We Reversed The Realignment

Jonathon van Maren is living in a fantasy world.

The 2016 election was a realignment election … because of us. The 2020 election, however, reversed that realignment … once again, because of us. The math of based blacks in MAGA hats fizzled. Donald Trump plummeted from winning 306 electoral votes to 217 electoral votes.

Bro, what planet are you living on? Did we watch the same election? Donald Trump lost the Rust Belt. He decisively lost the Purple States in the North. He turned in the same result in Nevada. He lost Arizona and Georgia because of White voters. He underperformed John Cornyn in Texas with his based Hispanics. It looks to me like he lost his margin with the White vote in over 41 states.

TAC:

“In July of 2019, conservatives gathered in Washington, D.C. for the National Conservatism Conference, the coming out party for the new Edmund Burke Foundation and a three-day discussion about the future of conservatism in the Age of Trump. Everyone from J.D. Vance, author of Hillbilly Elegy, to James L. Buckley, the former senator and brother of the late William F. Buckley, was in attendance. Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri closed the conference with a rousing call to action. Everyone agreed on one fundamental thing: The old GOP coalition of Big Business and social conservatives was dead. It was time to forge a new one.

The pivotal question was whether Trump’s 2016 victory was a fluke or a realignment. Trump, after all, is Trump. Did he expose potential new coalitions and growing fault lines in the Democratic base, or did his unique brand of celebrity and barnstorming rallies make him a one-off candidate? With the 2020 election results coming in, we have our answer. There was no blue wave. Trump lost by a handful of votes in a handful of states; the GOP unexpectedly won congressional races; if Republicans win the two run-off races in Georgia, they will retain the senate. Trump, the “white supremacist” candidate, won the highest share of non-white voters of any Republican presidential candidate since Nixon in 1960—double Romney’s 2012 count and nearly triple Bush’s count in 2000. …

To Camosy, the potential is obvious. “Gone is the classic left/right binary around big and small government,” he pointed out. “Instead, there is a party—the Democrats—who seem to be becoming the party supported by elite money, elite ideology, and Big Tech. The GOP, by contrast, seems to be becoming the party of populism and the working class. I say ‘seems’ because the major complicating factor is the Black and Latino working class. While still not doing good enough, the exit polls seem to suggest Trump and more populist Republicans are doing a much better job than they have done in recent years. There is a real opportunity to build a multi-racial working-class party here.” …

The 2016 election upended conventional wisdoms and inaugurated political chaos, with Donald Trump at the center of the maelstrom. Democrats have been desperately hoping—even assuming—that Trump was a one-off detour on the long march towards Progress (a goal that is forever just beyond the horizon.) Instead, the 2020 election results prove that the conservatives who gathered last year are not delusional—they’re on to something. Demography is not destiny. A new fusion of economic populism and social conservatism just might be.”

Behold, the party of the working class.

2016:

In the 2016 election, Trumpism 1.0 won the working class.

2020:

In the 2020 election, Trumpism 2.0 lost the working class.

It is true that there is a constituency for social conservatism and economic populism, but cucks like this guy lost the plot and the 2020 election. Donald Trump campaigned on social conservatism and economic populism in 2016, but delivered social liberalism and economic liberalism in office. In doing so, he lost the White male Independents who were worth 89 electoral votes.

How about a joke?

What do you get when Jared Kushner and Steve Bannon trade 5% of the White male vote (35% of the electorate) for 4% of the black vote (13% of the electorate)?

You get President Joe Biden!

I’ve dealt with this guy before.

A few years ago, he wrote an article denouncing the Alt-Right.

“I hope this reveals, yet again, why conservatives can find no common ground with the alt-right. I hope this explains why I find it so reprehensible and disgusting that commentators like Gavin McInnes are willing to give Richard Spencer a platform—and multiple times, too. Conservatism is going through a time of upheaval, and we have to be extraordinarily vigilant. The alt-right is attempting to infiltrate the mainstream, using people like McInnes, and Milo, and others. If they manage to do it, conservatism is going to need chemotherapy.”

Chemotherapy it is then.

A “moral victory” in defeat and returning to the wilderness.

In the 2020 election, Trump did better with every demographic with one notable exception. He turned out more Conservatives than he did in the 2016 election. He did better with Jews, Muslims, Mormons, Hispanics, Asians, LGBTs, blacks, women and the upper middle class. He should have won then, right?

White men is why Trump won the 2016 election and lost the 2020 election. He lost Independents and Moderates. He lost his margin with White men in the Center of the electorate, not on the Right. He lost the ethnocentric Far Right vote which is to the Left of the Conservative vote.

The first order of business for Yoram Hazony’s National Conservatism conference was to tell anyone in attendence who was actually a nationalist rather than a LARPing conservative to get out.

BuzzFeed:

“The conference organizers kept repeating how unwelcome white nationalists were at the event, as well as in the movement they’re trying to launch. In a speech on the opening night, Brog told anyone in the room who might have racist sympathies to leave, telling them, “There is the door.” Hazony made similar points in his remarks, and encouraged attendees to take the threat of white nationalism seriously and not just dismiss it as a “tiny periphery.”

“There is the door.”

The door through which Trump entered the White House is the same one through which he now makes his exit as a one term president. We’re the social conservatives and economic populists in the middle of the electorate that the Right needs to win the White House. Without us, Donald Trump can win 94% of Conservatives and still lose the election. There aren’t enough based blacks and based Latinos to win Northern White working class states like Wisconsin and Michigan.

Note: White male Independent voters who were attracted to Donald Trump in 2016 are the reason why Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett are on the Supreme Court. While people like Richard Spencer might not have personally cared about abortion or religious liberty, they empowered those who did care about those issues. Now they are gone and … well?