This is not a bloody argument I want to have.
Quote:Why do YOU so concern yourself with the voting trends of Black and brown people?
Why are the voting trends of any groups of people regularly discussed? We read profiles of women voters, we read about trends among South Asian voters, and in this election, coverage of Muslim voters has also been a feature. In the case of young Black men, it's been covered since it was first noticed in 2020. And it concerns me because Black voters have been instrumental in helping to elect Democrats for years. So if a growing number of Black voters are turning toward someone like Trump – not just skipping the election but actually voting for this racist – it will make winning elections more difficult. Why is that hard to see? If we wish to reverse this trend it will need to be addressed, not ignored.
A report from the Labor Department yesterday showed that inflation has dropped again, falling back to 2.4%, the same rate as it was just before the coronavirus pandemic. Today the Dow Jones Industrial Average jumped 400 points to a record high, while the S&P 500 closed above 5,800 for the first time.
Washington Post economics columnist Heather Long noted that “by just about every measure, the U.S. economy is in good shape.” Inflation is back down, growth remains strong at 3%, unemployment is low at 4.1% with the U.S. having created almost 7 million more jobs than it had before the pandemic. The stock market is hitting all-time highs. Long adds that “many Americans are getting sizable pay raises, and middle-class wealth has surged to record levels.” The Federal Reserve has begun to cut interest rates, and foreign leaders are talking about the U.S. economy with envy.
Democratic presidential nominee and sitting vice president Kamala Harris has promised to continue the economic policies of the Biden-Harris administration and focus on cutting costs for families. She has called for a federal law against price gouging on groceries during times of crisis, cutting taxes for families, and enabling Medicare to pay for home health aides. She has proposed $25,000 in down payment assistance for first-time homebuyers and promised to work with the private sector to build 3 million new housing units by the end of her first term.
The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, which focuses on the direct effect of policies on the federal debt, estimated that Harris’s plans would add $3.5 trillion to the debt.
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has promised to extend his 2017 tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations and to impose a 10% to 20% tariff across the board on imported goods and a 60% tariff on goods from China. Tariffs are taxes paid by American consumers, and economists predict such tariffs would cost an average family more than $2,600 a year. Overall, the effect of these policies would be to shift the weight of taxation even further toward middle-class and lower-class Americans and away from the wealthy.
The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates that these plans would add $7.5 trillion to the debt.
But there is more: Trump has also made deporting undocumented immigrants central to his promises, and his running mate, J.D. Vance, has claimed the right to determine which government policies he considers legal, threatening to expand deportation to include legal migrants, as well.
Michael Hiltzik of the Los Angeles Times noted on October 8 that in March, the Peterson Institute for International Economics pointed out that the immigrants Trump is targeting are vital to a number of U.S. businesses. Their loss will cause dramatic cutbacks in those sectors. Taken together, the study concluded, Trump’s deportations, tariffs, and vow to take control of the Federal Reserve could make the country’s gross domestic product as much as 9.7% lower than it would be without those policies, employment could fall by as much as 9%, and inflation would climb by as much as 7.4%.
And yet, in a New York Times/Siena Poll of likely voters released on October 8, 75% of respondents said the economy was fair or poor. Further, although a study by The Guardian showed that Harris’s specific economic policies were more popular than Trump’s in a blind test, 54% of respondents to a Gallup poll released on October 9, thought that Trump would manage the economy better than Harris would.
Part of Americans’ sour mood about the economy stems from the poor coverage all the good economic news has received. Part of it is that rising prices are more immediately obvious than the wage gains that have outpaced them. But a large part of it is the historic habit of thinking that Republicans manage the economy better than Democrats do.
That myth began immediately after the Civil War when Democrats demanded the government renege on the generous terms under which it had floated bonds during the war. When the Treasury put those bonds on the market, they were a risky proposition, but with the United States secure after the war, calculations changed, and Democrats charged that investors had gotten too good a deal.
Republicans were horrified at the idea of changing the terms of a debt already incurred. They added to the Fourteenth Amendment the clause saying, “The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.” When that amendment was added to the Constitution in 1868, the Democrats’ fiscal rebellion seemed to be quelled.
But as Republicans increasingly insisted that protecting big business with a high tariff wall was crucial to the American economy, Democrats called for lowering tariffs to give the consumers who paid them a break. In response, Republicans said that those suffering in industrial America were lazy or spendthrifts and warned that Democrats were socialists. When Democrats took control of both chambers of Congress and put Grover Cleveland in the White House in 1892 with a promise to lower tariffs, Republicans insisted that the economy would collapse. But, the Chicago Tribune wrote, “The working classes of the country need such a lesson…. The Republicans will be passive spectators… It will not be their funeral.”
Their warnings of an impending collapse prompted investors to take their money home. On February 17, 1893, fifteen days before Cleveland would be sworn into office, the Reading Railroad Company went under, after which, as one reporter wrote, “the bottom seemed to be falling out of everything.” By the time Cleveland took office, a financial panic was in full swing.
Republican lawmakers and newspapers blamed Democrats for the collapse because everyone knew they would destroy the economy. Republicans urged voters to put them back in charge of Congress, and in 1894, in a landslide, they did. “American manufacturers and merchants and business-men generally will draw a long breath of relief,” the Chicago Tribune commented just days after the Republican victory. Republicans had successfully associated their opponents with economic disaster.
That association continued in the twentieth century. In 1913, for the first time since Cleveland’s second term, the Democrats captured both Congress and the White House. Immediately, President Woodrow Wilson called for lowered tariff rates and, to make up for lost revenue, an income tax. Massachusetts senator Henry Cabot Lodge called the tariff measure “very radical” and warned that it would destroy all the industries in Massachusetts. As for the income tax, big-business Republicans claimed it was socialism and that it discriminated against the wealthy.
For the rest of the century, Republicans would center taxes, especially income taxes, as proof Democrats were bad for the economy. As soon as World War I ended, Republicans set out to get rid of the high progressive taxes that had paid for the war. Andrew Mellon, who served as treasury secretary under presidents Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover, took office in 1921 and set out to increase productivity by increasing investment in industry. To free up capital, he said, the government must slash its budget and cut taxes. From 1921 to 1929, Mellon returned $3.5 billion to wealthy Americans through refunds, credits, and tax abatements.
The booming economy of the 1920s made it seem that the Republicans had finally figured out how to create a perpetually prosperous economy. When he accepted the 1928 Republican nomination for president, Herbert Hoover said: “We in America are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land. The poorhouse is vanishing from among us…. [G]iven a chance to go forward with the policies of the last eight years, we shall soon, with the help of God, be in sight of the day when poverty will be banished from this nation.”
The Great Depression, sparked by the stock market crash of October 1929, revealed the central weakness of an economic vision based in concentrating wealth. While worker productivity had increased by about 43% in the 1920s, wages did not rise. By 1929, 5% of the population received one third of the nation’s income. When the stock market crash wiped out the purchasing power of this group, the rest of the population did not have enough capital to fuel the economy.
Mellon predicted that the crisis would “purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people.” The Hoover administration preached thrift, morality, and individualism and blamed the depression on a wasteful government that had overstaffed public offices. To restore business confidence, Republicans declared, the nation must slash government spending and lay off public workers.
But most Americans had had enough of Republican economics, especially as the crash revealed deep corruption in the nation’s financial system. In 1932, voters overcame their deep suspicion of Democratic economic policies to embrace what Democratic presidential candidate Franklin Delano Roosevelt called a “New Deal” for the American people, combating the depression by regulating business, providing a basic social safety net, and investing in infrastructure. Hoover denounced Roosevelt’s plans as dangerous radicalism that would “enslave” taxpayers and destroy the United States.
Voters elected FDR with about 58% of the vote. Over the next forty years, Americans of both parties embraced the government’s active approach to promoting economic growth and individual prosperity by protecting all Americans.
But when President Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, he promised that returning to a system like that of the 1920s would make the country boom. He called his system “supply-side” economics, for it invested in the supply side—investors—rather than the consumers who made up the demand side. “The whole thing is premised on faith,” Reagan’s budget director David Stockman told a reporter. “On a belief about how the world works.”
Under Reagan, deficit spending that tripled the national debt from $995 billion to $2.9 trillion—more federal debt than in the entire previous history of the country—along with lower interest rates and deregulated savings and loan banks, made the economy boom. Americans watching the economic growth such deficit spending produced believed supply-side economics worked. Tax cuts and spending cuts became the Holy Grail of American politics, and the Democrats who opposed them seemed unable to run an economy.
But that belief was not based in reality. In April the nonpartisan Economic Policy Institute found that since 1949 the nation’s annual real growth has been 1.2 percentage points higher under Democratic administrations than under Republican administrations (3.79% versus 2.60%), total job growth averages 2.5% annually under Democrats compared to barely over 1% under Republicans, business investment is more than double the pace under Democrats than under Republicans, average rates of inflation are slightly lower under Democrats, and families in the bottom 20% of the economy experience income growth 188% faster under Democrats than under Republicans.
A recent analysis by former Goldman Sachs managing director H. John Gilbertson expands on those numbers, showing that Democratic administrations reduce the U.S. budget deficit and that stock market returns are 60% higher under Democrats than under Republicans.
Democratic President Joe Biden returned the country to the proven system that worked before 1981, and the economy has boomed. While Trump has vowed to return to the tax cuts and deregulation of supply-side economics, Vice President Harris has promised to retain and fine-tune Biden’s policies.
But Harris has to overcome more than a century of American mythmaking.
Historian Timothy Shenk joins us for a conversation about his new book, Left Adrift: What Happened to Liberal Politics, a timely look at political strategy on the liberal-left as the New Deal Consensus cracked up in the late 1960s and 1970s through Bill Clinton's presidency and beyond. He tells the story of how Democrats responded to class dealignment through the careers of two consultants, Stan Greenberg and Doug Schoen—a story that, following these two men, also takes us to the UK, Israel, and South Africa. We discuss what happened to the New Deal coalition, arguments about how to appeal to working class voters drifting right, the limits—and necessity—of polling and even focus groups, why Bill Clinton's role in the rise of neoliberalism is more complicated than you might believe, lessons for the American left from their being crushed in Israel, and what all this might mean for 2024.
Sources:
Timothy Shenk, Left Adrift: What Happened to Liberal Politics (2024)
Douglas E. Schoen, Enoch Powell and the Powellites (1977)
Stanley B. Greenberg, Race and State in Capitalist Development (1980)
"Explaining McCarthy," TIME, April 18, 1969
(...) Much of the erosion in support for Ms. Harris is driven by a growing belief that Democrats, who have long celebrated Black voters as the “backbone” of their party, have failed to deliver on their promises, the poll showed. Forty percent of African American voters under 30 said the Republican Party was more likely to follow through on its campaign commitments than Democrats were. (...)
Barack Obama got blunt in Pittsburgh on Thursday. He chided Black men who are not supporting Kamala Harris, saying that some of “the brothers” were just not “feeling the idea of having a woman as president.”
That left me mulling again: Is Harris in a dead-even race against a ridiculous person because of her sex or is that just an excuse?
Hillary Clinton did not lose because she was a woman. She lost because she was Hillary Clinton. She didn’t campaign hard enough, skipping Wisconsin and barely visiting Michigan. She got discombobulated about gender and whinged about sexism.
I asked James Carville if Kamala’s problem is that too many Americans are still chary about voting for a woman, much less a woman of color. The Ragin’ Cajun chided me.
“We’re not going to change her gender or her ethnic background between now and Election Day, so let’s not worry about it,” he said. “Time is short, really short. They need to be more aggressive. They don’t strike me as having any kind of a killer instinct. They let one fat pitch after another go by. I’m scared to death. They have to hit hard — pronto.”
Her campaign, he said dryly, “is still in Wilmington.”
Kamala spent a week answering questions on “60 Minutes” and “The View” and on the shows of Stephen Colbert and Howard Stern. And she didn’t move the needle.
“She needs to stop answering questions and start asking questions,” Carville said. He thinks that, for her closing message, she should put the issue of Jan. 6 and who won the election on the back burner.
Instead, he said, she should ask:
“How dare JD Vance say with a straight face that Trump is the father of Obamacare when Trump tried to kill it 50 times?”
She should display pictures of right-wing judges who Trump could appoint to the Supreme Court, and ask if Americans are ready for an even more fanatical court.
She should ask: “Do you know how destructive tariffs can be? They will kill your freaking jobs.”
She should say she’s going to end the Trump tax cuts for the rich and ask voters if they would rather use those trillion-plus dollars to help young people afford their first home.
In other words, he said: “She should scare the crap out of voters. You know, Trump is just taunting us, having a rally at Madison Square Garden just like the Nazis did in 1939.
“Black men and young Black men have to think about what they have at stake in the election. Donald Trump tells you that you have nothing to lose. Well, you have health insurance you could lose, you have a job you could lose.”
Other Democratic strategists I talked to agreed that Harris needs to let her guard down, cut loose and turn on the afterburners. Mainly, her pitch is that she’s not Donald Trump. And that’s an excellent pitch.
But she needs to make the case for herself more assertively.
It’s hard to understand why she didn’t sit down with a yellow pad or laptop long ago and decide why she wanted to be president, what her top priorities would be and how she would get that stuff done. The Vision Thing. Even when getting softballs from supportive TV hosts, Harris at times seemed unsure of how to answer.
She didn’t learn to tack to the center in bright blue California. When asked on “The View” whether she would have done anything different than Joe Biden, she said “there is not a thing that comes to mind” — a flub if you want to convey change.
Harris should distance herself from Biden when she needs to; she should just admit what we all know, that the border policy was bollixed up and that Biden was not tough enough with the execrable Bibi.
Kamala’s guarded nature leaves people feeling that she’s not fully revealing herself. Her reluctance to do serious interviews made her look fearful. She should have been interacting more with the media as a way of getting off the teleprompter and giving a sense of who she is as a person.
She does her homework but her delivery seems more scripted than from the kishkes. Even though it can get weird and duplicitous, Trump is better at riffing.
As Harris grinds it out, trying to woo white women who are ambivalent about Trump, she does have one big advantage: Abortion rights are on the ballot and, as a woman, she can conjure the medieval nightmare that Trump and Vance threaten.
When Harris linked her story about caring for her mother, dying of colon cancer, to her plan to get Medicare to cover some in-home care, she effectively offered a specific policy idea while revealing her vision for a kinder America than Trump has in mind.
His lies about the federal response to Hurricanes Helene and Milton have consequences. When Trump says the government is not helping people in red locales, those affected might not apply for aid. Perhaps Trump’s most ludicrous whopper is that he would be the Protector of Women.
It’s disturbing that Harris can’t get over the hump and outpace Trump. As Carville says, we need less mulling and more action in a do-or-die moment. She needs to do so we don’t die.
I was pointing out that despite best intentions you have come across as patronising.
You don't seem to be able to see that.
It's not about how you address people at all.
In 2016, Donald J. Trump became the Republican nominee and ultimately won the presidency after calling many Mexican immigrants rapists and falsely claiming that Barack Obama was not born in the United States.
Eight years later, the polls suggest that he might well return to the White House by faring better among Black and Hispanic voters combined than any Republican presidential nominee since the enactment of the Civil Rights Act in 1964.
How is this possible? It’s a question I get often, and the latest New York Times/Siena College polls of Black and Hispanic voters nationwide represent our best effort at answering it.
Like our other surveys this cycle, the polls find Mr. Trump faring unusually well for a Republican among Black and Hispanic voters. Overall, Kamala Harris is ahead, 78 percent to 15 percent, among Black voters, and she’s leading, 56-37, among Hispanic voters.
Almost any way we can measure it, Mr. Trump is running as well or better among Black and Hispanic voters as any Republican in recent memory. In 2020, Joe Biden’s Black support was 92 percent among major-party voters; his Hispanic support was 63 percent, according to Times estimates.
The poll offers plenty of insight into Mr. Trump’s strengths and Ms. Harris’s weaknesses, but it does not offer a simple, definitive answer. This may be unsatisfying, but it should not be surprising. After all, analysts are still debating whether Mr. Trump’s strength among white working-class voters is attributable to the economy, racism, ideology, sexism, Hillary Clinton’s liabilities or one of countless other theories. There still isn’t a definitive answer, even with the benefit of the final results and almost a decade of research.
The truth is there are many explanations and they’re hard to untangle. Here, I’ll offer five explanations offered by the survey. This list is not comprehensive — not even close. But each one plays a role in the story.
Before going on, an important thing to keep in mind: While Mr. Trump is doing far better than prior Republicans, he is still far from winning a majority of the Black or Hispanic vote. As a consequence, many of the factors helping Mr. Trump apply only to a minority of Black and Hispanic voters. Even so, Democrats have typically won these groups by such wide margins that even modest support by Black or Hispanic voters can lay the groundwork for politically significant gains.
1. They don’t mind the dog whistles
To liberals, Mr. Trump’s views on race, crime and immigration are little more than racist dog whistles.
Many Black and Hispanic voters feel similarly, but a surprising number hear those dog whistles and like what they’re hearing.
Around 40 percent of Black voters and 43 percent of Hispanic voters say they support building a wall along the Southern border. Similarly, 45 percent of Hispanic voters and 41 percent of Black voters say they support deporting undocumented immigrants.
Half of Hispanic voters and nearly half — 47 percent — of Black voters say that crime in big cities is a major problem that’s gotten out of control. That’s essentially the same as the share of white voters (50 percent) who say the same.
The support for Mr. Trump’s views extends beyond issues related to race and immigration. A majority of Black and Hispanic voters seem to sympathize with his “America First” foreign policy, saying that America ought to pay less attention to problems overseas and concentrate on problems at home. Previous Times/Siena surveys have found that a substantial share of Black and Hispanic voters agree with Mr. Trump on trade as well.
Or put differently: There’s a lot about Mr. Trump’s core populist, conservative message that resonates with a sizable chunk of Black and Hispanic voters.
2. They’re not offended; they might even be entertained
Of course, Mr. Trump hasn’t just used dog whistles in his campaigns. Sometimes, he’s used a bullhorn.
During his time in national politics, he has offended millions of Black and Hispanic voters, including by recently saying that Haitian refugees eat cats and dogs and that undocumented immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.”
But a sizable minority of Black and Hispanic voters aren’t necessarily so offended.
Overall, 20 percent of Black voters say that those offended by Mr. Trump take him too seriously, while 78 percent agree people have good reason to be offended.
Similarly, 40 percent of Hispanic voters say people offended by Mr. Trump take his words too seriously, while 55 percent say there’s good reason to be offended. And importantly, only about one-third of Hispanic voters say Mr. Trump is talking about them when he’s talking about problems with immigration.
Why aren’t more Black and Hispanic voters offended by Mr. Trump? One possible factor: He hasn’t necessarily offended them so much recently.
While most voters have been offended by Mr. Trump at some point, a substantial 53 percent of Hispanics and 35 percent of Black voters said they hadn’t found anything he has said recently to be offensive. Those tallies are down a bit from earlier in the year — perhaps the remarks about Haitian refugees are a factor — but I’d guess more voters would have said they had been offended recently if we had asked the same question in the heart of the 2016 campaign.
Another factor: A sizable number of Black and Hispanic voters appear to be entertained by Mr. Trump.
In this survey, we asked voters whether they thought Ms. Harris or Mr. Trump was more “fun” — a question that could potentially capture everything from Ms. Harris’s claim to “joy” to Mr. Trump’s “locker-room talk.”
Overall, voters said Ms. Harris was more “fun” than Mr. Trump — she even led on “fun” among white voters, even though Mr. Trump led among white voters in the poll.
But among Black and Hispanic voters, the story was a bit more complicated. They do rate Ms. Harris as more “fun,” but by a much narrower margin than her lead over Mr. Trump in the presidential race. Mr. Trump’s relative strength on “fun” comes almost entirely from men; he led on the measure among Hispanic men. Age is a factor, too: Younger voters are far likelier to find Mr. Trump “fun” with respect to Ms. Harris than voters over 65.
Put all of this together, and Mr. Trump isn’t quite as unpopular as you might guess among Black and Hispanic voters. Overall, 17 percent of Black voters and 41 percent of Hispanic voters say they have a favorable view of him.
3. It’s the economy, stupid
It’s obvious, and yet it still doesn't get enough attention.
Many people assume that Democrats win Black and Hispanic voters simply because of the party’s commitment to advancing racial equality, but the role of economic self-interest should not be underestimated. Democrats started winning Black and Hispanic voters in the 1930s, not in the 1960s, because Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal helped redefine the Democrats as the party of the working class, not just the party of the former Confederacy.
Just 20 percent of Hispanic voters and 26 percent of Black voters say the current economic conditions are good or excellent. More than half of both groups say they have “often” cut back on groceries over the last year because of the cost.
This is important for economically vulnerable voters — especially those who have previously voted for Democrats on the assumption that they represented their economic interests. Overall, the economy was the most-cited issue among Black and Hispanic voters when asked what would most decide their vote this November.
As a celebrity billionaire businessman, Mr. Trump has always had an advantage on this issue, whether against Mrs. Clinton or Mr. Biden. Now, Mr. Trump is running again at a time when voters are more dissatisfied with the economy than before, and when many look back on Mr. Trump’s presidency as a prosperous and peaceful time. Ms. Harris has a mere 69-25 lead among Black voters who rate the economy as the most important factor for their vote; Mr. Trump leads, 61-35, among Hispanic voters who say the economy matters most.
When combined with the rest of Mr. Trump’s populist pitch, the poll finds that the Democratic core brand advantage as the party of the working class has eroded. Black and Hispanic voters still see Democrats as the party of the working class, but only by a 76-18 margin in the case of Black voters and a 56-35 advantage among Hispanics. It’s a notable shift from September 2022, when Democrats had a 58-27 lead among Hispanic voters by this measure.
4. The end of hope and change
Even beyond the poor state of the economy, there’s something deeper holding Democrats back: a sense that voting for them just won’t make much of a difference.
Of all the questions in the survey, perhaps the single worst one for Democrats was on the question of which party best “keeps its promises.” Just 63 percent of Black voters and 46 percent of Hispanic voters said “keeps its promises” describes the Democratic Party better than the Republicans.
Black and Hispanic voters don’t necessarily doubt Democratic intentions, but they are disappointed in the results. Democrats fared poorly on questions like whether the party can “fix the problems facing people like me,” even as they excelled on “understand the problems facing people like me.”
In the presidential race, few seem to be convinced that Ms. Harris will make a difference in their lives. Just 50 percent of Hispanic voters said Ms. Harris would do more to help them personally, while 37 percent said the same for Mr. Trump. Among Black voters, 73 percent said Ms. Harris would do more to help them personally, compared with 14 percent who said the same for Mr. Trump.
Why are Democrats doing so poorly on these measures? Much of it, of course, is about the state of the economy today. But for a decade this problem could be heard between the lines — in focus groups and interviews and polls of Black and Hispanic voters — stemming from a perceived failure of Mr. Obama’s presidency to bring the kind of change that many hoped it might.
In a way, Democrats are suffering the cost of having held the presidency for 12 of the last 16 difficult years. The period began with high hopes, most of all for Black voters. Today, voters remain deeply dissatisfied with the state of the country and the economy. Great expectations weren’t met.
5. For a new generation, Trump is ‘normal’
The Times/Siena polls suggest Mr. Trump has made his largest gains among young Black and Hispanic voters — especially young Black and Hispanic men.
Overall, he has a 55-38 lead among Hispanic men 45 or younger. Ms. Harris leads among Black men under 45, but only by 69-27. The results among 18-to-29-year-old Hispanic and Black men are even more striking, though the samples are small.
In contrast, Ms. Harris holds far more typical leads for a Democrat among younger women, with a 68-30 edge among Hispanic women under 45 and 87-6 among young Black women.
These young men came of age long after the civil rights movement that cemented nearly unanimous Democratic support among Black voters 60 years ago. The youngest were toddlers during the Obama ’08 campaign. They may not have a vivid memory of Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign. To them, Mr. Trump may be “normal” — a fixture of their lives to this point, naturally making it harder to depict him as a norm-defying “threat to democracy.”
While these events forged and cemented Democratic loyalties among their elders, today’s young Black and Hispanic voters have come of age in a different era. There was the political, economic and cultural upheaval of the Trump era and the pandemic, including lockdowns and vaccine mandates; the Black Lives Matter movement; and the backlash against “woke” that followed. They experienced rising cost of goods and housing just as they entered their first years of independent living.
The poll offers relatively little evidence about how these events shaped the political views of young Black and Hispanic men. Prior Times/Siena polling has found a sliver of young Black and Hispanic men who appear relatively moderate on traditional economic and cultural issues, but also seem to resent the prevailing “politically correct” or “woke” cultural norms of their generation. It may also be worth noting that young voters were especially likely to say Mr. Trump was “fun.”
What’s perhaps most important, however, is that Mr. Trump has made his largest gains among voters who were political blank slates. If Mr. Trump was going to surge among groups with traditional loyalties to Democrats, it makes sense that it manifested among the younger, less engaged voters who had weak or no previous attachment to the Democratic Party.
This same phenomenon, however, leaves lingering doubts about whether all of Mr. Trump’s gains will materialize on Election Day. Young Black and Hispanic men are not the most reliable, high-turnout voters. Indeed, a disproportionate share of Mr. Trump’s Black and Hispanic supporters say they will “probably” support Mr. Trump, but not “definitely.”
But whatever happens this November, today’s young Black and Hispanic voters will be the regular Black and Hispanic voters of the future. Even if Mr. Trump’s support is not fully realized in the final results this November, it may only be a matter of time before Republicans break through.
“He is the most dangerous person ever. I had suspicions when I talked to you about his mental decline and so forth, but now I realize he’s a total fascist. He is now the most dangerous person to this country…a fascist to the core.”
This is how former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, the nation’s highest-ranking military officer and the primary military advisor to the president, the secretary of defense, and the National Security Council, described former president Donald Trump to veteran journalist Bob Woodward. Trump appointed Milley to that position.
Since he announced his presidential candidacy in June 2015 by calling Mexican immigrants rapists and criminals, Trump has trafficked in racist anti-immigrant stories. But since the September 10 presidential debate when he drew ridicule for his outburst regurgitating the lie that legal Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating their white neighbors’ pets, Trump has used increasingly fascist rhetoric. By this weekend, he had fully embraced the idea that the United States is being overrun by Black and Brown criminals and that they, along with their Democratic accomplices, must be rounded up, deported, or executed, with the help of the military.
Myah Ward of Politico noted on October 12 that Trump’s speeches have escalated to the point that he now promises that he alone can save the country from those people he calls “animals,” “stone cold killers,” the “worst people,” and the “enemy from within.” He falsely claims Vice President Kamala Harris “has imported an army of illegal alien gang members and migrant criminals from the dungeons of the third world…from prisons and jails and insane asylums and mental institutions, and she has had them resettled beautifully into your community to prey upon innocent American citizens.”
Trump’s behavior is Authoritarianism 101. In a 1951 book called The True Believer, political philosopher Eric Hoffer noted that demagogues appeal to a disaffected population whose members feel they have lost the power they previously held, that they have been displaced either religiously, economically, culturally, or politically. Such people are willing to follow a leader who promises to return them to their former positions of prominence and thus to make the nation great again.
But to cement their loyalty, the leader has to give them someone to hate. Who that is doesn't really matter: the group simply has to be blamed for all the troubles the leader’s supporters are suffering. Trump has kept his base firmly behind him by demonizing immigrants, the media, and, increasingly, Democrats, deflecting his own shortcomings by blaming these groups for undermining him.
According to Hoffer, there’s a psychological trick to the way this rhetoric works that makes loyalty to such a leader get stronger as that leader's behavior deteriorates. People who sign on to the idea that they are standing with their leader against an enemy begin to attack their opponents, and in order to justify their attacks, they have to convince themselves that that enemy is not good-intentioned, as they are, but evil. And the worse they behave, the more they have to believe their enemies deserve to be treated badly.
According to Hoffer, so long as they are unified against an enemy, true believers will support their leader no matter how outrageous his behavior gets. Indeed, their loyalty will only grow stronger as his behavior becomes more and more extreme. Turning against him would force them to own their own part in his attacks on those former enemies they would now have to recognize as ordinary human beings like themselves.
At a MAGA rally in Aurora, Colorado, on October 11, Trump added to this formula his determination to use the federal government to attack those he calls enemies. Standing on a stage with a backdrop that read, “DEPORT ILLEGALS NOW” and “END MIGRANT CRIME,” he insisted that the city had been taken over by Venezuelan gangs and proposed a federal program he called “Operation Aurora” to remove those immigrants he insists are members of “savage gangs.” When Trump said, “We have to live with these animals, but we won’t live with them for long,” a person in the crowd shouted: “Kill them!”
Officials in Aurora emphatically deny Trump’s claim that the city is a “war zone.” Republican mayor Mike Coffman said that Aurora is “not a city overrun by Venezuelan gangs” and that such statements are “grossly exaggerated.” While there have been incidents, they “were limited to several apartment complexes in this city of more than 400,000 residents.” The chief of the Aurora police agreed that the city is “not by any means overtaken by Venezuelan gangs.”
In Aurora, Trump also promised to “invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798.” As legal analyst Asha Rangappa explains, the Alien Enemies Act authorizes the government to round up, detain, and deport foreign nationals of a country with which the U.S. is at war. But it is virtually certain Trump didn’t come up with the idea to use that law on his own, raising the question of who really will be in charge of policy in a second Trump administration.
Trump aide Stephen Miller seems the likely candidate to run immigration policy. He has promised to begin a project of “denaturalization,” that is, stripping naturalized citizens of their citizenship. He, too, spoke at Aurora, leading the audience in booing photos that were allegedly of migrant criminals.
Before Miller spoke, a host from Right Side Broadcasting used the dehumanizing language associated with genocide, saying of migrants: “These people, they are so evil. They are not your run-of-the-mill criminal. They are people that are Satanic. They are involved in human sacrifice. They are raping men, women, and children—especially underaged children." Trump added the old trope of a population carrying disease, saying that immigrants are “very very very sick with highly contagious disease, and they’re let into our country to infect our country.”
Trump promised the audience in Aurora that he would “liberate Colorado. I will give you back your freedom and your life.”
On Saturday, October 12, Trump held a rally in Coachella, California, where temperatures near 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 degrees Celsius) sparked heat-related illnesses in his audience as he spoke for about 80 minutes in the apocalyptic vein he has adopted lately. After the rally, shuttle buses failed to arrive to take attendees back to their cars, leaving them stranded.
And on Sunday, October 13, Trump made the full leap to authoritarianism, calling for using the federal government not only against immigrants, but also against his political opponents. After weeks of complaining about the “enemy within,” Trump suggested that those who oppose him in the 2024 election are the nation’s most serious problem.
He told Fox News Channel host Maria Bartiromo that even more troubling for the forthcoming election than immigrants "is the enemy from within…we have some very bad people, we have some sick people, radical left lunatics…. And it should be easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military."
Trump’s campaign seems to be deliberately pushing the comparisons to historic American fascism by announcing that Trump will hold a rally at New York City’s Madison Square Garden on October 27, an echo of a February 1939 rally held there by American Nazis in honor of President George Washington’s birthday. More than 20,000 people showed up for the “true Americanism” event, held on a stage that featured a huge portrait of Washington in his Continental Army uniform flanked by swastikas.
Trump’s full-throated embrace of Nazi “race science” and fascism is deadly dangerous, but there is something notable about Trump’s recent rallies that undermines his claims that he is winning the 2024 election. Trump is not holding these rallies in the swing states he needs to win but rather is holding them in states—Colorado, California, New York—that he is almost certain to lose by a lot.
Longtime Republican operative Matthew Bartlett told Matt Dixon and Allan Smith of NBC News: “This does not seem like a campaign putting their candidate in critical vote-rich or swing vote locations—it seems more like a candidate who wants his campaign to put on rallies for optics and vibes.”
Trump seems eager to demonstrate that he is a strongman, a dominant candidate, when in fact he has refused another debate with Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris and backed out of an interview with 60 Minutes. He has refused to release a medical report although his mental acuity is a topic of concern as he rambles through speeches and seems entirely untethered from reality. And as Harris turns out larger numbers for her rallies in swing states than he does, he appears to be turning bloodthirsty in Democratic areas.
Today, Harris told a rally of her own in North Carolina: “[Trump] is not being transparent…. He refuses to release his medical records. I've done it. Every other presidential candidate in the modern era has done it. He is unwilling to do a 60 Minutes interview like every other major party candidate has done for more than half a century. He is unwilling to meet for a second debate…. It makes you wonder, why does his staff want him to hide away?... Are they afraid that people will see that he is too weak and unstable to lead America? Is that what’s going on?”
“For these reasons and so many more,” she said, “it is time to turn the page.”
