An often-overlooked story of the 2024 presidential election was how much Donald Trump won over traditionally rusted-on Democrat voting blocs: Blacks, Hispanics, Jews and immigrants. Fifteen per cent of Blacks voted Republican in 2024, the highest since 1964. Nearly half of Hispanic voters flocked to Trump. The Jewish Republican vote rose by over 40 per cent. Half of naturalised citizens – that is, immigrants – voted Republican.
This was an astonishing achievement for a Republican president. As Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen puts it, it signalled a repudiation by mainstream Americans of the “Democrats’ toxic game of identity politics”. But the fringe of the conservative right seemed hell-bent on destroying that magnificent achievement.
Tucker Carlson’s effort to bring neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes into the mainstream of the conservative movement is not only morally reprehensible, it is a path to political suicide for the right. Those defending or excusing Carlson’s sane-washing of Fuentes need to ask themselves a simple question: Do they want to be a majoritarian movement or not?
The same goes for the refusal to admit that the toxic Candace Owens is nothing but a ranting, anti-Semitic grifter. Coddling these loons is not ‘based’ or edgy: it’s suicidally stupid… at best.
Conservatives cannot build a lasting majority without appealing to minority voters – and that won’t happen if they embrace white nationalists.
The simple fact is that it was not whites who delivered the thumping turnaround for Trump in 2024. The Democrats might have lost “White Dudes for Harris” in droves – but they didn’t flock to Trump. Trump’s standing among white voters barely shifted from 2016 to 2024.
So, what changed between 2016 and 2024? Simple: Trump’s political comeback was powered by significant gains among minority voters.
In 2020 Trump won just 36 per cent of Hispanic voters. In 2024, he won 48 per cent – a 12-point gain. In 2020, Trump won just 30 per cent of Asian Americans. In 2024, he won 40 per cent. He also more than doubled his share of the Black vote over the past eight years from six per cent in 2016 to 15 per cent in 2024, when he won almost a quarter of Black men. He also gained 11 points among Jewish voters – jumping from 24 per cent in 2016 to 35 per cent in 2024. According to the Republican Jewish Coalition, 31 per cent of Jewish voters now identify as Republicans, the highest percentage on record.
Trump also made significant gains among legal immigrants. He won 47 per cent of naturalized citizens in 2024 – a nine-point gain from over four years earlier. He was nearly even with Harris, who won 51 per cent of this voting bloc. Trump won a decisive 57 per cent majority of new citizens who had not voted in 2020 – including 55 per cent of white naturalized citizens, 51 per cent of Hispanic naturalized citizens and 46 per cent of Asian naturalized citizens – all double-digit gains from the previous election. In 2020, by contrast, Biden had won naturalized citizens by 21 points.
In other words, Trump’s 2024 coalition was significantly more racially and ethnically diverse than it had been in 2020 or 2016. Indeed, Trump increased his support in almost every key demographic. That’s why he went from losing the popular vote in 2016 and 2020 to winning it in 2024.
The momentous demographic change Trump engineered in 2024 was entirely among traditionally Democrat minority voters. A huge achievement.
But if the centre-right doesn’t repudiate the groypers, Nazis and gibbering nutcases of the racist fringe-right, Trump’s hard-won gains will likely evaporate.
A normal political movement would celebrate this success and try to build on it. Instead, some on the right seem intent on driving away these new voters by tolerating or even embracing white nationalists. That is both repulsive and insane.
How long will the gains Republicans made with minority voters last if we cannot bring ourselves to denounce a vile bigot who says Mexicans need to “get the f— out! … Go back over the border”; calls JD Vance a “fat dumbass dork with a brown family” and declares of his South Asian wife: “Jeet First Lady? I hope I never see the day”; who defends Jim Crow and says, “White people are every single bit justified in being racist” against Black people; and declares that “perfidious Jews” need “to be given the death penalty, straight up.”
This isn’t the free speech crusade too many ninnies on the right seem to think it is. Nobody is saying that hateful wombles like Fuentes must be silenced: just that the right isn’t obligated to give these shits a bully pulpit. It’s one thing to leave pinhead groypers to circle-jerk over their framed Hitler photos, quite another for Tucker Carlson to whip his own dick out and do that weird, falsetto cackle-thing while he joins in and videos it for his legion of admirers.
If we wanted that kind of Nazi-porn, we’d watch Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS, instead of Carlson and Fuente’s creepy groyper OnlyFans show.
If you really want the left’s ‘Nazi’ name-calling to look as ridiculous as it is – don’t cuddle up to actual Nazis. Is that really so hard to comprehend?
