By now it’s fairly obvious that Donald Trump intends racism to be the centerpiece of his campaign for re-election. But the evidence—both the statistical, numerical kind, as well as the purely anecdotal—strongly suggest that this strategy is going to be a loser. One reason is the plain fact that the country is becoming more racially diverse with each passing day. The other is that a critical portion of women, specifically suburban women, are becoming increasingly appalled by Trump’s racist rhetoric.
Why any woman would vote for a president who bragged about assaulting women and put an attempted rapist on the Supreme Court is a question that should give anyone serious pause, but in 2016 Trump garnered a substantial share of the “white women’s” vote (exactly how much is still being debated). Moira Donegan, writing for The Guardian probably explained it best:
The most likely answer seems to be that white women vote for Republicans for the same reason that white men do: because they are racist. Trump, with his raucous rallies and his bloviating, combative style, has offered his supporters an opportunity to savor the pleasures of being cruel. It is likely that the white women who voted for him in 2016, and who will vote for him again in 2020, find this racist sadism gratifying. It is fun for them.
And white women as a whole did not vote much more progressively in the 2018 mid-terms. But in suburban areas, the votes of all women taken together (including, most importantly, suburban women of color) skewed significantly toward the Democratic candidates in key House races.
The reality is that Trump’s electoral victory in 2016 owed itself (with a social media assist from the Russians) to twenty years of conditioning and disinformation regarding the character and persona of Hillary Clinton rather than any feelings of genuine warmth towards Donald Trump. In 2018, after Trump’s essentially vile nature had revealed itself, educated, suburban women vented their boiling anger at Trump towards the most convenient target they could find—their Republican Congressman. And as 2020 looms, Trump isn’t doing himself any favors with this critical voting bloc by his continual race-baiting.
Many professional, suburban women — a critical voting bloc in the 2020 election — recoil at the abrasive, divisive rhetoric, exposing the president to a potential wave of opposition in key battlegrounds across the country.
The Associated Press interviewed thirty-six suburban women in the three critical states—Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan—that provided Trump his electoral victory in 2016. What they discovered in the largely white suburbs of Milwaukee, Detroit, and Philadelphia (Denver, CO was also included) was a strikingly consistent, strongly negative response to Trump’s racist rhetoric and his pointed embrace of white supremacy over the past few weeks.
In more than three dozen interviews by The Associated Press with women in critical suburbs, nearly all expressed dismay — or worse — at Trump’s racially polarizing insults and what was often described as unpresidential treatment of people. Even some who gave Trump credit for the economy or backed his crackdown on immigration acknowledged they were troubled or uncomfortable lining up behind the president.
According to the Associated Press interviews, Trump’s coarse, racist rhetoric is backfiring with these voters crucial to his re-election effort.
[I]nterviews with women reveal a clear discomfort with Trump’s character: It emerged again and again in the AP’s interviews and was a consistent objection cited by women across the political spectrum.
“I did not think it was going to be as bad as it is — definitely narcissism and sexism, but I did not think it was going to be as bad as it is,” said Kathy Barnes while shopping in the Denver suburb of conservative-leaning Lone Tree. “I am just ashamed to be an American right now.”
Admittedly it’s not possible to predict from anecdotal evidence whether Trump’s boorish and racist behavior will continue to influence these women when they walk into the voting booth. However, an Op-Ed by author Steve Phillips in today’s New York Times suggests that Democrats are well-advised by the sheer numbers to keep hammering on Trump’s racism. Because while in the U.S. racism is practically an imperative written into its genetic code (seemingly stronger in some areas of the country than even the biological instinct to reproduce) the demographic trend lines are simply pointing the other way.
[D]ecades of election data on voter behavior show that Democrats are on firm ground in making the president’s overt racism a prominent campaign issue. That data shows that there are enough white voters for Democrats to defeat a president stirring racial resentment. It might, in a tight race, be barely enough — but enough. And the math gets more promising in 2020 when the electorate will be more racially diverse than at any previous time in United States history.
Phillips points out that our elections—including the one in 2016—are already racialized, and have been since the passage of the Civil Rights Act. The Republican Party has seen to that, and the demographics prove it up.
In every presidential election for the past 50 years, a majority of white voters have voted against the Democratic nominee, and the overwhelming majority of people of color have sided with the Democrats.
But there is a determined and consistent core of whites who always vote Democratic. Since the advent of exit polling of racial groups in 1976, no Democrat has received less than 34 percent of the white vote (that was Walter Mondale in 1984, losing 49 states in a landslide to Ronald Reagan). The historical average of white support for Democrats is almost 40 percent, and Hillary Clinton, up against Mr. Trump’s thinly disguised call to Make America White Again, garnered the support of 37 percent of white voters.
Again, like the interviewers in the Associated Press article, Phillips comes back to the three states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, and points out that Trump’s exceedingly narrow victories in those states was not due to any mythical vote-switching “Obama-Trump” voters but owed itself to former Obama voters opting for third-party candidates, such as Jill Stein. But more importantly, the voting demographics of all three states have shifted in the last four years as more people of color entered the voting ranks.
As people of color become a bigger portion of the voting population, the number of white votes required to win steadily shrinks. In fact, a group of think tanks released a report last year showing that if all of the country’s racial groups replicate in 2020 their voter turnout and partisan preferences of 2016 — essentially a “do-over” — the Democrats would win Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, just because of the demographic changes over the past four years.
The upshot of Phillips’ argument is that Democrats don’t need to worry about making Trump’s racism an issue, and in fact Trump is doing the Democrats’ work for them. As both the AP article and Phillips’ analysis show, Trump’s racist bile is poisoning his chances for re-election, in exactly the states he needs to win.