Rep. Michelle Steel, pictured, is representative of a broader rightward shift among American ethnic minorities (Photo Credit: Wikimedia)
The following is an opinion contribution and reflects the author’s views alone.
News of a Biden victory has overwhelmed the airwaves, saturating television chyrons, and appeared across my social media feed. Defeat looks all but certain for our sitting president. Despite the gross inaccuracies of statewide polling, which in numerous cases had underestimated Mr. Trump’s performance more egregiously this year than in 2016, several news sources and eminent figures on the left have crafted a convenient narrative to tout their electoral successes. From the Ivory Tower, they proclaim the mantra of “demography is destiny” and peddle more modern perfunctory claims, which include “the suburban revolt” and, perhaps most comical in retrospect, “the blue wave.” Yet, these are phrases which hold little merit in today’s society and which aim to masquerade the blunt truth. A political earthquake has been brewing, not only in the wealthy, pampered, Trump-loathing suburbs, but also within our nation’s most diverse urban landscapes as well. The Democratic Party’s lost footing among core minority communities, unless mitigated, spells a bleak vision for its future.
Much to their own chagrin, the political experts’ prophecy of a Democratic blowout fell short. Trump made substantial gains among nearly every demographic minority in the United States, eclipsing his 2016 performance among Hispanics, blacks, Asian-Americans, and other non-white groups. Look no further than our nation’s periphery to begin to see Democrats’ shaky support among minority communities: nineteen of the twenty-three counties along the US-Mexico border experienced shifts towards Trump from his 2016 to 2020 performance (the exceptions being counties with sprawling suburban populations, such as San Diego, California and Tucson’s Pima County). When leftist pundits and personalities maliciously slandered Trump in 2016 as every “-ist” and “-phobic” that can be found in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, Hispanic communities in Southern Florida—among them Cubans, Colombians, and Nicaraguans—sprinted leftward, delivering Hillary Clinton a whopping thirty-percent margin of victory. After this year’s events shed light upon the true nature and agenda of our predominant political parties, the same communities lovingly embraced Trump and Republicans down-ballot with margins resembling those of the Bush era of the mid-2000s, when over 40% of Hispanics nationwide cast ballots for Republicans. Take Doral, Florida, nicknamed “Doralzuela” by locals for its heavy frequency of Venezuelan-American residents, the city voted for Hillary Clinton by a forty-point margin. This year, Trump narrowly won the city.
This story plays out in nearly every urban center, with Trump ushering gains for the Republican Party among black, Hispanic, and Asian constituencies. In New York City, Joe Biden experienced a massive drop in support in four of the city’s five boroughs. Trump’s strongest improvement, perhaps unsurprisingly, was in the Bronx, a borough where less than ten percent of the population is non-Hispanic white. Trump performed approximately eleven percent better here than in 2016. Similar gains accompanied heavily Hispanic and black areas of Manhattan, Queens, and Brooklyn. Even in Staten Island, the one borough where Trump’s overall share of the vote decreased, he received a higher vote percentage in precincts north of the Staten Island Expressway, far more urban and diverse than areas south of the bisecting thoroughfare. Trump allowed Republicans to clear ten percent of the vote in Compton, a Hispanic-heavy neighborhood of Los Angeles, for the first time in decades. In earshot, the Vietnamese populace of suburban Orange County showed in full force in favor of Trump; plurality-Asian Westminster voted for Trump following a double-digit victory for Hillary Clinton four years earlier. From Las Vegas to Philadelphia, from Houston to Kissimmee, pronounced concentrations of Hispanic, black, and Asian communities correlated highly with Democratic erosion.
The left’s justifications for their declining support from minority communities are dizzying. Some have flagrantly asserted that the Cuban-American community is entrenched in racism, particularly towards black Hispanics and Hispanics from other nations; a 2016 Associated Press article entitled “Cuban Americans share sad secret: their own racism” reflects an overarching, conciliatory narrative to Democrats which has been actively maintained since the 2020 election. The author speaks of a “racial chasm” bifurcating the Cuban-American community, and tells the story of two Cuban American immigrants to the United States, one who was white, became “another (white) Miami Cuban, a relatively privileged identity,” while the other, of African ancestry, “met less than a warm embrace from white Cubans,” causing him to gravitate towards non-Cuban blacks. I do not intend to undermine the existence of racism in American communities as a cross-cutting force of harm, nor do I seek to impose my own limited comprehension upon this complex topic. Nonetheless, this real truth is apparent: by “whitewashing” the largely Caucasian, Republican-leaning group (an industrious immigrant community, no less), and by embracing radical progressive ideals that harmed the people of Cuba when imposed under Fidel Castro, the Democratic Party has worked unconsciously to excise some members of the Cuban-American community from the fabric of immigrant America, and, in the spirit of cultural revisionism, regrouped them with other overlooked demographics, including rural Southerners and the Midwestern white working class.
Other Trump-friendly minority groups have been swayed by similarly discriminatory Democratic rhetoric. Vietnamese immigrants in California have held historic attraction to the anti-communist streams of the Republican Party, though they have trended left in recent years. Hillary Clinton received the highest share of the Vietnamese vote for a Democrat in modern history. However, the California Democratic Party’s push for affirmative action elicited a reaction among voters who remain opposed to policies that may hinder Asian-American candidates within the college application process. This past November, for instance, the Democrats placed Proposition 16 on the ballot, a measure that would repeal the ban on race-based affirmative action in the state’s public colleges and universities. Democrats targeted Asian communities like the Vietnamese in their native tongue, producing attack advertisements in the languages of Vietnamese and Hmong. These efforts fell through, nevertheless, as Trump posted considerable gains among Vietnamese-Americans, and Asian-American Republican candidates swept out two Democratic Orange County congressmen.
Given Democrats’ considerable losses among minority communities, one would expect introspection. The tone-deaf efforts of numerous liberal politicians, Hollywood elites, and tech moguls who have deemed themselves arbiters of cultural inclusivity and urban policy nearly led the Democratic Party to presidential defeat once again. The Lincoln Project, a collection of disgruntled former Republican strategists who drove the failed campaigns of John McCain, Mitt Romney, and John Kasich, aimed their television advertisements towards a miniscule demographic of right-leaning suburbanites by harkening to an erstwhile era of American conservatism, effectively ignoring the tribulations of working-class Americans of all races who care little for ideological nostalgia. These groups, which now form the backbone of the Democratic Party, pander relentlessly through a method of thespian activism that vacuously affirm the struggles of their constituents. In other words, their party has forsaken its title as the party of the American worker. The Republican Party, on the other hand, with its steady performance in white working-class regions, gradual inroads into black communities, and astronomical gains among Hispanic and border communities, has fed into the frustrations of the common American honestly and authentically.
One may wonder: may these trends of Republican overperformance among minority groups be indicative of a broader evolution, one where race is divorced from political preference, where income bracket and social class emerge as the primary foundations of partisanship, or will these blocs snap back to the Democratic column in due time? Only time will tell. Though as future generations reckon with the tumult of 2020, they will be struck at the notion that a president, so thoroughly admonished and antagonized as bigoted, could tap into a deep-seated populist energy and make substantial inroads into minority communities. The Democratic Party’s polarizing tactics impart a deleterious effect upon our political system. If President-Elect Biden, Speaker Pelosi, and other party leaders maintain their superficial outreach without instituting a unifying, pragmatic message for all American minority communities, the American left may continue down its perilous trajectory.
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