WaPo | Republicans are in a pickle. The midterms are just
two months away, Democrats seem more excited than ever, and the
president’s approval ratings are anemic. Faced with the possibility of
disaster, what message will they focus on for November? It sure is a
mystery. I’ll let the New York Times reveal the answer:
Democratic nominees for governor include three African-Americans, two of them in the old Confederacy, a prospect that not long ago would have been unthinkable. Record numbers of women are competing in congressional races. Elsewhere, Muslims, gays, lesbians and transgender people will be on the ballot for high-profile offices.
That diverse cast is teeing up a striking contrast for voters in November at a time when some in the Republican Party, taking their cues from President Trump, are embracing messages with explicit appeals to racial anxieties and resentment. The result is making racial and ethnic issues and conflicts central in the November elections in a way that’s far more explicit than the recent past.
Who
could have imagined that the GOP would choose to campaign on racial
resentment? Only anyone who has paid attention to Republican politics in
the Trump era.
What’s more, this is the only
kind of campaign it can run as long as Trump is president and dominates
the party. Republicans may take a different path once he’s gone, or they
may not. But any campaign that involves Trump will always be about
race.
The
primary reason, of course, is that Trump makes every campaign about
race because that’s just who he is. There are some positions he adopts
insincerely — I doubt he cares one way or another what his
administration’s policies on health care or education are — but when it
comes to getting rid of immigrants or his belief in the intellectual inferiority of African Americans, he speaks from the heart.
But
it’s also because Trumpism as a political strategy rests on stirring up
racial resentment among white voters. He turned himself from a reality
TV star into a political figure by becoming America’s most prominent
proponent of the racist theory that Barack Obama was not born in
America; he also insisted
that Obama could only have gotten into college and law school because
he was an affirmative-action admission who pushed aside worthier white
applicants.
