Eighteen years ago, liberal analysts, John Judis and Ruy Teixeira, argued in their book, "The Emerging Democratic Majority," that an emerging class of cosmopolitan professionals would join Blacks, Hispanics, Asians and working women in an embrace of "progressive" politics that would guarantee the Democratic Party a national electoral majority.
This belief gave rise to the identity politics movement which Manhattan Institute scholar Heather MacDonald has pointed out, "holds that human beings are defined by their skin color, sex, and sexual preference; that discrimination based on those characteristics has been the driving force in Western Civilization; and that America remains a profoundly bigoted place, where heterosexual white males continue to deny opportunity to everyone else."
Earlier this year, Democrat Stacey Abrams, who still refuses to concede the Georgia gubernatorial election she lost two years ago, told her party it must "embrace identity politics as an electoral necessity."
The National Democratic Party followed her advice but Nov. 3 returns indicate the "identity politics" strategy fell flat.
Why?
Because throughout the urban deserts of America’s inner cities, are patches of green: stretches of tidy, well-kept houses, populated by new immigrants and civic-minded minority citizens committed to family, education, self-discipline, and hard work.
These new Americans — Koreans, Chinese, Mexicans, Venezuelans, Columbians, Indians, Pakistanis, and Middle Easterners — have been repopulating abandoned communities, and have been building productive businesses and neighborhood shops.
And their politics, based on family, neighborhood, and bourgeois virtues, have turned out to be far stronger in the 2020 election than politics based on identity.
In Florida, for example, Cubans, Venezuelans, and Columbians, whose families experienced totalitarian socialist regimes, came out in droves to vote for Donald Trump.
Trump won 55% of Cuban-Americans and his overall support from Latino communities hit 47%, 12 points more than his 2016 total.
This outpouring in Miami-Dade County, cut Biden’s margin of victory to 7 percentage points vs. Hillary Clinton’s 30-point lead.
Down along the Texas-Mexican border where the Mexican-American population exceeds 90%, Trump made incredible inroads.
In Zapata County, Trump received 53% of the vote versus 34% in 2016.
In neighboring Starr County, Biden won by only 5 percentage points versus Clinton’s 60-point margin.
A former mayor from the area, Freddy Guerra, told the The Wall Street Journal: "There’s a lot of parallels between a community that’s 96% Hispanic and a community that’s 96% white. . . . Racism is not something that people deal with in Starr County because everybody’s brown. Climate change isn’t something they feel. They prefer bread on the table."
As for the national Latino vote, which is 13% of the electorate, 32% voted for Trump, up from 28% in 2016.
Questioning identity politics, Isvett Verde, a staff editor at The New York Times, who happens to be Cuban-American, wrote in an op-ed titled "There is no ‘Latino Vote'":
"The reason the 'Latino vote' befuddles is because it doesn’t exist, nor do 'Latino issues.' If we want to understand how Latinos vote, we should start by retiring the word 'Latino' entirely — and maybe 'Hispanic.' too…. These labels have served only to reduce us to a two-dimensional caricature: poor brown immigrants who always vote Democratic."
Confessing that she does not know what "Latino" means, Ms. Verde added,
"While my culture may be a prism through which I view the world, it doesn’t guarantee that I will identify with or vote like other Cuban-Americans, let alone other Latinos. Mr. Trump understood that. Hopefully Democrats do now, too."
Thirty-five percent of Muslim-Americans of Asian, European, African and Arab descent voted for Trump. Reacting, Shadi Hamid, of the Brookings Institute said, "A sizable number of Muslims have experienced Donald Trump, and to the surprise of Democrats they said, 'We want more of that.'"
A significant number of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders also moved into the Trump column. Nationally 34% went with Trump, and in Nevada that number hit 40%.
Many Asians, according to Professor Linda Vo of the University of California, "see the GOP as socially conservative and anti-communist, which aligns more with their values."
In California, left-wing supporters of Proposition 16, which would have allowed "diversity as a factor in public employment, education and contracting decisions," suffered a humiliating defeat.
The measure went down 56% to 44% thanks to strong opposition from minorities.
Asian-Americans were not alone in opposing the affirmative action proposal.
It was voted down in the 14 counties that had Latino majorities.
"Identify politics only go so far," said Lanhee Chen of Stanford’s Hoover Institute. "There is a sense on affirmative action that people resent being categorized by Progressives."
Progressives who weaponized race and waved the flags of social justice, cultural appropriation, diversity, intersectionality and white privilege, learned on Nov. 3 that there are voters of all races and creeds more interested in liberty and prosperity.
The left’s misreading gives Republicans an opportunity to build on November’s successes in minority communities.
To earn the support of these voters, Republicans must strive to convince them that they will safeguard them from the central planners who have weaponized race, and will champion policies that will maximize their liberty to pursue the American dream.
George J. Marlin, a former executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, is the author of "The American Catholic Voter: Two Hundred Years of Political Impact," and "Christian Persecutions in the Middle East: A 21st Century Tragedy." He is chairman of Aid to the Church in Need-USA. Mr. Marlin also writes for TheCatholicThing.org and the Long Island Business News. Read George J. Marlin's Reports — More Here.
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