The Republicans Are Now Officially the Party of White Paranoia
ABC News published an intriguing poll the other day, one that spelled out a growing racial divide:
“Nonwhites see Trump negatively by a vast 17-79 percent… That said, whites are the majority group – 64 percent of the adult population – and they now divide evenly on Trump, 48-49 percent, favorable-unfavorable. Clinton, by contrast, is far more unpopular than Trump among whites, 34-65 percent. So while racial and ethnic polarization is on the rise in views of Trump, it remains even higher for Clinton.”
The Republicans already lost virtually the entire black vote (scoring just 4 percent and 6 percent of black voters the last two elections). Now, by pushing toward the nomination a candidate whose brilliant plan to “make America great again” is to build a giant wall to keep out Mexican rapists, they’re headed the same route with Hispanics. That’s a steep fall for a party that won 44 percent of the Hispanic vote as recently as 2004.
Trump’s supporters are people who are tired of being told they have to be part of some kind of coalition in order to have a political voice. They particularly hate being lectured about alienating minorities, especially by members of their own party.
Just a few weeks ago, for instance, establishment GOP spokesghoul George Will spent a whole column haranguing readers about how Trump was ruining his party’s chances for victory. He noted that Mitt Romney might have won in 2012 if he’d pulled even slightly more than 27 percent of the Hispanic vote.
Will blasted Trump’s giant wall idea and even ridiculed the candidate’s deportation plan by comparing Trump to Hitler:
“The big costs, in decades and dollars (hundreds of billions), of Trump’s project could be reduced if, say, the targets were required to sew yellow patches on their clothing to advertise their coming expulsion.”
It’s not clear how forcing 11 million people to wear yellow patches saves money, but whatever. However it was supposed to be taken, the shock argument didn’t work.
A few days later, in a rare episode of National Review-on-National Review crime, blogger Ramesh Ponnuru blasted Will for his hysterics. He argued Romney wouldn’t have won even with a 45 percent bump in the Hispanic vote. “He needed more votes, obviously,” Ponnuru wrote, “but he didn’t need more Hispanic votes in particular.”
Ponnuru was echoing an idea already expressed by the conservative commentariat. Hack-among-hacks Byron York said the same thing in the Washington Examiner back in 2013. He argued that even 70 percent of the Hispanic vote wouldn’t have helped Romney, whose more serious problem “was that Romney was not able to connect with white voters who were so turned off… that they abandoned the GOP.”
Rush Limbaugh bought what York was selling, arguing that Romney didn’t lose because he failed to convince Hispanic voters that Republicans “like ‘em.”
“The difference-maker was, a lot of white voters stayed home,” Rush said.
Anyway, the night after Ponnuru ran his brief blog post a week and a half ago, Trump had Univision anchor Jorge Ramos tossed from a press conference in Dubuque, Iowa, sneering at him to “siddown” and “go back to Univision.”