Throughout the election season, there were signs of the emergence of a coalition of normal people dissatisfied with the radical turns our country was taking. Regardless of how the presidential race turns out, the potential for a change in the political landscape is certain. Latinos and blue-collar workers are noticeably moving away from the efforts of the left-wing “anti-police” crowd. I’m not sure who thought the violence and looting on the streets of so many of our cities wouldn’t have any political repercussions, but they did, and they brought ordinary Americans together in a way that bodes well for the future.
Our election year was dominated by antifa riots on one hand and QAnon conspiracies on the other. Between real Marxists burning down buildings and huge swathes of America thinking our country was run by a secret network of pedophiles, it was firm not to fear for our future.
The far left, with the support of the corporate media and many representatives of corporate America, has made a earnest effort to stoke America’s racial divisions. Since the sin of slavery centuries ago, the issue of race has opposed everything America is supposed to stand for. Civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. fought firm to put these problems behind them and asked us to look at each person’s character, not the skin color they were born with. It is this assumption – the cornerstone of liberal American thinking – that has come under attack this year. The overwhelming defeat of this attack was the best part of the entire election.
The most dramatic change occurred in the state of Florida, where the Latino population consists of gigantic numbers of Cubans and Venezuelans. Despite the rise of socialism among our youth, those with the most direct personal experience with a left-wing government have fiercely opposed it. In 2016, Hillary Clinton won the Latino vote in Florida by 27 points. This time, President Donald Trump was close to a tie. Results in other states were less dramatic, but even in Georgia and Ohio, Trump did about 15 points better against Joe Biden than against Hillary. Trump also gained about 4 points among African Americans nationwide thanks to his 2016 performance, according to CNN’s exit poll.
These are major achievements and are even more noteworthy given the months of racial division our country has just gone through. What is driving change? The two most obvious answers are the criminal justice system and economic concerns. Voters of all stripes trusted Trump more on the economy and crime. Despite the left’s attempts to make absolutely everything about race, it turns out that kitchen issues are still significant to minority communities.
For too long, Americans have voted primarily along racial lines. If these trends continued, given the sheer demographics of our country, the Republican Party would become the party of a eternal minority. That was Democrats’ hope for converting states like Florida and Texas.
It looks like we may instead move to a vote based on economic interests. Those at the lower end of our wage scale felt stuck at neutral (or the other way around), while Americans with the highest incomes benefited from international trade, automation, and the age of information technology. During the Trump years, for the first time in a long time, lower-income workers saw greater wage growth than middle- and upper-income workers. Voters seem to know this. At least that’s what the results show.
All of this creates a huge opportunity for the Republican Party. If Republicans can capture more hard-working Americans of all races, our politics will be changed forever. On the other hand, if Republicans don’t make this kind of reshuffle, they will be doomed to failure in a demographically changing country. A Republican Party focused on moving beyond harmful racial divisions and improving the plight of working Americans seems possible based on the results we have observed.
The real challenge is to find a way to share prosperity more broadly without harming prosperity. Too many Americans have felt left behind in an increasingly global and automated economy. It is not effortless to find a solution to this problem, but so far our political leaders have not really tried. They are closely tailored to the needs of the huge enterprises that dominate Washington. These businesses have flourished over the past few decades. In the process, we have seen that what is good for large business – especially gigantic, multinational companies with growth goals abroad – is not always good for America.
Many politicians still do not even recognize the problem. They condemn populism and the ugliness that can come with it, without looking at its root causes. Others who actually see what is really happening in our country have taken the effortless way out, demagogueing these problems with superficial, politically popular fixes rather than real solutions. We need a third option: intelligent politicians who are committed to finding real solutions to restore the American Dream to the many who feel it is slipping away.
We have a country worth repairing. Solving these problems should be a major goal in the future. If Republicans do this, they can be home to a broader, more eternal working-class majority of ordinary Americans of all races. The left fears this more than anything else. On the other hand, if we continue to ignore this lively, the result will likely be a further escalate in the popularity of socialism among juvenile Americans, as we have seen over the last few years.
Ask the Cubans how it ended.
Neil Patel is the co-founder of The Daily Caller, one of America’s fastest-growing online news sites, regularly publishing breaking news and distributing it to more than 15 million readers each month. Patel also co-founded The Daily Caller News Foundation, a nonprofit news organization that trains journalists, produces fact-checks and conducts long-term investigative reporting. The Daily Caller News Foundation licenses its content for free to over 300 news outlets, reaching potentially hundreds of millions of people each month.
