It flew a bit under the radar given the avalanche of political headlines in advance of Super Tuesday, but at an election eve rally in Valdosta, Georgia, Donald Trump got a mighty intriguing celebrity validation.
At that rally, in the heart of the Deep South, Trump was endorsed by NASCAR royalty. On the stage with him stood a stock car racing legend (Bill Elliott), as well as trio of current NASCAR drivers (Elliott’s son Chase, as well as Georgia native David Ragan and veteran Ryan Newman).
Perhaps more importantly, Trump was also endorsed by the CEO of the stock car racing franchise, Brian France. This was no minor endorsement by a nondescript businessman. The France family has been synonymous with NASCAR since its inception—indeed, it was Brian France’s grandfather, “Big Bill” France, who co-founded the organization in 1948.
Of course, befitting its Southern roots at a time when partisan realignment was the rule south of the Mason-Dixon, NASCAR has been tied with Republicanism for most of its history. Usually this has simply manifested itself in endorsements and donor cash, although the sport’s winningest driver, “The King” Richard Petty, did manage a quixotic and unsuccessful bid to be North Carolina’s secretary of state in 1996, losing to Democrat Elaine Marshall.
In recent years, however, the image-conscious franchise has made some changes. Mindful of their reputation as a bastion of Southern White Males, they began Drive for Diversity, a recruiting program for female drivers and male racers of color. It has met with mixed success, most notably in aiding in the development of top driving talent like Kyle Larson (one of the sport's hottest young drivers whose maternal grandparents were Japanese-Americans interned at Tule Lake, California).
On a more explicitly political note, last spring the organization publicly denounced the ill-conceived Indiana “religious freedom” statute. Perhaps more intriguing: In what is now a deeply ironic gesture, NASCAR pulled two awards banquets from a Trump-owned resort in the wake of his conflation of immigration with criminal behavior, a decision that Trump ripped with predictable Trumpian bombast.
That Trump’s horrid rhetoric on the subject of immigration was the inspiration for NASCAR’s decision to change venues for their banquets during the 2015 season now looks exceptionally hollow, given that the organization’s head just endorsed Trump after an eight-month campaign effort that, if anything, saw his treatment of the subject actually become more abhorrent.
The endorsement also does real violence to the Drive for Diversity program. After all, one of the top D4D prospects in the last five years is currently a rising star in NASCAR’s second-tier (think: AAA baseball) Xfinity series. His name? Daniel Suarez.
Suarez is a 24-year-old native of Monterrey, Mexico, who is currently signed to a contract with one of the sport’s powerhouse programs—Joe Gibbs Racing. Granted, none of the three current drivers on the stage with Trump in Valdosta is signed with the Gibbs organization. That aside, one might expect the drivers meetings will be a touch more uncomfortable if/when Suarez ascends to the top tier of the NASCAR ladder. If nothing else, one has to figure that someone will ask Suarez about the Trump endorsement. At least, someone should.
Let’s make one thing clear, to deflect a possible criticism of this attack on NASCAR: people have a right to vote for whomever they please, and those who are public figures have an absolute right to lend their celebrity in support of causes and candidates that they value. No one is denying France, the Elliotts, Newman, or Ragan that right.
The mistake by NASCAR here, and it is inconceivable that they didn’t see it coming, was in the presentation. By having all of these figures on stage at the same time, it gave the impression that the organization as a whole was endorsing Donald Trump. It was an impression that Trump immediately cemented by directly making that implication:
Of course, the entirety of the organization did not endorse Trump. But, by packaging France with one of the sports legends and three of its current stars, it made it easy for Trump to parlay that into an apparent comprehensive endorsement by the franchise.
And that’s a problem for NASCAR, for two reasons.
First off: NASCAR, as an organization, is not particularly well at this point in time. At last week’s circuit stop in Atlanta, for only the second time in 15 years, fewer cars showed up to compete than there were positions available for the race.
This was in spite of the fact that, in part due to the closing of several teams after 2015, NASCAR already downsized from a 43-car starting field down to a 40-car starting field for the 2016 season. Despite winnowing the field slightly, only 39 cars came off the haulers for last weekend’s round at Atlanta.
The culprit, as it is throughout American motorsport, is a lack of sponsorship dollars. It is not merely endemic to NASCAR: The premier open-wheel circuit in America (the Verizon Indycar Series) is also looking at an atypically-low grid of 20 to 22 cars when they begin their schedule in Florida on March 13.
Which brings us to the second problem for NASCAR. Sponsorship money is already flagging somewhat in a sport that is utterly dependent upon it, given how expensive it is to go racing. Even the low-budget programs will spend up to $250,000 per race weekend. The top-flight teams may drop up to $20-25 million in a season. Given such a lofty budget, sponsorship dollars are utterly essential. And one has to wonder how potential sponsors feel about NASCAR marrying itself so closely to such a polarizing partisan political figure.
Lest you think this is liberal concern trolling, let’s revisit the franchise’s decision to pull its banquets from Trump properties in 2015. What was the catalyst for such a bold move? It was actually a scathing letter penned to Brian France by Marcus Lemonis, the CEO of Camping World, who is the title sponsor of the sport’s Truck racing series. The response to the letter by a NASCAR spokesman (explaining the ultimate decision to pull the events) was telling:
"We looked at everything we saw coming down, and what we heard from our sponsors and our partners and what we feel we should be doing, and that's what led us to the decision today.”
Lemonis, for his part, was deeply critical of France’s decision to endorse Trump, but did announce earlier this week that, despite his disappointment, he would not seek to break Camping World’s contract to remain the title sponsor of the Truck Series (which runs through 2022). But he minced few words in his statement on the matter to Sports Business Journal:
“Brian France is not NASCAR. NASCAR is made up of the millions of fans who have their own views of the favorite sports teams, drivers, politicians and religion.”
Which is true, so far as it goes. But NASCAR has some fences to mend, given that it has historically been viewed as rather hostile to anything other than Republican causes. Notably, in 2004, nine of the sport’s 10 leading drivers endorsed the re-election of George W. Bush (legendary driver Jeff Gordon was the long holdout, though he would later donate to Rudy Giuliani’s utter failure of a presidential bid in 2008). A 2007 survey of drivers showed that none of them self identified as a Democrat (three-fifths identified with the GOP, 18 percent Independent, and the rest didn’t give a clear answer).
Now, a lot of folks may well read that and say, “well...yeah...they’re all Southern white dudes.” Except they’re not. The “good ol’ boys” archetype in NASCAR endures, but it is not entirely accurate. The current roster of drivers includes a near majority of them hailing from states that Barack Obama carried in both 2008 and 2012.
- CALIFORNIA: Jimmie Johnson, Kyle Larson, A.J. Allmendinger, Matt DiBenedetto, Kevin Harvick, Casey Mears
- NEVADA: Kyle Busch, Kurt Busch
- IOWA: Michael Annett, Landon Cassill, Joey Gase
- VIRGINIA: Denny Hamlin
- WISCONSIN: Matt Kenseth, Paul Menard
- NEW JERSEY: Martin Truex, Jr.
- PENNSYLVANIA: Joey Logano
- MICHIGAN: Brad Keselowski
- WASHINGTON: Greg Biffle, Kasey Kahne
- FLORIDA: Aric Almirola
- NEW YORK: Regan Smith
- ILLINOIS: Danica Patrick
In fairness, several of these drivers hail from rock-ribbed Republican parts of their largely blue states (Harvick and Mears, for example, hail from uber-conservative Bakersfield, California). But the stereotype of NASCAR drivers as an exclusively Southern club simply isn’t true.
What’s more: Like the electorate at large, NASCAR (until this week) seemed to understand that it can no longer rely on just attracting older white Southern males as their audience. That NASCAR has the same demographic dilemma as the GOP was covered intriguingly by John Dick in a 2013 article where he noted that:
If you Google "reinventing NASCAR," you'll find ten results, only one of which is relevant. Two years ago, NASCAR execs embarked on the kind of "five-year plan" that consultants love. It included things like "increasing engagement among children and college-age consumers" and "attracting a multicultural fan base." They've ramped up their social media efforts and inked deals to broadcast races in Spanish. It's the right line of thinking but will it go far enough?
It has long been evident that NASCAR has paid proper lip service to trying to diversify its fan base. The upcoming circuit stop in Southern California has been marketed extensively in the region’s vast Latino community, including a Spanish language website and promoting a concert by rising Latin singing star Kevin Ortiz. One wonders whether this past week’s endorsement news, to the extent it made its way to a national audience, will hamper NASCAR’s efforts in this target-rich environment to expand its audience.
Indeed, the problem for NASCAR is that the more inclusive “line of thinking” addressed in Dick’s article hit … shall we say … a big wall this week. Whether NASCAR as a sports organization can extricate itself from its own self-inflicted wreckage remains to be seen.