Trump's Rainbow Coalition
Minorities for Trump: Real or Fake?
When Mark Fisher, a self-described co-founder of Black Lives Matter Rhode Island, announced that he was voting for Donald Trump in 2024, a lot of people lost their minds. Many of Trump’s staunchest supporters said it was proof he had built his rainbow coalition of disaffected minorities who would take him back to the White House. On the other hand, his detractors said it was nothing more than a publicity stunt and insisted that Fisher had nothing to do with the founding of BLMRI.
Regardless of the individual endorsement, a plethora of polls has shown Trump’s path to victory is the end of the Nixon strategy.
In 1968, Nixon - on the advice of Pat Buchanan, built a winning coalition by combining traditional college-educated white Republicans with non-college-educated ethnic whites. This strategy became the defacto strategy to usher a Republican into the White House and was successful in six of the next nine elections.
Obama’s path to the White House was by forming a coalition of the ascendant: college-educated suburbanites who became disenfranchised by the GOP over cultural issues, minorities, and young people.
That strategy was incredibly successful under Obama. Hillary wasn’t able to replicate it because young people and minorities - especially blacks didn’t show up to the polls in the numbers she needed, and she lost ground with ancestral working-class white Democrats.
Biden regained the level of support of working-class whites who didn’t hate him the way they hated Hillary but lost some minorities, especially Hispanics and Asians, in the process.
So now Trump is laying out his path forward to become the first president since Grover Cleveland to have two nonconsecutive terms by earning support from non-college-educated whites and shaving off more minority Democrats. All while hoping that some of the Democrats’ most ardent supporters, like young people and older blacks, don’t show up on election day.
But does he have a real chance at doing it?