First Things: The Future of Conservative Populism

Editor’s Note: This is a work in progress.

Check out this cope.

We won a big moral victory for National Conservatism by losing the election.

First Things:

“Amid the tumult of Election Night turned Election Week 2020, two United States senators made a striking and politically revolutionary claim: The Republican party will become a multiethnic, multiracial, and working-class party. Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri tweeted “we are a working class party now. That’s the future.” Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida echoed the sentiment, tweeting that the GOP future is “a party built on a multi-ethnic multi-racial coalition of working AMERICANS.” 

The Edison Research national exit poll found that Donald Trump’s support in 2020 rose among blacks (+4), Hispanics (+4), and Asians (+4), making Trump the most popular Republican presidential candidate among racial/ethnic minorities in sixty years. Among non-whites without a college degree, Trump’s support rose even more (+7); he won a quarter of their vote. Although he did not increase his vote percentage among whites without a college degree, Trump did maintain his national 2-to-1 lead. His persistent appeal is all the more remarkable outside the South. The white working class once largely followed the national mood, but no more. In 2020 they strongly favored Trump in Pennsylvania (+27), Nevada (+22), Michigan (+20), Wisconsin (+16), California (+16), Minnesota (+15), Maine (+11), and New Hampshire (+10) despite both the country and their states backing Joe Biden. Considering the clear tendency of polling in this election cycle to seriously undercount the Trump vote, the true values of all these figures are almost certainly higher.

The greatest sources of optimism for this new Republican coalition were the election returns from Texas and Florida, two of the country’s most racially and ethnically diverse states. Democrats had hoped to win both in 2020 as part of a “blue wave” that would sweep not only Donald Trump from the White House but Trumpism into the dustbin of history. Instead, the president actually increased both his number of votes and his percentage of the total vote in both states—not by winning back the traditional Republican country club set but by a wave of support from Hispanics. …”

Is this even true?

Did Trump win working class Americans? How did the party of the working class lose the Rust Belt and the Northern Purple States?

James Allsup claims Trump collapsed in 2002 with the working class.