Donald Trump Race Shocker: Polls Prove His Success Really Is Based on Racists
New numbers prove that Trump is pulling support from the highly xenophobic Republican contingent.
A new Washington Post-ABC News poll proves what gut instinct was already telling you: The Donald Trump campaign’s success is built on the backs of racists. Or, if you prefer a gentler word that captures the immigrant-specific questions the poll asked,xenophobes. Either way, fear of foreigners coming to America to white people isn’t just driving the rhetoric of the Trump campaign, but it’s, quite predictably, shaping who his supporters are.
“Nearly half of GOP-leaning respondents in the poll — 47 percent — both support the deportation of undocumented immigrants and oppose accepting refugees from Syria and other Mideast conflicts,” the Washington Post reports. “If a GOP-leaning voter supports deportation, there is a 79 percent chance she or he also opposes Syrian refugees, compared with 54 percent if they oppose deportation.”
Call them the twofers: Republicans who both want to kick out all undocumented immigrants and stop Syrian refugees from entering. A whopping 51 percent of Trump’s supporters are twofers, compared to only 16 percent of all other Republican voters. “Put another way, pro-deportation/anti-refugee voters account for almost three-quarters of Trump’s support,” the Washington Post reports.
To be clear, nearly every Republican in the race has pandered to the twofers on some level, stoking hysteria about Syrian refugees and talking tough on immigration, even if they fall short of embracing Trump’s build-a-wall-kick-’em-out program. But Trump’s laser-like focus on these issues, along with a simple-minded belligerence that appeals to the bigoted (who are not known for their nuanced approach to issues) means he is killing with these voters. Enough to hold a comfortable lead as the primaries draw closer.
While these results aren’t surprising, there’s a couple of important lessons to be drawn from them. One, traditional coalition-building is collapsing in the Republican Party, which has become victim of its own propaganda machine. Two, this should (but won’t) put to bed any lingering hope that Trump is somehow going to say something too racist and lose his base of support.
http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/donald-trump-race-shocker-polls-prove-his-success-really-based-racists
= new reply since forum marked as read
supporters. People who are in such a panic state, believing their very identity is under threat by growing racial and ethnic diversity, aren’t going to be interested in people who they see as accepting change as inevitable (even if they promise to slow it down). They want to hear that it can be stopped, even reversed. And Trump is making that promise.
This entire situation is also a nice reminder that the politics of coalition-building, as frustrating and contentious as they can be at times, have benefits over the multi-decade conservative effort to use propaganda to create a singular, lockstep coalition. Democrats work by bringing people with different issues together, settling differences through compromise and often tedious amounts of discussion. For decades now, the right has gone a different route: Using talk radio, conservative publications and Fox News to create a singular conservative identity and persuading people in the coalition to adjust themselves to it.
As long as immigration is a salient issue to conservatives, Trump is going to do well. He can convincingly portray himself as the most conservative on this issue, bringing a huge chunk of voters with him. The only way to combat that is to find some other enticing issue that a candidates is most conservative on, and distract voters with that. Carson was able to pull that off for awhile, but the immigration issue has surged to the front again because of the Paris attacks.
The Republican noise machine has been incredibly successful in building a powerful movement that moves in lockstep. But [insert your Frankenstein metaphor here]. There’s no real incentive for the Fox News and Rush Limbaughs of the world to dial it down. Lockstep conservatism is straight up good for ratings. But it increasingly looks bad for the Republican Party."
Republicans have spent several decades building a "singular, lockstep coalition". For the near future it looks very powerful. "But it increasingly looks bad for the Republican Party" longer term - over 'several decades'. The "bad for the Republican Party" cannot come soon enough.
Great article, MrScorpio. 
