Voting Rights and Voter Suppression in the Age of Trump
"Throughout history, there are many examples of how the racism of white voters has been mobilized to favor a candidate for president," wrote Think Progress's Casey Quinlan the morning after the election. Quinlan cited particularly the candidacy of Barry Goldwater, and Richard Nixon's "southern strategy," which "took advantage of white people’s anxieties about the economic and social advancement of people of color."
Despite a persistent tendency on the part of mainstream media to omit the racial component and highlight economic anxiety of a so-called "working class," research and analysis has shown that this is inadequate. A Gallup study of 87,000 interviews conducted over the past year found that Trump supporters "on average, do not have lower incomes than other Americans, nor are they more likely to be unemployed."
Among those who are similar in terms of income, education and other factors, those who view Trump favorably are more likely to be found in white enclaves — racially isolated Zip codes where the amount of diversity is lower than in surrounding areas.
In fact, as a number of studies showed, racial resentment correlated strongly with voters' support for Trump.
A Slate magazine survey of 2000 non-Hispanic white adult US citizens found that a majority of Trump supporters rated blacks as less evolved than they rated whites. (Disturbingly, 38% of respondents all together rated blacks as less evolved, but that's a topic for another day.)
Sarah Posner and David Neiwert at Mother Jones have documented Trump's apparently concerted appeal to the right wing fringe. They locate its origin in Trump's June 2015 announcement that he would build a wall to keep out Mexican criminals and "rapists." The statement was almost immediately picked up by the neo-nazi web site Daily Stormer, whose publisher, Andrew Anglin wrote, "I urge all readers of this site to do whatever they can to make Donald Trump President."
Two months later when the Trump campaign announced its immigration reform plans, including mass deportations and the end of birthright citizenship, it was hailed by white nationalists around the country. Author Kevin MacDonald, publisher of a journal that the Anti-Defamation League calls "online anti-Semitism's new voice," declared that Trump "is saying what White Americans have been actually thinking for a very long time."
Other extremists hailed Trump's anti-immigrant policies, including the promise to close the "anchor baby loophole," thereby denying citizenship to American-born children of immigrants. As Jared Taylor, operator of the white nationalist web site American Renaissance, put it, Trump was "talking about policies that would slow the dispossession of whites." Endorsements followed from the founder of the neo-Nazi web site Stormfront, the chair of the American Nazi Party, a national organizer for the successor to David Duke's Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, and white nationalist Richard Spencer, among others.
Trump didn't become the darling of America's right wing extremist communities solely because his positions echoed their concerns, Posner and Neiwert asserted, but because "he has amplified their message on social media—and, perhaps most importantly, has gone to great lengths to avoid distancing himself from the racist right." With the sole exception of David Duke, prior to the election Trump had not disavowed one of the dozens of endorsements he's received from right wing extremists and white nationalists. The effect, as a three-month long investigation by Mother Jones found, has been to draw these fringe elements into the mainstream of American politics.
Trump's enduring campaign tactics—from calls for black protesters to be "roughed up" to the circulation of racist, anti-Muslim, and anti-Semitic language and memes—[are] proof for them that white nationalism has not only arrived, but has found a champion in a major-party nominee for president of the United States.
Analysis by Mother Jones, working with the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), found that dozens of Trump campaign staffers were following the top five extremist "influencers" on Twitter. Staffers included the South Carolina coalitions director, the South Carolina field director, the Massachusetts field director, a New Hampshire operative, spokeswoman Katrina Pierson, and Trump surrogate former senator Scott Brown. Followed accounts regular tweeted xenophobic, homophobic, and anti-Semitic rants.
In an interview on November 20, Trump told the NY Times that he condemned and disavowed his supporters in the white supremacist movement. His appointment of right wing media peddler Steve Bannon as chief strategist sends the opposite message, however, as Forbes noted, among other observers.
Not surprisingly, then, incidents of racist and xenophobic harassment have increased since "the election of a Ku Klux Klan-endorsed candidate who has denigrated women and racial and religious minorities," as The New Yorker's Alexis Okeowo wrote.
As of November 18 the SPLC had catalogued 701 hate-related incidents, including offenses against women, blacks, Jews, Muslims, and immigrants. On December 3, North Carolina state troopers blocked traffic as members of the Ku Klux Klan made their way through downtown Roxboro, North Carolina in what was publicized as a "Trump victory parade." "I think Donald Trump is going to do some really good things and turn this country around,” Amanda Barker, identified on the KKK web site as an "imperial kommander" told the Burlington, NC Times News.
"If providing a platform for white supremacists makes me a brilliant tactician I am glad to have laws," former Clinton communications director Jennifer Palmieri told Trump staffers at a two-day post-election conference at Harvard in early December. "...I would rather lose than win the way you guys did.... [I]n Steve Bannon's own words and Donald Trump's own words the platform that they gave to white supremacists, white nationalists ... I am going to be very glad to be part of the campaign that tried to stop this."
"Do you think I ran a campaign where white supremacists had a platform? Are you going to look me in the face and tell me that?" Conway asked?
"It did, Kellyanne, it did," Palmieri replied.
It did.