For people who feel that way, I have some discouraging news. As part of a broad study of white working class politics, I solicited white Americans’ support for Donald Trump, but also for a hypothetical third party dedicated to “stopping mass immigration, providing American jobs to American workers, preserving America’s Christian heritage, and stopping the threat of Islam”—essentially the platform of the UK’s right-wing British National Party, adapted to the United States. How many white Americans do you think would consider voting for this type of protectionist, xenophobic party?
65 percent.
Clearly, Trump’s allure is bigger than Trump himself.
Who would the new party’s supporters be? What I found in the study is that much like those who support the Trump campaign, those who would consider voting for this third party are more likely to be male, of lower socioeconomic status, without a university education and ideologically conservative—in other words, the Republican Party’s longtime base. They are also more likely to be young (under 40 years old)—so this is not a phenomenon likely to pass quickly.
This is most immediately important to the Republican Party: If Trump were the whole story, and his message didn’t matter, then Republicans could dismiss this election as an anomaly. However, if Trump has stumbled upon a policy agenda that has been latent in the Republican base, then the party is faced with a choice: adopt it in the future, or stick with its longstanding principles and risk alienating its voters. That would either usher in a radical turn in the party’s trajectory or open up space for a third party, the likes of which are growing rapidly in Europe.
It is worth putting the results into perspective. This kind of theoretical question, untethered to any specific party or political figure, may well be a useful test of deep support for such policy platforms. But it’s also an imaginary third party right now, free of the media checks and public scrutiny that would accompany it were it to exist in a competitive party landscape. In Britain, for example, UKIP and its precursor, the British National Party, are both stained by allegations of racism and incompetence, while this hypothetical American counterpart is unexposed.
But neither the BNP nor UKIP has ever garnered anywhere close to a majority of the white British electorate, let alone a general majority. 65 percent is a whopping number—in fact, it’s significantly more than those who expressed support for Trump’s candidacy in my research.
The problem was never Donald Trump, but somebody who could run on Donald Trump's white nationalist platform and not be a self-destructive idiot while doing it. Trump's not the guy you have to be careful of. It's the guy after Trump, who knows how to play this game and win, who is the real danger.
Trump himself meanwhile can't take the fact that 99% of black voters like myself despise him, so in his speech in Wisconsin last night
he made a pitch to African-Americans in general.
Donald Trump made a new and explicit plea for the support of black voters on Tuesday, saying the Democratic Party had “failed and betrayed” them and accusing Hillary Clinton of “bigotry” in the pursuit of minority voters.
“We reject the bigotry of Hillary Clinton which panders to and talks down to communities of color and sees them only as votes — that’s all they care about — not as individual human beings worthy of a better future,” Trump said at a rally in Wisconsin.
After Republican Party leaders have urged Trump for months to rein in unpredictable tangents on the stump that have gotten him in repeated political trouble, Trump used a teleprompter at a campaign rally for the first time on Tuesday to deliver a speech that waded into the thorny topics of race and politics.
“The Democratic Party has failed and betrayed the African-American community,” Trump declared.
“The Democratic Party has taken the votes of African-Americans for granted. They’ve just assumed they’ll get your support and done nothing in return for it. They’ve taken advantage of the African-American citizen,” he added. “It’s time to give the Democrats some competition for these votes.”
Now, the Republican pitch to black voters has been exactly this for years, it's nothing new, that everything ailing the black community would magically vanish if we just started to vote for the Republicans.
Only, the reality is that in 2016,
black voters are the Democratic party. We're the most loyal base and we haven't forgotten the way Trump and Republicans have treated us, have treated President Obama and his family, and the Black Lives Matter movement, so Donald Trump can kindly go screw himself with a rusty pickax. We certainly haven't forgotten how the Republican party has worked over the last 60 years
to stop us from voting at all. It's comical how bad this man is at running for President.
But remember this: so far we've had McCain, Romney, and Trump, three guys who made massive unforced errors and completely blew their elections in the final stretch (and Trump is doing an even better job of self-destructing now.) But when we get somebody both smart and dangerous, that's when America gets screwed, big time.
Imagine Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio running on Trump's platform from the start, the whole “stopping mass immigration, providing American jobs to American workers, preserving America’s Christian heritage, and stopping the threat of Islam” thing Gest mentions in his article.
Now imagine them running in 2020.
That's why I want to run up the score this year, guys. I want these guys done.