It turns out that everyone underestimated how much a proposed mass deportations could bring Americans together.

Donald Trump has assembled the largest and most diverse Republican coalition in decades, while being further to the right on immigration, crime and culture than any major party presidential candidate in the history of the United States.

Trump spoke out against uncontrolled illegal immigration in harsh, grim terms – and appealed to Hispanic voters.

Trump pledged to reverse “a brutal scourge of bloodshed, crime, chaos, misery and death in our country” – and won over more young voters.

Trump dethroned the Republican establishment in 2016 and has now crushed its theory of how to forge a Republican future in an increasingly diverse country.

Trump could win the most electoral votes by a Republican since George HW Bush in 1988. In the 1980s, America was about 80% white, and Hispanics and Asians made up less than 7% and 2% of the population. Today, Hispanics and Asians make up 19.5% and 6.4%, while whites have fallen to 75% of the population.

We have long been told that these changes spell doom for the Republican Party, and that the Republican Party can only survive by softening its boundaries.

That was the warning in the famous “autopsy” commissioned by the Republican National Committee after Mitt Romney’s defeat by Barack Obama in 2012. According to the report, the divisive politics and tone of Romney’s Republican Party — yes, the resolutely polite, earnest, scrupulous Mitt Romney—doomed the party to demographic extinction.

To win over Hispanics, the autopsy insisted, Republicans “must embrace and defend comprehensive immigration reform,” the establishment’s preferred euphemism for mass amnesty. “It doesn’t matter,” he asserts, “what we say about education, employment or the economy; if Hispanics think we don’t want them here, they will turn a blind eye to our policies.

And the tone of the party had to change. The post-mortem stated that “we must emphasize during candidate trainings, retreats, etc., the importance of a welcoming and inclusive message.”

The same goes for young voters: “The RNC needs to more effectively highlight its young leaders and fundamentally change the tone we use to talk about issues and the way we communicate with voters. »

Given what we know now, the autopsy might have said: “To prosper in the future, the party needs to find an energetic and charismatic leader of around 70 years old, who often speaks in sharp terms and raw and who sounds a lot like Pat Buchanan in his speech. the problems. »

According to exit polls, Trump won among Latinos and men ages 18 to 29, while also winning among Asians and black men, and maintaining his large advantage among whites without a college degree.

Once Trump established working-class economic credibility, the door was open to gains by Latino and African-American men who are patriotic, culturally conservative, and uninterested in being seen as members of a group of victims. These voters are not easily offended, so Trump’s mode of communication does not bother them.

As for young men, many of them are unhappy with a progressive elite that views them as inherently hateful and privileged and favors policies that disadvantage them.

The Biden-Harris border policies, progressive tolerance of urban disorder, willingness to implement a radical trans agenda, and the priorities of woke identity politics struck so many voters as so completely crazy that Trump had permission to say or do anything in opposition. It wasn’t so much Trump who popularized the idea of ​​mass expulsions as it was Biden-Harris’s insistence on creating a border crisis and denying that it was happening.

Furthermore, the crucial context for Trump’s success has been broader economic discontent, as well as the outright unpopularity of Joe Biden.

Everything is fluctuating, so perhaps 2024 will not be repeatable, but, for now, Trump has shown that demographics are not inevitable. Her right-wing populism has caught on among a wide range of voter groups, while Kamala Harris — an emblem of progressivism’s cultural obsessions — has spread among college-educated whites and seniors.

Who does the future look like now?

Rich Lowry is a syndicated columnist.

Copy story link