Some People Still Wonder If The Republican Party Is As Racist As Trump Is— And THAT Is Weird

He's Going To Have His Ass Kicked By A Non-White Woman

If the election were held today, Trump would lose. Both national and battleground state polls show Kamala-Tim with enough support to best the weirdos. But the election isn’t going to be held today. It’s nearly 3 months away… and the battles to keep the Senate and flip the House are up in the air, despite the undeniable momentum for Kamala. Her choice of Tim Walz and Trump’s choice of JD Vance has been great for the Democrats and devastating for the GOP. 

Nate Cohn noted that she has fundamentally changed the race, with, for example, swing states Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania now all polling blue instead ion red, as they were when Biden was at the top of the ticket— and not just blue, but 4 points blue in each state. Right now Walz’s average net favorability is +11 and Vance’s is -7. In other words, “people have positive views of Walz and are increasingly repelled by Vance.”

“Until now,” wrote Cohn, “the basic dynamic of the race was driven by Biden’s unpopularity. It prevented Democrats from running their usual strategy against Trump and his MAGA allies: Make an election a referendum on Trump by running a broadly acceptable candidate. Millions of voters were left with an agonizing choice between two candidates they disliked. With Harris riding an extraordinary wave of momentum at the top of the ticket, at least for now, the usual political dynamic of the Trump era has been restored.”

We’re starting to see situations where Kamala-Tim popularity is going to impact down-ballot races. Take Miami-Dade, for example, which had been slipping away from Democrats. Now it’s slipping away from Republicans. A new poll shows Kamala leading Trump by 15 points, which includes a 23 point margin among independent voters. “The poll,” reported Jesse Scheckner, “indicates that enthusiasm for Harris should translate into down-ballot victories for several other Democrats in Miami-Dade.” One Republican-held state House seat likely to flip is the 113th district— Key Biscayne, Dodge Island, Shenandoah, part of Little Havana and the part of Coconut Grove— where strong progressive Jackie Kellogg is on the verge of displacing GOP freshman Vicki Lopez. (She can use some help getting her message out.) She’s being bolstered by top of the ticket momentum, by big numbers in favor of the abortion and marijuana amendments and by what Kellogg told us was DeSantis’ having “targeted South Florida to show his strength with zero regard for ‘anti woke’ consequences: Less tolerance and increased hate crimes. Meanwhile, education plummets and sea level rises.”

Alan Grayson is running for an open state Senate seat in central Florida.He’s also enthusiastic about the excitement building around Kamala and Tim. “One of the primary tools that the Republicans use to try to win,” he told us, “is to demoralize Democrats, to suppress our vote. Basically, they try to make us feel guilty for voting for Democratic candidates, often with bizarre lies like ‘Pizzagate.’ That was working for a while this year, but not anymore, with the Kamala/Walz ticket. Now the burden is on the Republicans to try to rationalize their vote for the Convicted Felon/Clownish Faker ticket.”

Another Florida legislative candidate, Ben Braver, is running in a much redder district that Kellogg and Grayson are... but even there, people are feelin' the vibe. “Running down-ballot in Florida there was so much baggage associated with the term Democrat that I had to distance myself from the label,” he told us. “It dragged me down, but since we shed our old skin, swing voters have become more comfortable seeing what's new, and they like it. Democrats are gaining ground and that feeling is like electricity shooting from Harris' campaign, through the whole Democratic base, shocking people who didn't know what to expect. Folks I’m meeting are actually excited to get involved in politics. The national mood has shifted in no small part due to left leaning celebrities coming out in force for Harris, and right leaning celebrities stepping back from Trump. This influx of support for Harris has caused Trump, Vance, and the general Alt-Right to become progressively more, well, whiney. Joe Rogan briefly complimented RFK and was immediately canceled by a petty Trump and his sore MAGA crowd. Even Kyle Rittenhouse, the Alt Right's darling, after expressing his doubts in Trump was dumped so fast his former fans started calling Kyle a trans infiltrator. Trump & Vance's inability to function as normal people, coupled with Harris & Walz's natural charm are swinging the general public to the left. Democrats not only have the better policy, we are the party having a party. The progressive movement is growing, a community is forming, and MAGA is seen as the angry weirdos sulking in the corner.”

Please consider contributing to Braver, Grayson and Kellogg here on the Florida ActBlue page.

Some people have trouble wrapping their minds around how it can in even be close, how Trump is ahead in large swathes of the country and how 74,223,975 people voted for him in 2020. How are we ever going to explain that? Almost 47% of American voters then and still an awful lot of popularity today, especially in rural America. James Risen attributes a lot of it to nothing more compliucates than ugly, old-fashioned racism. “In 1980, white people accounted for about 80 percent of the U.S. population. In 2024, white people account for about 58 percent of the U.S. population. Trump appeals to white people gripped by demographic hysteria. Especially older white people who grew up when white people represented a much larger share of the population. They fear becoming a minority. While the Census Bureau says there are still 195 million white people in America and that they are still the majority, the white population actually declined slightly in 2023, and experts believe that they will become a minority sometime between 2040 and 2050. Every component of the Trump-Republican agenda flows from these demographic fears. The Trump phenomenon and the surge of right-wing extremism in America was never about economic anxiety, as too many political reporters claimed during the 2016 presidential campaign. It was, and still is, about race and racism.”

The simple truth is that Trump is a racist, and it is his shamelessness about his racism that appeals to white people. He says what they wish they could get away with saying. They forgive his criminal behavior, his lies, his egomaniacal behavior, and his other flaws because of his racism, not in spite of it. They don’t care that his economic policies will benefit billionaires and not them, just so long as he makes sure minorities have it worse than them. Vance followed up Hillbilly Elegy, his supposed paean to the working class, by becoming a puppet of right-wing billionaire Peter Thiel, who bankrolled his Senate campaign in Ohio. Trump no doubt chose Vance to be his running mate at least in part to get more money from billionaires for his campaign. 

The evidence of Trump’s racism is so overwhelming that the press and many voters now seem to consider it old news, shrugging at his constant stream of bigoted comments. That is exactly what Trump is counting on; it’s difficult to remember that his racism was still considered shocking as recently as 2016 when he ran for president. 

Trump has been a racist his whole life; the Justice Department sued him for racial discrimination in the 1970s. In the 1980s, he took out newspaper ads calling for the death penalty in the case of the Central Park Five— Black and Latino men falsely accused in a New York City rape case— and he has stubbornly refused to apologize to the exonerated men.

He first gained prominence as a political figure for being an obsessive “birther,” propagating false conspiracy claims that Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States and thus couldn’t legally be president.

Trump remains obsessed with race and is constantly looking for ways to discredit and dehumanize any and all minorities: African Americans, Mexicans, Native Americans, Muslims, Asians. He’s claimed that Mexican immigrants are murderers and rapists, that Obama was the founder of ISIS, that Covid-19 was the “kung flu,” that migrants crossing the southern border have been released from mental institutions and are coming to take “Black jobs,” that Haitians probably have AIDS.

When Trump first emerged as a presidential contender, many Republican Party leaders claimed they were disgusted by his blatant racism.

Now they embrace it.

Dominated by Trump, the Republican Party adheres to policies designed both to maintain white political power and increase the white percentage of the nation’s population.

Once you understand that it is all about white power— especially white male power— the Trump-Republican agenda begins to make sense.

…Christian nationalists consider Vladimir Putin to be a fundamentalist Christian, a guardian of traditional white values, largely because he has cracked down on LGBTQ+ rights in Russia. By contrast, they associate Ukraine with Western Europe, which they think is too woke. Andrew Torba, founder of the far-right site Gab who wrote a self-published book called Christian Nationalism: A Biblical Guide for Taking Dominion and Disciplining Nations, said after the Russia’s invasion that “Ukraine needs to be liberated and cleansed from the degeneracy of the secular western globalist empire.” Nick Fuentes, another online Christian Nationalist, said on Telegram after the Russian invasion that “I wish Putin was president of America.”

Trump's latest stand-up comedy routine (Bozeman, Montana Friday night):