The challenge now is to expand Trump’s class-based appeal in ways that can also win over minorities. Becoming the white people’s party is not the road to long-term success; better to reach across the racial divide and make common cause with the new party core.
Most Latinos and African Americans, after all, share many economic concerns with the white working class — the loss of blue-collar jobs, lack of affordable housing and diminished prospects for homeownership. They also are most likely to suffer from the efforts to protect poorly performing public schools, which are fervently defended by Clinton’s core supporters in the teachers unions.
And as most Latinos are, themselves, not immigrants, and are becoming ever more native-born, they may prove more amenable to such basic economic appeals than focusing on people crossing the border.
But perhaps Trump’s signature achievement may prove to be the marginalization of the religious right, exemplified by the embrace at the Cleveland convention of gay billionaire Peter Thiel. Religious conservatives have posed a mortal threat to Republican future prospects, not only among millennials and educated professionals but across a broad swath of an increasingly secular electorate.
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