The Quill | Issue No. 8 | Spring 2022

SPRING 2022 | ISSUE NO. 8

The Quill A T

P A L M

B E A C H

A T L A N T I C

Conversations & Commentary from The LeMieux Center for Public Policy U N I V E R S I T Y

The Legacy of Trump: A Populist Realignment?

By WESLEY B. BORUCKI, PH.D.

million more votes than in 2016. Hispanics voted Republican in unprecedented numbers. Joe Biden won Florida’s MiamiDade County by seven percentage points after Hillary Clinton carried it by about thirty points in 2016, while two CubanAmerican Republicans there unseated two incumbent U.S. House Democrats, including former Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala.

With the presidential election now more than a year behind us, the question arises for historians to ponder: What is Donald Trump’s presidential legacy? That question for any president requires many years for full assessment; for example, the consequences of Bill Clinton’s endorsement of NAFTA and the People’s Republic of China’s reception of mostfavored-nation trading status are clearer today than they were twenty years ago.

However, some intriguing potential trends warrant observation in future elections.

Surprising results also came from heavily Hispanic border counties in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley. As The Texas Tribune reported on November 13, 2020, Trump lost Starr County to Hillary Clinton by sixty percentage points in 2016 but by only five points to Biden; neighboring Zapata County flipped from a Clinton majority to a Trump majority. All along the Mexican

For example, the 2020 election suggested a possible party realignment, as President Trump gained many voters from traditionally Democratic constituencies.

Even in defeat, Trump polled over eleven 1

CONTINUED FROM FRONT

the pandemic. However, those negative perceptions may be mitigated, as President Biden’s handling of COVID has inspired more disapproval over time, such that his approval and disapproval rates on COVID were virtually even at November’s end.

Biden’s push for vaccine mandates after running-mate Kamala Harris expressed distrust of the vaccine while Trump was in office – in addition to higher inflation fueled partly by continued large spending packages – have not helped Democrats’ prospects.

border, the Tribune continued, “Trump won 14 of the 28 counties that Clinton had nearly swept in 2016” by an average of thirty-three points. Nationwide, Trump gained three points among Hispanic Americans.

Trump also made significant gains among Black voters. According to Columbia University graduate fellow Musa al-Gharbi’s election analysis in The Guardian (November 14, 2020), from 2016 to 2020, Trump gained four percent of the overall Black vote. Sizable majorities of urban Black constituents still voted Democrat, but al-Gharbi concluded that Black voters’ support was crucial to Trump in battleground states such as North Carolina; Trump lost Georgia because losses of white voters exceeded gains among minorities.

Under Trump, the Black unemployment rate declined by September 2019 to its lowest since the government began keeping the statistic: 5.5 percent. Such improvement among diverse groups can provide solace to Republicans, as the GOP cut Democrats’ majority in the House of Representatives from thirty-eight seats to nine.

Economic growth, spurred by deregulation and lower fuel prices, offered hope for continued Republican gains under Trump, but then COVID-19 arrived to torpedo the economy. According to polling site FiveThirtyEight, most Americans disapproved of Trump’s handling of

NEW DICHOTOMIES POSSIBLE Are such voters within groups who have long voted Democrat now considered conservatives? Hardly. As The Texas Tribune indicates, South Texas voters split their tickets; one voter interviewed cast her ballot for more familiar Democrats locally but for Trump at the top. Ticketsplitting clearly occurred in Michigan, where Biden defeated Trump by over 154,000 votes, but John James, the African-American Republican nominee for U.S. Senate, lost to incumbent Democrat Gary Peters by over 92,000 votes. Ticket-splitting suggests voters are more moderate than party leaders recognize. Along the Rio Grande, for example, Latino petroleum workers disliked Biden’s primary-debate pledge to end fracking – the high-pressure injection of liquids into fissured underground rocks to extract petroleum. As Senators Bernie

Ticket-splitting suggests voters are more moderate than party leaders recognize.

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Sanders and Elizabeth Warren received widespread media attention embracing socialist labels to Biden’s left, Cubans and Venezuelans in Florida recoiled from prospects of the type of government they and their families had escaped.

industrial complex” was undermining him. NBC News found this past summer that most Americans it polled supported withdrawal from Afghanistan, and perhaps helping Trump going forward is that only twenty-seven percent rated Biden’s execution of it as “excellent” or “good.”

One possible consequence of this voter behavior is that a realignment might change the existing conservative-versusliberal dichotomy to a nationalist-versusglobalist split. Corporate elites interested in outsourced cheap labor and low-cost imports might clash with working-class Americans who enjoyed the resurgence of those manufacturing jobs that President Obama declared Trump would need a “magic wand” to restore. Working Americans would predictably oppose Democrats’ recent open immigration policies that can press wages downward.

Trump’s avowed defense of “the forgotten man and woman” in his Inaugural Address resonated with Midwestern farmers, small business owners, and factory workers who felt both parties’ trade policies ignored them, as Salena Zito shows in The Great Revolt. Trump’s victories in 2016 and 2020 in Kentucky and West Virginia reflected a workingclass electorate there resentful of Obama Administration restrictions on the coal industry.

Trump appeared to have a nationalist victory when China capitulated in the trade war — unless COVID-19 was that war’s last shot. Even farmers, who historically fear high tariffs due to potential foreign retaliation, came around to Trump’s stance when China agreed to buy billions of dollars of American goods.

Trump still carried farm states such as Iowa, the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, and Missouri; even in Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Michigan — states Biden won — Trump carried most rural counties. Firm policies toward China may be wise, as China’s President Xi Jinping declared in October that reunification of Taiwan with the mainland “must be fulfilled,” prompting Biden to affirm the U.S. would defend Taiwan.

CONCLUSION: BUT WHAT NEXT? Republicans’ essential question is who the next nationalist to cultivate the possible trends will be. Mike Pence, Ted Cruz, and Ron DeSantis are possibilities but are not political outsiders like Trump.

Trump will be 78 years old in 2024, the same age Biden was in 2020 as questions about his sharpness arose. Conservatives appear comfortable with Trump as standard-bearer: sixty-eight percent of straw-poll respondents at February 2021’s Conservative Political Action Conference selected him as their preference.

Congressional Democrats’ attempts to bury Trump through the second impeachment and continual fingerpointing over the Capitol “insurrection” or “riot” with the January 6 Commission

Also suggesting a globalist tilt of Trump’s opponents was the fact that during Election Night and the morning afterward, Dow Jones Futures surged as Biden’s victory became apparent, and China’s government reversed its currency devaluation. Moreover, though Trump wanted to end the U.S.’s costly involvement in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, American troops’ presence there continued past his presidency, and Trump acrimoniously broke with hawkish former National Security Advisor John Bolton and former Defense Secretaries James Mattis and Mark Esper. Their opposition made Trump wonder aloud in early September whether a “military3

have made them appear afraid of Trump; this echoes the experience of Justin Trudeau, who has recently cowered behind emergency powers and allegations of extremism in Ottawa instead of acknowledging that the sentiments of protesting truckers are representative of many Canadians. Trump must cease allegations of election fraud and present a forward vision to win back independents after Biden’s faultiness, but, according to a November 2021 NPR/PBS/Marist poll, about two-thirds of Republicans believe election fraud changed results. So, Trump’s legacy and any possible populist partisan realignment are far-from-finished stories.

Dr. Wesley Borucki is associate professor of history at Palm Beach Atlantic University.

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From the desk of Senator LeMieux I welcome you to the latest edition of The Quill. This publication highlights The LeMieux Center’s mission to provide a space for reasoned, thoughtful and civil discourse on pressing public policy issues confronting Florida, the United States and the world. Every quarterly issue includes an article written by a scholar, policy maker, journalist or other thought leader with the knowledge, expertise and prudence to inform the reader on topics of broad public interest.

The previous issue of The Quill examined the United States in a post 9-11 world, a topic even more salient given the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

This issue examines a complex and contentious domestic topic: the political legacy of former President Trump. Dr. Wes Borucki, a history professor at Palm Beach Atlantic University, turns his attention to assessing a possible political realignment of voters and voting that emerged during the Trump presidency.

The Quill and The Quill Podcast are but one facet of the Center’s interests and activities. In addition, the Center’s Distinguished Speaker Series hosts luminaries such as former Prime Minister Tony Blair of the United Kingdom, Associate Justice Clarence Thomas of the United States Supreme Court and former Secretary of State and CIA Director Mike Pompeo. These

speaking events, offered free of charge to the community, are held on the beautiful campus of Palm Beach Atlantic University in West Palm Beach, Florida.

Finally, the Freidheim Fellows program seeks to inculcate young people with the principles, perspectives and training to empower them to lead a new generation.

Each year Palm Beach Atlantic students selected as Freidheim Fellows conduct research and present their findings on public policy questions. Their public presentations are certainly one of the highlights of the year for me.

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