Why The Republican Party Chose To Be So White
One thing you might have noticed during this presidential campaign is how Trump has spoken to “suburban women” in language along these lines: “The suburban voter, the suburban housewife … they want security and they want safety ... they don’t want to have their American dream fulfilled and then have a low-income housing process [sic] built right next to their house or in the neighborhood.”
It’s a pretty clear anti-Black dog whistle on Trump’s part; it’s also pretty clear that he thinks the way to appeal to white women in the suburbs is through race-baiting language. The strategy doesn’t match with the ideological proclivities of that particular demographic group in 2020 -- college-educated voters have grown more liberal on race issues and white women in the suburbs are a Democratic-leaning group these days -- Trump’s clumsy appeals are rooted in history.
The Republican Party has for decades made the choice to pursue the votes of white people at the expense of those in other racial groups. I wrote about this decades-long strategy in detail this summer. Trump’s misguided attempts to talk to suburban women are framed clearly within the electoral playbook that has dominated the GOP for much of his lifetime. While the Black vote was evenly split between the Democratic and Republican Party in 1942, by 1980, Republican Ronald Reagan would win only 14 percent of the Black vote.
What happened in the interim was that indifference on the part of Republican Party when it came to Black voters -- Republicans coasted for decades on Black voters’ affinity for the party of Abraham Lincoln -- turned into outright animosity with the onset of the Civil Rights movement and the shift of Southern Democrats into the Republican Party. Pitting racial and ethnic groups against each other in Northern cities as well as in the South proved to be a winning electoral strategy for the GOP.
But in 2020, the GOP could be heading for a real reckoning. Polls consistently show that most Americans think Trump is racist. That’s not a great place for the head of a political party to be, especially since white people will no longer be a majority in the country in a couple decades. No matter the outcome of 2020, I think the next few years could prove a turning point for the party.