The Trump Voting Bloc that Dare not Speak its Name

Despite the Democrats anti-White policies, The GOP is still too timid about appealing to White voters.

I put this out as a bit of a troll, but the engagement it got was only fraction of the original “Asians for Donald Trump” tweet.

And that didn’t surprise me in the least.

Spend a bit of time on Twitter/X and you’ll see scores of high engagement posts from proud Blacks/Hispanics/Asians touting their race or ethnicity while voting for Trump (and I’m glad they are!) but you’d almost never see a white person as a white person saying they are voting for Trump as a consequence of the Democrats anti-white policies. You can be a “White Dude for Harris” and get a ton of positive media coverage, but any organized group “White Dudes” or even “White Women” for Trump would be met with derision at best.

Let me make a few things clear at the outset.  I believe Donald Trump will and should be elected President on November 5th.  I believe the election will be close but not the dead heat the polls indicate. I believe the President’s campaign has been by far stronger and more disciplined than his 2016 or 2020 efforts. His selection of J.D. Vance as his Vice-Presidential candidate was inspiring and potentially legacy making. I believe he has a chance to have a historic second term.

But for all of the improvements Trump’s campaign in 2024, if President Trump *does not* win in 2024, it will be in large part because of one problem from 2020 that he has that he has not corrected.  And that is his challenges with upscale, college-educated white voters.  He lost this group in 2020, and, if polls are to be believed (though perhaps, based on early voting numbers, they shouldn’t) he will lose it even more badly in this election.  This explains why Trump, who the left and media (but I repeat myself) have constantly berated for being the candidate of white identity politics, appears on track to take a slightly lower percentage of the white vote than did milquetoast Mitt Romney in 2012.  Given the relentlessly anti-white nature of the Democrat party, this is lost opportunity.

Not for nothing did the Washington Post’s Jason Willick declare that “The most important U.S. political trend of this century is the march of college-educated White voters toward the Democratic Party — and of non-college-educated White voters toward the GOP.”

Trump regularly appears on the campaign trail with Black rappers and athletes, working class Hispanics, and members of other minority groups.  Indeed, it is possible that Hispanic men may vote more for Trump than white college educated men. And I want to be clear—I think it’s great that he’s expanding the GOP’s demographic footprint.   But his failure to substantially increase his share of white votes, especially college educated whites who are arguably the number one target of the regime I wrote about in The Unprotected Class, represents a missed opportunity.

It is simply stunning that Kamala Harris, whose rise, statements, and policies embody the Democrats anti-white racism completely, is nonetheless will get the votes of a strong majority of college-educated white voters.

Kamala Harris is discriminating against their kids in school.

Kamala Harris wants to make them victims of crime with her soft-on-crime policies including cashless bail for criminals, and she has valorized numerous thugs who were killed in encounter with police.

Kamala Harris attacks Christopher Columbus and other Europeans who explored and settled the American continent and were the leading figure in creating modern American culture.

Kamala Harris believes in discriminating against whites in the job market.

Kamala Harris has indicated an openness to race-based, taxpayer-funded reparations.

And yet, despite all of the evidence of her and her party’s anti-white animus, Kamala Harris is winning the votes of college educated whites by a wide because she hasn’t been challenged SYSTEMATICALLY on her anti-white policies and behavior.  Back in early May, Trump criticized the “anti-white feeling” arising in the U.S., but we’ve never heard anything like that since.  He’s been unafraid to challenge various elements of our anti-white regime’s policies (DEI, open borders) and this has explained a good bit of his popular appeal to many white voters, but he has declined to shape these critiques that into a coherent narrative about Democrats anti-white agenda.   The parts of Trump’s critique are less than the whole. White voters remain the demographic that dare not speak its name.

And college educated Whites are a huge part of the electorate. Whites with a college Degree comprised 31% the electorate and favored Biden by 7 points in 2020—non-college Whites favored Trump by 25.  Under Harris these gaps appear to have gotten wider still. A bit more than half of these college educated white voters are unstinting partisans for either side but 40-45% of them in the middle comprise arguably the biggest and most important genuine bloc of swing voters in contemporary politics.

Part of Trump’s problem with more educated White voters is stylistic—His brash no-holds barred style and cultural affect tends to appeal to working class and anti-elite voters of all races, while often turning off class conscious white voters with college degrees. In fact, in 2020 Trump did better with Hispanic voters with some college or less than he did with white college-educated voters.

At one level that could be seen as a harmless trade-- after all one always trades off constituencies in electoral politics.  But unfortunately, as I explained in an influential article  a few years ago in The American Conservative, the GOP has traded off too many elites to be able to effectively govern and run the institutions of society, even when we win elections. Most elites in our current society are terrible, but we still need decent ones to help manage even a smaller version of the modern managerial state. For that to change, we need to bring back more White college educated voters into the fold. 

Losses for Trump among college educated Whites are not simply limited to moderates. According to the Brookings Institution between 2016 and 2020, Trump’s vote among college-educated white evangelicals fell from 81% to 63%.  While these measurements are often uncertain and this one may overstate the fall, it is nonetheless a real and concerning phenomenon.

Ruy Teixeria, the electoral analyst and author of The Emerging Democratic Majority notes that without extreme economic pressure, many college-educated Whites will vote their more liberal cultural preferences rather than their economic ones.  In a large survey conducted when Joe Biden was still in the race that looked at college educated whites, Teixeria and his partners at AEI found that Joe Biden’s 52% unfavorable rating was far better than Trump’s 76% disapproval rating among moderate college educated whites, a group that makes up approximately 14%-15% of voters.  Indeed, approximately 1/3 of these “Double Haters”—those who disliked both Biden and Trump, were white college graduates. Biden had a 7% lead over Trump among these voters in a series of Quinnipiac polls. Almost 77% of these “double haters” are Independents or Republicans, and they are disproportionately, younger, white and with college degree. 

These voters are “Disproportionately young, white, moderate-to-conservative, and college educated. They are more likely to be from the Midwest than the South or Northeast.” In other words. these are the key swing demographics in this election, and key members of a stable governing coalition.   Yet these voters, while unhappy with both parties, are not uninvolved. 83% say they “always” or “nearly always” vote, In the survey, “Double haters” of all races preferred DeSantis over Biden 48-24, a number that was no doubt substantially higher among white moderates in that group, even as they preferred Biden to Trump by 38-24.

But the moderate “double hater” voters should be with the GOP.  Looking at “double haters” of all races, more of them think the Democrats are extreme than the GOP—by 42-28% they think that the GOP shares their values. 45-36 think the GOP looks out for the working class.  More importantly, by a 64-34 percent, this moderate group rejects the notion of institutional racism, feeling that it racism the product of individuals and not systems. While I don’t have crosstabs for the specifically white sample of moderates on the above questions, no doubt this grouping is even more substantially more inclined to the GOP.  And yet, right now they are largely voting for our opponents.  Among white moderates specifically, a staggering four fifths oppose affirmative action and other racial preferences in college admissions.    

We can make the closing argument to these voters to meet them where they are at.  Proxies such as DeSantis or Vance that are appealing to these voters may be helpful in providing a friendly face and a comprehensive plan to address their legitimate political interests in the final days of the campaign.  But for the GOP to really put together a durable coalition that is a substantial American majority, rather than just nibbling at the edges in swing states, we need to bring these moderate, college-educated White voters into the fold.  They are by far the largest group that is being obviously mistreated by our opponents that nonetheless remains in their voting bloc.

We need them to provide a long-term electoral mandate, and just as vitally, we need them in our governing coalition.