GOP Has Finally Found Its Big Tent
Republicans had few defenses against the race and gender cards deployed by the Democratic Party. Defeat followed defeat until Donald Trump focused on groups of disenfranchised voters who had all but been written off.
Rural people and rust belt workers joined evangelicals and most other church-going Americans to support a candidate who demonstrated a willingness to stand up to political correctness. The GOP had found its Big Tent.
Time magazine describes the grassroots revolution early on: “Chris Reilly, a commissioner in York County, Pennsylvania, has lived in the heavily Republican area north of Baltimore for 28 years. On the day in September after Mike Pence spoke to some 800 folks in downtown York, Reilly scanned a panoramic picture of the crowd in the local paper and had a shock. ‘I recognized one face,’ he said. That’s when the party stalwart knew something was going on.”
Pollsters undoubtedly had little luck reaching these people, most of whom were used to being harassed constantly by telephone marketers and con artists posing as researchers and pollsters. More and more people had already abandoned landlines with their exploitable online databases.
Campaign surprises kept unfolding, as the Time article continues: “Then, on a recent Friday, Reilly got word that the county had received 9,000 absentee-ballot applications in a single day. It had to mail them out by Monday but had no money for extra help. So Reilly turned up at the election office on Saturday to stuff the applications into envelopes himself. As he did, he noticed something surprising. The applications were running 10 to 1 male. And when he peeked at the employment lines, he saw a pattern. ‘Dockworker. Forklift operator. Roofer,’ Reilly recalled. ‘Grouter. Warehouse stocker. These people had probably never voted before. They were coming out of nowhere.’”
Trump skillfully used the news media to reach these voters, even while television and newspapers were unabashedly trying to promote a Democratic victory using classic yellow journalism practices. Nor can we forget that civility will always be insisted upon by those securely in power and who set the terms. No Mr. Peepers will get noticed in crowded presidential primary debates. Candidates without all the establishment and incumbent advantages are beginning to notice.
Trump tapped into the same overlooked segment of American society that Yale University professor William Graham Sumner had pointed out in his 1876 essay on “The Forgotten Man,” that is, the citizen who is forced to pay for social reforms that betray everything he stands for.
In 1932, FDR joined Sumner’s idea with the emerging Bolshevik emphasis on helping the lower economic strata of society. Socialists too, the Nazis hoped to bootstrap the Volk. Today’s Democratic Party elites thought they had become masters of racial and gender voting blocs, but Trump just built a bigger, more traditional tent.
