by Christopher Roach
There are a lot of post-mortems on the election at the moment. Many who predicted a Kamala Harris victory are now trying to explain how Donald Trump was elected. Their ability to analyze the data ex ante was clearly flawed, but humility and objectivity have not been journalistic virtues for a long time.
In the run-up to the election, Trump demonstrated many strengths, which I have written about previously, including his physical courage, his authenticity and comfort with common people, and his resilience in the face of persecution.
He was also strong on the issues, including crime, immigration, and inflation. These were the main failures of the Biden administration and the main expressed concerns of voters. Kamala’s campaign of “vibes,” “joy,” and other glittering generalities never convinced voters how she would address any of these problems or why she was the right person to do so.
One of the bigger surprises was Trump’s massive increase in support among various minority groups. He got 20 percent of black men, at least 40 percent of Hispanics, a plurality of Arab voters in Michigan, over 60 percent of Native American voters, and a majority of young male voters. In almost all cases, these gains exceed his performance in 2016 and 2020.
This expansion of the base defies the conventional wisdom. Even before 2008, when Obama destroyed John McCain, analysts argued that the Republican Party needed to become more moderate to appeal to women, minorities, and recent immigrants.
In the eyes of analysts, the Republican Party needed to adapt to a new America, which contained an emerging majority made up of different minority groups. The party’s perceived harshness on immigration and other artifacts of the “Southern Strategy” were deemed to be the main causes of the party’s failure to forge a majority coalition.
In facing these changes, the alleged nativism and bigotry of the Republican Party loomed large. In response, George W. Bush began to flirt with amnesty for illegal aliens and told us, “Family values do not stop at the Rio Grande.” Indeed, they do not, but our country does.
Republican leadership convinced themselves that amnesty would be a great act of magnanimity for which the party would be rewarded. They presumed, but never really established, that immigrant-citizens care a lot about helping illegal immigrants. They also downplayed how their doctrinaire, pro-corporate policies tended to turn off blue-collar, Hispanic immigrants.
The entire time, the Democratic left’s massive apparatus of hostility to America’s history and white Americans continued apace. Easily cowed by any suggestion that their policies were racist, Republicans avoided any defense of our shared American heritage and never would acknowledge that native-born Americans, who were mostly white, may have certain interests that were undermined by affirmative action, mass immigration, and the like.
Even after the 9/11 attacks, which found their roots in Islamic extremism, any suggestion that a Middle Eastern background may be a risk factor in issuing visas or screening airline passengers was treated as an indefensible act of irrational racism, even by the Bush administration. So grandmas who traced their ancestry to the American Revolution had to take off their shoes and get strip-searched at the airport.
When the GOP emerged from the Obama Era, the 2016 primary contenders lined up with one another competing for immigrant votes. They spoke Spanish during the primary debates, talked about how amnesty was the solution to immigration, and expressed hostility to tariffs designed to shore up the wages and dignity of the American worker.
In other words, when facing manipulative allegations of racism and the prospect of America’s changing demographics, the pre-Trump Republican Party would consistently get weak in the knees and pander.
When that didn’t work, they would pander harder.
The energy was weak and demonstrated a total lack of confidence. Rather than accruing more votes, the intended audience for this campaign found it disgusting and repellent.
Trump showed that expanding the Republican coalition would paradoxically come from doing the opposite of what was counseled by the consulting class; namely, self-respect and standing up for the concept of the common good. Trump’s positions on many issues—the border, immigration enforcement, and building a wall—have been attacked ad nauseam as racist, retrograde, and offensive. They were supposed to turn off the emerging non-white majority and, combined with the large numbers of existing liberals, would lose him the election.
But it all worked out. He did better with all minority groups, particularly Hispanics, than the George W. Bushes, McCains, and Romneys of the world. It has been a big surprise, but there are a few reasons for this.
First, Trump never accepted the one-sided and unbalanced concept of race relations, where whites do all the bad things and everyone else is a victim group. It turns out that groups get along when each has a certain amount of self-respect and accountability. Holding one’s head high, honoring one’s ancestors, and asserting one’s rights tend to prevent a death spiral of mutual animosity and recrimination. It brings out the best in everyone.
Trump’s rhetoric always emphasized national unity and our collective interest in the common good, but he acknowledged that members of the majority were equal participants in American life and entitled to respect like everyone else. This is anathema to the modern politics of racial spoils, where whites, and white men in particular, are demonized constantly under the logic of “intersectionality.”
Second, many Hispanics and others who have rallied to Trump are not so distinct from the native-born that their interests and identities are distinct. Many are deeply assimilated, have several generations in our country, and no longer have significant contact with their countries of origin. Many intermarry with Americans of other backgrounds.
Also, the native cultures of Latin America tend to have a more fluid notion of race and identity than the United States. To put it bluntly, in spite of the best efforts of our public schools at anti-assimilation coupled with Democrats’ attempts to stoke the flames of resentment, Hispanics are not particularly hung up on race and grievance.
Finally, the Democrats’ politics of racial spoils may simply have too many contradictions to forge a stable, majority coalition. For example, Arab and Jewish Americans lately have a lot of disagreement owing to the war in Gaza. It was hard for Harris to appeal to both parties at once given the Biden administration’s policies. While both groups are historical parts of the Democratic coalition, Trump’s reputation as a peacemaker served him well with the Arab community, despite his very public affinity for Israel.
Most of Trump’s critics in the media, the Democratic Party, and the pre-Trump GOP are weak, a collection of wimps, nerds, and schoolmarms. By contrast, Trump has a ton of presence, many years of success in business, and is a well-known ladies’ man. He knows from all of these experiences that excessive attempts to please others are a turnoff.
Everyone can respect and appreciate a real man. That’s why Trump did so well with hitherto unreachable groups. And that’s why he won.
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Christopher Roach is an adjunct fellow of the Center for American Greatness and an attorney in private practice based in Florida. He is a double graduate of the University of Chicago and has previously been published by The Federalist, Takimag, Chronicles, the Washington Legal Foundation, the Marine Corps Gazette, and the Orlando Sentinel.
Photo “Trump Rally Crowd” by Team Trump.
