The Republican Party's Multiethnic, Working-Class Coalition Is Taking Shape
By: Josh Hammer
The GOP is a big tent party. A multi racial working and middle class pro theistic coalition. The GOP is no longer a white urban pro wall st bankers party. It still is pro national defense but not pro involvement in everyone’s affairs. We support small business and individual owned businesses and main st. The working class and middle class along with independent businesses make our coalition. It is a bigoted lie to call the GOP racist and a sign of small and narrow minded intolerance to call our multiracial coalition perjorative terms such as fascist. We are an American first nationalist populist multiracial group. 🇺🇸🗽🦅🇺🇸1776!
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Source: AP Photo/Ben Gray
In the 2016 Republican Party presidential primary, decades of dissonance between the party's aggrieved grassroots and its blinkered elite spilled out into the open. For years, the chasm widened between the GOP's heartland base, the river valley-dwelling "Somewheres" from David Goodhart's 2017 book, "The Road to Somewhere," and the party's bicoastal "Anywhere" rulers. The foot-soldier Republican "Somewheres," disproportionately church-attending and victimized by job outsourcing and the opioid crisis, felt betrayed by the more secular, ideologically inflexible Republican "Anywheres."
Donald Trump, lifelong conservative "outsider" and populist dissenter from bicoastal "Anywhere" orthodoxy on issues pertaining to trade, immigration and China, coasted to the GOP's presidential nomination. He did so notwithstanding the all-hands-on-deck pushback from leading right-leaning "Anywhere" bastions, encapsulated by National Review magazine's dedication of an entire issue to, "Against Trump." Trump's subsequent victory in the 2016 general election sent the conservative intellectual movement, as well as the Republican Party itself, into a deep state of introspection.
Trump's victory was primarily propelled by a white working-class revolt, but the emergence during his presidency of a deeply censorious and anti-American left -- epitomized by the Democrats' outrageous conduct during the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court confirmation battle and the destructive "1619 riots" last summer -- opened the door for a broader working-class, pro-America political coalition. By Election Day 2020, that multiethnic, working-class conservative coalition had begun to take more definite shape. Trump lost a nail-biter of an election, but the GOP made massive inroads in crucial Black and Hispanic communities, such as Florida's Miami-Dade County and the heavily Mexican counties dotting Texas' Rio Grande Valley.
Now over a year removed from the 2020 presidential election, as President Joe Biden's poll numbers plummet and frantic Democrats gird themselves for a 2022 midterm election shellacking, data continues to trickle in supporting the emergence of a "Somewhere"-centric, multiethnic, working-class Republican coalition. In Texas, where former Democratic Rep. Beto O'Rourke lost to incumbent Republican Sen. Ted Cruz by less than three points in 2018, a new Quinnipiac University poll finds Republican incumbent Gov. Greg Abbott, up for reelection in 2022, leading challenger O'Rourke by a whopping 15 points. Abbott outright leads O'Rourke among Texas Hispanic voters, 44 to 41, and Texas Hispanics disapprove of Biden's job performance by a massive 27-point margin.
A new Wall Street Journal national poll evinces much the same trend. On a generic Republican versus Democrat ballot, the WSJ poll shows Hispanics evenly split 37 to 37. Nationally, Hispanics disapprove of Biden's job performance by 12 points, and they support Biden over Trump in a hypothetical 2024 presidential rematch by a razor-thin 44 to 43 margin. Nor, of course, is the GOP's good news with Hispanic voters limited to Texas; in Florida, the state's growing conservative-leaning Cuban and Venezuelan populations make Republican incumbents Gov. Ron DeSantis and Sen. Marco Rubio heavy favorites for reelection next fall.
If the trendlines continue, the Democratic Party could end up as a parochial regional party with extremely limited statewide appeal outside the Northeast and the West Coast. But the trendlines are not guaranteed to continue; the onus is now on Republican leaders to ensure the party's new coalitional inroads are nurtured, not squandered.
The woke left's dramatic cultural excesses, especially on such issues as policing, critical race theory and gender ideology, have already paid some handsome dividends for the GOP -- just look at Virginia Gov.-elect Glenn Youngkin. And because the left has overstepped so much on bread-and-butter cultural issues, the temptation will be strong for the right to exclusively focus on that fertile terrain.
This would be a mistake; the right can and should aggressively fight the culture war with the aim of victory, but it must not lose sight of the economic issues that helped propel Trump's insurgency and the subsequent emergence of the GOP's multiethnic, working-class coalition. That coalition is deeply discomfited by the wokesters' anti-American cultural assault, but it is also turned off by the old Republican guard's dogmatic commitment to laissez-faire absolutism. Immigration restrictionism, trade pragmatism, total disentanglement from China and the prudential use of antitrust against the Big Tech giants and other woke corporate miscreants must become part of a standard "common good capitalism" Republican economic repertoire.
The median voter is culturally commonsensical (respecting the flag, saluting the troops, appreciating the police) and economically pragmatic. The Republican Party has a golden opportunity to attract and maintain the support of that crucial bloc. It must not blow it.
Recommended Townhall Video
"LET'S GO BRANDON!": House Republican SLAMS Biden On House Floor
House Republican Bill Posey (CT-8) blasted Joe Biden on the House floor, being one of the first members of congress to bring the "Let's Go Brandon" trend to the official arena of American politics.
Tags
Who is online
36 visitors
"The GOP is a big tent party"
That's not true.
Clearly it is true.
Clearly it's not.
The growing support for GOP candidates among minority communities and the number of candidates of those communities running as Republicans for various offices say otherwise
Nope.
You should be glad that it is true!
Now updated to actually include the seeded article which is right on!
"but not pro involvement in everyone’s affairs"
Nonsense, they need to stay out of women's wombs and stop denying women their rights.
This is not an abortion seed. My body my choice applies to the China 🇨🇳 virus 🦠 vaccine, right?
So you admit that the alleged conservatives need to stay out of women's wombs and stop denying women their rights.
Progress!
As long as the baby’s right to life is recognized we are fine.
See 3.1.1
You realize that women with wombs are a huge part of the pro life movement so does that mean some women who are advancing the cause of life are in other women’s wombs and denying their license to kill?
Wrong Direction
See more Ramirez toons HERE.
Read More »Republicans are Plus 10 on the latest generic Congressional ballot. The last (and I think only) time it was in that range was 2010 and they flipped 63 House seats.
Biden is turning out to be as good for the Republican party as Obama was.
I can see a repeat of that. 63 house seats 6 senate seats next year.
Let's go for 70 seats in the House!
Sounds like a great plan to me! That would get the GOP close to 2/3 of the house!
Will Biden be as good as Trump was for flipping complete control of the House, Senate, and Presidency to democratic?
He will be. The difference being that democrats won’t have near as many state governors, AG’s, and legislative bodies to fall back on for support as we do now.