, the Democrat turned Republican pastor of Mount Olive Evangelical Lutheran Church in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, which is part of a swing congressional district. Like many of the people in the fading steel towns west of Pittsburgh, he voted for Obama in 2008. Later, he changed his registration and cast a ballot for Trump in 2016—mainly, he says, because of his concerns about legal abortion.
And the Democratic message is as important—if not more important—than the messenger, adds Morrison, who cites Michigan electing a female governor, Gretchen Whitmer, in November with the highest share and total votes of any Democratic gubernatorial candidate in the state in the past decade. Whitmer’s campaign slogan, “Fix the damn roads,” was the sort of strong kitchen table message that strategists believe can override racialized messaging.
In 2016, Clinton and Sanders held similar positions. But the party has since moved to the left, and some leading 2020 contenders are revisiting reparations and other race-conscious proposals, including housing assistance, universal child care and government-funded savings accounts for low-income children. “We have to be honest that people in this country do not start from the same place or have access to the same opportunities,” Harris said on the radio show The Breakfast Club.
Meanwhile, Republicans are always eager to use the left’s so-called identity politics against them. Like gender-free bathrooms, the issue of reparations is guaranteed to inflame not only conservatives but also white identifiers, who already resent their perceived loss of power. In 2014, a YouGov poll found that half of white Americans believe that slavery is “not a factor at all” in the lower average wealth of blacks; just 6 percent support cash payments to the descendants of slaves.
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