When a Republican leader went to vote in his Dallas neighborhood on May 1, 1976, he was in for a huge surprise. It was the day of the Republican presidential primary in Texas—Ronald Reagan versus President Gerald Ford—and a long line of voters extended outside the polling place. And he didn’t recognize any of them.
Many of the voters were participating for the first time in a GOP primary. They had showed up for one purpose: to vote for Reagan. The crowd in Dallas matched those around the state. Reagan swamped Ford, winning all of the Texas delegates to the national convention and coming close to capturing the nomination.
The turnout was a revelation. Reagan was attracting a mass of new voters to the Republican party. Four years later, he was elected president, his victory spurred by a category of voters that hadn’t existed before—Reagan Democrats. They were evidence the GOP had grown.
I was reminded of the Republican leader’s shock in 1976 when I talked recently to a GOP official in New Hampshire. Donald Trump is far ahead in every poll of voters in the state’s Republican presidential primary on February 9. Yet the official doesn’t know a single Trump supporter.
The Washington Examiner‘s Byron York found more evidence of this phenomenon when he covered the New Hampshire GOP’s “First-in-the-Nation Presidential Town Hall” in Nashua in late January. He asked every Republican activist he met if they know Trump backers. In nearly all the cases, the answer was no.
There was one exception. “I talked to two party officials, one county and one regional, who said they knew a lot of Trump supporters,” York wrote. One told him, “They’re not Republicans.” The officials said those voters “glanced left and right, to see if it was OK to talk, and then said, ‘Trump.’ ”
The fact that Trump is attractive to non-Republicans leads to a question about his candidacy. Is he capable of enlarging the GOP with a wave of new voters, including people with a skimpy history of voting, who could play a significant role in politics?
Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama thinks Trump could do so. “Absolutely,” he told me. He showed up on stage with Trump last August at a massive rally in Mobile. Sessions said he looked at the crowd and “there were so many people I didn’t know.”
Sessions believes the Republican coalition is growing because of Trump’s emphasis on building a wall to halt illegal immigration from Mexico and killing the Pacific trade treaty. These are policies Sessions agrees with that have been rejected by the GOP hierarchy. But many Americans, the senator says, view the Trump policies as necessary to protect their livelihoods.
Sessions hasn’t endorsed either Trump or the candidate’s insistence on deporting all illegal immigrants. Trump, he says, has “said some things I haven’t said.” But his “personal strength” appeals to voters, especially in contrast with the weakness they see in leaders in Washington, the senator says.
Besides stirring excitement, Trump has affected the race in other ways. The latest Fox News poll asked voters which quality would influence their choice of a candidate. “Strong leader” was first with 24 percent and “tells it like it is” followed at 23 percent. “Conservative values” got 19 percent and the “right experience” 8 percent.
And 27 percent of self-identified independents said they want to vote in a Republican caucus or primary. Only 15 percent prefer a Democratic caucus or primary. Is there any doubt that Trump has lured them?
What’s unknown is whether Trump enthusiasts could become a durable voting bloc. “What we know by observation is that Trump is attracting people who are not traditional Republican voters to his campaign and his events,” says Steven Law, president of the American Crossroads super-PAC. “What we won’t know until the voting starts is whether they actually show up—and whether their enthusiasm starts and stops with Trump himself.”
Fred Barnes is an executive editor at The Weekly Standard.
