MILWAUKEE — The 2020 Republican National Convention featured a procession of minority speakers that was, as reported at the time, almost certainly unprecedented.
The 2024 RNC lineup may rival or exceed it.
It would be easy to mock this week’s lineup of speakers of color as mostly performative, but you would be wrong to do so. Republicans are strategically — almost surgically — trying to carve away minority voters from Democrats. And to some degree they’re succeeding.
Let’s recall how we got here: In 2013, not long after losing a second presidential election to Barack Obama, Republicans produced a 100-page report titled the “Growth and Opportunity Project,” often called the Republican autopsy.
It chastised the party for “driving around in circles on an ideological cul-de-sac” and insisted that it must broaden its appeal to minority voters: “We need to campaign among Hispanic, Black, Asian and gay Americans and demonstrate we care about them, too.”
Of course, in 2016, Republican voters spurned a crowded and relatively diverse Republican field in favor of Donald Trump, the man who mainstreamed birtherism and who traffics in racially and ethnically inflammatory statements — “I think Islam hates us,” “look at my African American over here” and so on. It felt like a full rejection of the autopsy.
But as time went on, the party began achieving its diversity objectives while seemingly spurning them: According to an April report from the Pew Research Center, “White voters make up 79% of Republicans and Republican leaners. In 1996, they constituted 93% of the party’s voters.”
Republicans — driven for much of that span by Trump and MAGA — seized upon an uncomfortable but (for them) beneficial reality: Racial and ethnic tension extends well beyond the white-nonwhite binary.
They didn’t have to dial down their zero-sum take on race in America; they simply had to make more people believe that they had a stake in it.
Nine years after giving the campaign announcement speech in which he infamously said, “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. … They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people,” the Trump Republican approach has gelled into a strategy with at least four pillars.
Immigrants as a threat
Republicans have realized that an anti-immigrant message doesn’t just appeal to xenophobes and white nationalists. It also appeals to some people of color, including some relatively recent immigrants, who worry about what Republicans portray as the negative effect of new arrivals on their socioeconomic status.
That’s why, for instance, during last month’s debate, Trump said of new immigrants, “They’re taking Black jobs, and they’re taking Hispanic jobs.” The line was roundly and appropriately mocked, but there’s no question that it landed with some voters.
It’s part of a broader scaremongering effort: As Robert Bartels Jr., a New York union leader, told the convention crowd on Monday, “We have an open border inviting illegal immigrants to take our American jobs and lower our wages.”
It recasts fear of immigrants as a pan-racial struggle against financial — and cultural — diminution.
Wave away racism
In his convention speech on Monday, Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina predictably repeated his frequent refrain that “America is not a racist country.” Rep. John James of Michigan expanded on that theme: “Even though they endured racism, it did not define the nation they loved,” he said of his parents. “They taught me I could do anything I set my mind to.”
Their dismissal of the existence and persistence of systemic racism is a means to absolve its beneficiaries of any responsibility to combat it. And though their pitch — Just like me, you too — is a craven gloss on history and present-day reality, it also appeals, almost certainly, to many white Republicans as the proper way for minorities to process racism and helps make all the overt minority outreach more palatable.
Racial ‘conversions’
For Republicans, it has become standard to enlist celebrities to offer testimonials that pooh-pooh the idea that there’s any racial animus associated with Trump and his movement. In simple terms, it’s an attempt to neutralize GOP negatives.
At the convention Monday, entertainer Amber Rose, who is multiracial, said that in the past she believed “left-wing propaganda that Donald Trump was a racist,” but after doing her “research,” she “realized Donald Trump and his supporters don’t care if you are Black, white, gay or straight. It’s all love.”
Her framing places the charge that Trump is a racist in the category of liberal conspiracy, a mere tactic meant to guarantee minorities’ allegiance to Democrats, evidence to the contrary notwithstanding.
Patriarchal appeals
For some men of color, the perquisites of the patriarchy are a stronger draw than racial oppression is a repellent. Trump has tapped into that. He has crafted a persona that sends the message that toxic masculinity can be flaunted unapologetically and without consequence.
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To some, that makes him a hero — a video game version of a man. In his convention speech, North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson called Trump “the Braveheart of our time.”
Most minority voters reject these overtures as displays of rank cynicism, but Republican success doesn’t require a mass defection, only a gradual erosion. If Republicans can shave a few percentage points away from Democrats, it may not only mean that they’re slowly gaining ground philosophically, it may also be enough for them to win this year.
Democrats have to stop laughing at this strategy and soberly combat it; if not, they may soon need an autopsy of their own.
Charles M. Blow is a New York Times columnist.