With a little more than a week to Election Day, former President and Republican nominee Donald Trump staged a rally in Madison Square Garden so steeped in racism and misogyny that it invited comparisons to the infamous 1939 Nazi rally held in the same arena.
Speakers at the Oct. 27 event each tried to outdo the others in producing the most racist one-liners, calling Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage,” likening Trump’s opponent Kamala Harris to a prostitute, and saying Palestinian children — nearly 17,000 of whom have been killed in Israeli attacks during the past year — are “taught to kill us at two years old.”
Trump himself topped off the night by proclaiming that the United States is now under occupation by undocumented immigrants.
Shock and awe over the latest round of unprintable insults aside, the event itself was actually quintessential MAGA. Trump has spent the home stretch of the campaign doubling-down on his most controversial racist rhetoric.
With the election a toss-up, and few undecided voters left to move the margins, the campaigns are focused on base turnout, says Darnell Hunt, professor of sociology and African American studies at UCLA.
And Trump’s base is primarily White, conservative voters.
During the 2020 elections, 85% of Trump voters were White, compared to 61% of Joe Biden voters. Overall, Trump won White voters by 12 percentage points, while only 8% of Black voters picked Trump.
Fast forward four years and Trump is leading by nine points among White voters and is polling at 12% among Black voters, per recent Reuters/Ipsos polling.
“If they were really interested in securing the support of groups that haven’t traditionally voted Republican or these so-called undecideds in the middle, then I think their message would be more moderate as opposed to extreme,” Hunt said.
Trump’s message reflects a zero-sum idea of politics – everyone is in it for themselves and power is won by taking it away from others. You don’t have to be White to find that message compelling.
“Trump’s continual reliance upon racist, sexist, and homophobic language is meant to reinforce this ‘us versus them’ vision of America,” Hunt said. “The countervailing tactic is to continue to press these wedge issues that divide the other group — like gender, like sexuality, et cetera — to pick off a few of those to bring them into the Trump camp to add to an energized base.”
The jokes, offensive as they are, are a part of that strategy. There are lots of people who feel seen when a politician defiantly says the “wrong” thing, says Howard University professor Marcus Board Jr.
“They’re talking to people who are tired of being told that their opinion on their queer niece is unacceptable, or people who are tired of hearing that the joke that they made about a friend’s pet is not cool,” Board said. “It’s people who just want to be able to say and do what they want.”
Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance summed up that sentiment after the condemnation over the Madison Square Garden rally saying that though he didn’t hear the offensive comments, “I think that we have to stop getting so offended at every little thing in the United States of America. I’m just — I’m so over it.”
“Our country was built by frontiersmen who conquered the wilderness. We’re not going to restore the greatness of American civilization if we get offended at every little thing,” he said.
Low-propensity voters are the wild card
Lots of media coverage has been dedicated to the possibility that Trump and the Republicans are making in-roads with voters of color, particularly Black and Latino men. Sunday’s rally proves this was never their central strategy, says Eddie Glaude, author and professor at Princeton University.
“The central strategy has always been to increase the turnout of low-propensity White voters,” Glaude said. “Trump’s strategy since 2016 has been based on the idea that there are more of us that do not vote than them.”
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Any gains or losses in support from voters of color would be marginal. The Republican party is still overwhelmingly White, and voters of color still overwhelmingly support Democrats.
The untapped potential of infrequent voters or non-voters is far greater — and it’s another area with stark racial disparities.
Pew Research Center studied the voting patterns of U.S. adults in 2018, 2020 and 2022 and found that 76% of White adults voted in at least one of those three elections, compared to 69% of Asian adults, 65% of Black adults, and 52% of Latino adults.
“It’s not apathy. It’s actually a critical orientation to a political system that fails repeatedly to deliver for folks,” Glaude said. “It’s absolutely necessary for us to shift the center of gravity of our politics.”
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