Stand for nothing and you’ll fall for anything.
The GOP is quickly proving its uselessness at being a force for constitutional government — and reinforcing the weakness of the prevailing party model — by becoming a Democrat Lite party due to its tendency to seek the approval of various demographics that the political establishment claims are necessary for electoral victory.
One of the most popular talking points in this election cycle has been that Donald Trump and the Republican Party at large — particularly due to the abortion issue — have fallen out of favor with suburban white women. According to this narrative, unless the GOP rapidly gets back into good graces with this demographic (in particular by becoming pro-choice and toning down talk on hot-button issues like governmental corruption), the party will lose the November election disastrously.
The pundits make a similar case with regard to the black vote. For example, an article from Politico published earlier this month is titled “Trump has a rocky relationship with Black voters. He’s trying to change it.”
The piece details various outreach initiatives the Trump campaign has undertaken to appeal to blacks, especially black men — only 12 percent of whom cast their ballots for Trump in 2020. The Trump team’s efforts include deploying Donald Trump, Jr. to participate in an in-depth interview with hip-hop podcaster DJ Akademiks, during which the 45th president’s eldest son detailed how his father’s policies would benefit the black community.
Also earlier this month, the Trump campaign shared a video in which he visited a Chick-fil-A in Atlanta and was received warmly by the black staff, with one woman going so far as to tell him, “I don’t care what the media tells you, Mr. Trump, we support you.”
Trump also hopes to use the migrant crisis, particularly its disastrous effects on New York, to drive black voters to the polls and vote Republican. As Politico notes:
He’ll make targeted pitches to voters of color during campaign-style stops in and around the city, including in historically Black neighborhoods like Harlem. And [Trump’s advisors] say he’ll attempt to turn the city’s migrant crisis into a wedge issue to attract Black voters bitter at local Democratic officials who approved millions in resources to support newly arriving immigrants instead of their communities.
… Trump has already started employing this strategy. During a stop at a bodega in the heart of Harlem last week, the former president railed against Biden’s border policies as well as New York Democrats for allocating millions of dollars in rental and food assistance to people who only recently entered the country.
During that appearance, Trump said that illegal aliens “take over everything” and added, “They’ve destroyed so many people, the African American community is now not getting jobs, migrants are taking their jobs that are here illegally.”
But at the end of the day, all this talk is much ado about nothing. Blacks in the United States make up approximately 12 percent of the total population. That number has not drastically changed over the course of decades. It’s the same now as it was when Trump won in 2020, when Obama won in 2008, and when George W. Bush won in 2000.
So why are we to believe that all of a sudden Republicans cannot win unless they get the black vote?
In the end, it’s not really about electoral math. It’s about the media deceiving Republicans into watering down their own platform and convictions in pursuit of these unicorn demographics who will not support them anyway, and whom the party does not actually need in order to win. And because the GOP is spineless and short-sighted, they are playing right into the Left’s hand — making themselves less of a threat by forsaking their constitutional principles in favor of policies palatable to Democrats.
The Trump team should have learned its lesson in 2020, when they pandered to blacks with the infamous Platinum Plan, a $500 billion investment proposal for black communities. Obviously, the plan failed to convince black voters to come out for Trump in droves.
What Republicans need to understand is that many, if not most, of the people who vote have a particular political identity through which they view the world and view themselves. This is true of virtually all those who bother to join a party and who vote during the primaries. For people who have such an identity, voting for the “other side” is unthinkable; even if a candidate of the opposing party says some things they like, these people cannot fathom seriously voting for the party they see as the incarnation of evil.
Think of it from the Republican side. A conservative Republican voter may like some of the things said by a Democrat like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (before he decided to change his presidential bid to Independent) on some issues; but, ultimately, the conservative voter takes issue with Kennedy’s left-wing stances and record on other issues, recognizes that Kennedy subscribes to a generally liberal worldview incompatible with constitutional conservatism, and believes that (because of that worldview) he cannot be trusted to fulfill whatever conservative-leaning promises he makes on the campaign trail.
It is the same with blacks, homosexuals, and other groups whom the GOP wants to win over with pandering. The pundits claim Republicans need to sacrifice their pro-life stance on abortion to win over suburban white women; but the real issue is that more suburban white women today have subscribed to an overall feminist, cultural Marxist worldview and identity
And because of this worldview, they will not vote Trump or GOP even if the party succumbs on abortion. These women perceive Trump and the Republican Party as the supreme instruments of the “Christo-fascist patriarchy,” and continue to consider it as such even if the party adjusts its position on one or two issues. Why would leftist women vote for a pro-choice Republican Party when it still goes against their beliefs on other issues? It would make more sense for them to vote for the Democratic Party, which is not only pro-choice, but is on the same page as they are on all the other issues as well.
Likewise, blacks will still view Republicans as the party of white oppression, even if the GOP promises billions in urban investment, and homosexuals — most of whom are anti-Christian Marxists across all the issues — will still see Republicans as Christo-fascists even if they relax on gay issues. In fact, that has already proven to be the case; since the Supreme Court made “gay marriage” the law of the land with Obergefell in 2015, Republicans have largely backed off from contesting the issue of same-sex marriage. Despite this, there has been no mass exodus of homosexuals from the Democratic Party to the GOP.
The only circumstance under which such voters will ever vote Republican is if the GOP completely throws out its entire platform, fires all its staff, disavows all its politicians (especially Trump) and adopts a new name that includes some variant of “democracy,” “equality” and “social justice.”
In conclusion, the party model of prioritizing electoral success over policy success is a flawed, dangerous, and morally bankrupt one. It leads to the GOP foolishly running after any sparkling new trend in the hopes of gaining new votes. Republicans must stop desperately chasing the approval of people who hate them, hate America, and hate Christianity. They should strive to sell their platform to voters, not sell out their platform for the sake of potential voters.
On one hand is the GOP’s soul, on the other is the election. If Republicans choose to save their soul, no matter the political consequences, they may win or lose the election. But if they choose to pursue electoral victory at any cost, they will inevitably and certainly lose both.
