09/22/2020
See also: Trump Still In Statistical Dead Heat With Biden, But His White Share Weakens
The Main Stream Media has finally discovered that President Donald J. Trump’s real weakness is with whites [‘It’s a big, big swing’: Trump loses ground with white voters, by David Siders, Politico, September 21, 2020]. Of course at VDARE.com we’ve been calling attention to this for months, and blaming Jared Kushner’s strategy of pandering to minorities. What’s really disturbing: even Rasmussen Reports, which recently showed Trump with his first-ever lead over Joe Biden (47%-46%) and therefore got no MSM publicity, shows this weakness with whites. The good news: Trump has upside potential. The bad news: it’s awfully late.
Donald Trump won in 2016 because he adopted (blundered into?) what VDARE.com calls the Sailer Strategy and focused on whites, especially in the Rust Belt, rather than Karl Rove–type pandering to minorities.
It’s easy to miss how extraordinary Trump’s triumph was among whites in 2016. He got about 58% of the white vote, which is roughly about what Romney got. But there’s a paradox that masks Trump’s true impact.
You have to consider the effect of Third Parties. Quite often you hear people say that Reagan got 59% of the white vote in 1980 and he won in a landslide and Romney got 59% of the white vote and was defeated, and that this is a measure to the extent to which the country has changed.
Well, that’s not exactly true — because there was a Third Party candidate in 1980, John Anderson, who got 6.6% of the vote, essentially all of it white. So the Democrats were more damaged by John Anderson and by Reagan in terms of the white vote.
And that’s exactly what happened in 2016. Green Party candidate Jill Stein and Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson, between them, got close to 5%. There were several states where that would have tipped the balance.
Nevertheless, Trump’s task in 2020 was to drive up the GOP’s share of the national white vote. Steve Sailer has calculated that, without any patriotic immigration reform at all, the GOP/GAP (Generic American Party) could still win nationally as late as 2050 simply by driving its white share up to 70% — which it already achieves in several Southern states.
After the 2016 election, I explained in detail to Trump how he could do this. There are enormous sectional variations in the U.S. white vote. He simply had to break into Greater New England — the predominantly white, historically Democrat states from Portland ME to Portland OR.
But Trump has made no specific effort to win this section. Indeed, his adoption of the GOP Establishment agenda included Paul Ryan’s tax bill, which by attacking the deductibility of state and local taxes from federal taxes (whatever its theoretical wonkish justification) actually damaged the very white groups in high-tax Northern states that Trump should have been trying to win.
Looked at in more detail, available to subscribers to its Platinum Service, Rasmussen reveals the peculiarity of Trump’s current position. Despite beating Biden overall, he only leads the Democrat nominee by a disgraceful 50%-45% among white voters.
But he does have, for a Republican, relatively unusual strength among blacks (22% — don’t laugh, that is high) and among Rasmussen’s “Other” category, which presumably means Hispanics and Asians — an amazing 50%. These two groups together make up only 30% of Rasmussen’s sample. But it seems that their relative although net negative) Trumpishness has counter-acted Trump’s weakness among whites.
Of course, we’re delighted to see Pat McCrory, the former GOP governor of North Carolina, tell POLITICO “he has been 'very surprised' that the Trump campaign has not leaned more heavily into immigration."
This confirms the point we’ve repeatedly made — Trump has real, if negative, achievements on immigration: above all, his anti-unemployment temporary immigration moratorium, his dramatic reduction of the immigrant workforce population, and his effective evisceration of the Refugee Resettlement Racket.
So why won’t he (and Republicans) campaign on them?
We’ll be revisiting the white share issue frequently from now on.
Peter Brimelow is the editor of VDARE.com. His best-selling book, Alien Nation: Common Sense About America’s Immigration Disaster, is now available in Kindle format.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.