The Black Vote
Every election and sometimes between elections, the so-called conservatives start mewing about minority outreach. They start the game by saying how this time will be different and minorities are ready to listen. Then they spend time pandering to those voters, while lecturing whites about the need to pander to those people. After the election, when they got no increase in minority support, they say all the things about GOP voters that Democrats say about them.
It is a shameful and ridiculous charade, but republicans never seem to pay a price for it, so they keep doing it. In fact, a large segment of their voting base seems to like this charade. Baby Boomer conservatives are hooked on the idea of winning black votes. They are mesmerized by Trump’s tweet about how the economy is great for everyone except white people. Despite their political orientation, they are just as ashamed of themselves as white liberal boomers.
Those who have crossed over from conventional politics look at Trump’s pandering to blacks as proof he is not really on our side. After all, if he really did understand what is happening, he would spend no time pandering to blacks and instead focus on dispossessed whites. They are a demographic that is both larger and regularly assaulted by the Left. The argument is that these are the voters that put Trump in the White House, having turned up to vote in the 2016 election.
This is the Sailer Strategy, named after Steve Sailer. If Republicans are getting one percent of the black vote, increasing that to two percent is a few thousand votes in states that are not competitive. On the other hand, adding another percent of the white vote could be the margin of victory in states that are competitive, like Michigan and Pennsylvania. One percent of 70% of the electorate is always going to be bigger than one percent of 13% of the electorate.
George Bush the Minor won his two elections without black support. He did do well with Hispanics, but again, this is a tiny slice of the electorate. Go back further and George Bush the Elder won a landslide with just 11% support from blacks. Reagan won in a huge landslide in 1984 with 9% black support. When 66% of whites backed Reagan, fewer than ten percent of blacks voted republican. That speaks to the futility of chasing the black vote if you are a Republican.
The thing is though, 2020 may be the year that the Great Pumpkin comes to the pumpkin patch and gives black votes to all the guilt-ridden baby boomers that have been waiting since the 1980’s. Trump may actually pick up support among blacks and maybe even Hispanic voters. It seems ridiculous, but there is some historic precedent for what could be happening. In what would be great irony, Trump could repeat what Nixon did in the 1972 presidential election.
Most of the comparisons between Trump and Nixon are done by mouth breathers on the Left who check under their beds every night for Russians. Nixon is the universal bogeyman in their political universe. Every politician they hate is Nixon, while all of their backers are fascists or white nationalists. Because of this, people dismiss the comparison to Nixon, but it may actually be a good one. There are a lot of points of comparison between the two and their times in office.
The most important comparison between Nixon and Trump is they are both transitional figures for their party. Nixon figured out that the GOP had to wheel south and southwest in order to win elections. His “southern strategy” transformed the political map and eventually made the GOP the majority party. Despite being right about this, his party hated him for it. It put them on the side of the people they hated, the bad whites in the Progressive narrative, and they resented him for it.
Trump is doing something similar. He is transforming the party away from gentry conservatism and libertarianism toward suburban populism. Instead of appealing to the same urbanite bugmen as the Democrats, Trump is appealing to white voters through the proxy of populist economics. Like Nixon, he is hated by his own party, because it puts the insiders on the side of people their liberal friends hate. Trump is making the GOP the white party, despite their howling and moaning.
Of course, a similar thing is happening to the Democrats. In the 1960’s, the Left went insane and took the Democrat party with it. Nixon won office in large part because white people feared what was coming from the Left. By the 1970s’ the Left was a clown car full of freaks and weirdos. One look at the current Democratic field and you can’t miss the similarities. Like Nixon, Trump will face a party that is riven by internal discord and representing everything that scares white people.
In the 1972 election, Nixon won 18% of the black vote. That is a far cry from being competitive, but it is orders of magnitude greater than what we have come to expect from Republican candidates. Even after Watergate, Gerald Ford won 16% of the black vote in 1976. His decision to pardon Nixon may have doomed him with white voters, but his loyalty worked on black voters. Whatever explanations one wants to assign, in the last great political transition, blacks temporarily moved toward stability.
That may repeat itself in the 2020 election. Like Nixon, Trump is a rare politician in that he is what you see. Trump is not a phony. That plays well with black voters, who truly hate putting on airs, especially by white people. It’s why they are open to Bloomberg, by the way, despite his past statements. They know what they are getting with him, while the other candidates are code-switching phonies. More important, black are less inclined to support a crazy white person than a racist.
There is a lot that could happen between now and November. The Democrats could find a numinous negro to be their nominee in a brokered convention. The economy could collapse this summer. The Wu-tang virus could turn into the Yellow Plague. Making predictions this far out is a mug’s game. The point here is just that the conditions in which a Republican could do well with blacks are forming up. Trump the transition candidate, like Nixon, could deliver blacks to his boomer supporters.
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