Counterintuitive as it may sound, Republicans need to sound more like U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton in 2022 to retain the gains they made among nonwhites in 2020.
Conventional wisdom holds that the Arkansas senator’s hard-line “send in the troops” approach to crime and civil unrest would be antithetical to courting minority support. Many conservative strategists seem convinced that a more dovish message of criminal justice reform or drug decriminalization is preferable to traditional law-and-order rhetoric when trying to appease nonwhite voters.
Recent trends contradict such intuition. Examining shifts in geographical partisan support between the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections illustrates this.
Diminished Republican support in suburban America, coupled with a surge of urban minorities throwing their support behind the GOP, puzzled political analysts in the wake of last November’s election. Despite the confusion in the beltway, one of the primary mechanisms behind this realignment is apparent to regular people.
While suburbanites posted black squares on Instagram and whined about institutional racism on Twitter from the comfort of their 5,000-square-foot McMansions, rioters and looters ravaged our nation’s urban cores. Nonwhites bore the brunt of last summer’s violence, but many suburban whites farmed dopamine-high virtue-signaling on social media.
Trump, ostensibly at least, represented an answer to the chaos and criminality that had overtaken the neighborhoods of many racial minorities. Whites in the suburbs, conversely, saw him as being too mean on Twitter or as not doing enough to address the racial injustice they perceived existed. Here lies a substantial part of the answer to why the electorate shifted in the way that it did.
Atlanta encapsulates this dynamic perfectly. While the more affluent suburbs and northern districts of the city moved hard to the political left, southern Atlanta, which is impoverished, crime-ridden, and heavily black and Latino, swung to the right. Wealthy whites pontificated over the merits of defunding the city’s police from their Decatur townhouses, leaving those in south Atlanta to live among chaos for months.
The same is true of pretty much every major city in the United States. (Check out this map and see for yourself.) Wealthy, white areas trended blue while poorer, majority-minority constituencies trended red — largely for the reasons outlined above.
A more recent instance of this phenomenon can be found in Eric Adams’s rebuke of progressivism during New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary election. Adams ran on an explicitly pro-police, law-and-order campaign in one of the most diverse, and heavily Democratic, cities in the nation. He won his race, shocking many observers, though the patterns found in his victory bear a striking resemblance to those present in the 2020 presidential election.
Comparing maps of the mayoral primary results, murder, and racial distribution in New York City reflect this similarity. Areas with higher murder rates overlap with those that have large concentrations of blacks and Hispanics. These areas, the Bronx and East Brooklyn among them, overwhelmingly favored Adams in the primary. Conversely, safer and wealthier neighborhoods in places such as Manhattan or Williamsburg voted for more progressive candidates such as Kathryn Garcia and Maya Wiley.
Adams proved once again that, when crime is high (as it likely will be, come midterm elections season), minorities respond positively to leaders promising a robust approach to public safety.
With Trump (probably) not on the ballot in 2022, Republicans can expect to win back a significant portion of MAGA-weary suburb dwellers. That said, conservatives should make a play to solidify their progress with nonwhite voters by hammering the Biden administration for failing to quell urban unrest and providing policy solutions to voters that would lead to more officers in localities where crime festers.
A suburban reversion combined with the retention of newly acquired minority voters from the previous cycle would equate to an electoral blowout for Republicans and is in the party’s interest to pursue.
