Donald Trump held a campaign rally in the South Bronx on Thursday night. You would be hard-pressed to find another part of America less Republican than this once-famous New York district, which is overwhelmingly black and Hispanic, and which voted 85 percent for Joe Biden in 2020.
The Bronx was also once synonymous with urban squalor, decay and anarchy. Many years ago, when most New Yorkers considered it a no-go zone, I, rather foolishly, managed to get lost there while driving out of town with a friend on our way to Vermont.
We found ourselves in the middle of block after block of urban devastation that made Glasgow’s former Gorbal slums look somewhat luxurious. I saw a police station, which seemed like the safest place to look for directions.
We approach the guard desk. The policeman looked at us suspiciously and then in disbelief when he heard our British accent. I doubt he ever expected to meet two lime-white idiots in his district.
He pulled out a shotgun from under the desk but… ugh! – he used it only as a pointer to the huge map behind him. He showed us the quickest way back to the interstate and growled, “Stay on this highway until you’ve left the district.” I understand?’
Donald Trump may find support in the most unlikely demographic of voters: the black and Hispanic communities.
Could Trump return for another term? His rally in the South Bronx on Thursday night drew a large crowd.
We did it. As we left I realized that we had been to ‘Fort Apache’, so called because it was surrounded by ‘hostiles’ and about to become the most famous police station in the world when a movie of the same name starring Paul Newman was released. .
The Bronx has enjoyed something of a renaissance since then. It has pleasant residential neighborhoods and growing middle-class prosperity. Of course, he won’t be voting Republican in November’s presidential election. But that was not the purpose of Trump’s rally.
Rather, it was to show that no part of America is off-limits to his brand of right-wing populism, and to underscore the fact that he is making big gains in the black and Hispanic vote, traditionally the reliable core of Democratic support. . even in the most ethnically diverse areas.
Trump’s campaign managers, unsure how the evening would go, had secured a license for a 3,500-seat venue in a Bronx park. It was packed, long before he began to speak, and thousands more gathered outside trying to hear what he had to say.
It is true that there were more white people than would normally be found even in today’s tidy Bronx. But the audience was probably the most diverse ever seen at a Trump campaign event.
Democratic strategists are increasingly concerned about Trump’s growing appeal to ethnic minorities. According to recent polls, national support for the former president has more than doubled among Black voters to 22 percent from the estimated 9 percent he won in 2020.
Republican strategists say it could approach 30 percent on Election Day (Nov. 5). It’s not a far-fetched prediction given that Trump’s support among young black people between the ages of 18 and 49 already stands at 25 percent.
Biden, of course, will continue to win a comfortable majority among black voters. But that is not the point. The President needs overwhelming support from them to be re-elected. If Trump can undermine that, especially in swing states, then Biden’s chances of victory will be seriously reduced.
According to recent polls, national support for the former president has more than doubled among black voters, from 9 percent to 22 percent.
The audience at this week’s rally was one of the most diverse yet at a Trump campaign event.
Team Biden knows this. Last Sunday he spoke in Detroit at an elegant dinner for the black establishment of Michigan, a must-win swing state. But this is somewhat doubtful because its relatively large Muslim population is disillusioned with its support for Israel.
Biden was honest. He told his audience of Black power brokers that it was Black votes that made him president in 2020 and that he needs them again in large numbers to win a second time. That same day he had spoken at a historically black college in Atlanta, where he had praised, somewhat shamelessly, the sense of victimhood that many blacks feel in the United States.
It’s a measure of the panic in Democratic circles that the party just released a commercial for digital platforms and television stations in swing states depicting Trump as a black-hating white supremacist.
There’s even a clip of him saying “Of course I hate these people,” a fake use of a clip that comes from a 1989 CNN interview in which he was referring to young black men accused of a brutal rape at Central New York Park.
It’s not clear that the old Democratic narrative aimed at black Americans resonates anymore. Only 30 percent of white liberals – the kind of people who still determine Democratic politics – think crime is a major problem; more than 70 percent of working- and middle-class blacks think so.
Biden’s inability to control the border with Mexico is also unpopular among ethnic voters, especially immigrants who came to the United States the difficult and legitimate route. The millions who enter the country illegally are a far greater threat to its economic well-being than to well-off liberals who feign nonchalance.
“I understand that this country is made up of immigrants,” a woman from the Dominican Republic told the New York Times at the Bronx rally. ‘But I came to this country the right way. I didn’t enter through the backyard, I entered through the front door.
When it comes to Hispanics, it is not even clear that Biden can already count on majority support. In 2020, exit polls suggested she had a strong 59 percent to 38 percent lead over Trump among Hispanics.
Supporters of former President Donald Trump watched him at a rally in the historic South Bronx Democratic district in New York City.
The Bronx, home to a large Latino community, is where Trump seeks to win more non-white votes.
The latest polls show Hispanic voters are evenly divided, with younger members of the ethnic group more inclined to favor Trump. If they vote this way on November 5, the result will be devastating for Biden, especially since there are many more Hispanic voters than black voters.
Trump’s surge in nonwhite support is already helping him in the seven swing states that will determine the election. The latest New York Times poll has Trump leading in six of them (Biden has the narrowest lead in Wisconsin), some by wide margins.
In Nevada, for example, generally considered a Democratic state, he was 13 points ahead.
In the latest poll, he is comfortably ahead (nearly five points) in Nevada, North Carolina, Georgia and Arizona, and within striking distance of victory everywhere else.
Even in solidly Democratic New York state, where Biden won 61 percent of the vote in 2020, polls now give him just a nine-point lead.
I can’t believe New York will go Trump’s way (Ronald Reagan was the last Republican to win it in 1984, when he was re-elected in a landslide), but it will be closer than last time. And Democrats don’t help themselves when the painfully awake Democratic governor of New York describes those who attended the Bronx rally as “clowns.” Shades of Hillary Clinton’s disastrous stigmatization of Trump supporters as “a basket of deplorables.”
What looks most like a duck right now are the Democrats. Placid and confident on the water, pedaling furiously beneath it. Top Democrats believe Biden needs to get rid of him, but they only say so in private and don’t know how to get rid of him unless he forces them to resign voluntarily.
A few have raised their heads above the parapet (prominent Democratic pollster Nate Silver said this week that Biden should “step aside”), but not enough to create a large “dump Biden” movement.
The Spanish words ‘Jose Biden No Bueno’ translate to ‘Joe Biden Not Good’ in English.
One supporter at the rally wore a personalized kippah with Tump’s slogan “Make America Great Again.”
But perhaps the date of the first presidential debate between Biden and Trump is significant: June 27. There has never been a debate like this so early in the election cycle. By then, neither of them will have been formally ordained as their party’s official candidate. That happens at conventions.
The Democratic convention won’t be until August 19-22 in Chicago. If Biden crashes and burns in the late June debate and the polls go from bad to worse, there would be time to pressure him to drop out and turn Chicago into an old-fashioned negotiated convention where delegates would choose a new candidate.
It’s a remote possibility but I wouldn’t rule it out. Biden’s campaign is becoming more unstable. Her public performances become increasingly embarrassing. This week he referred to his vice president as “the president” and predicted that Africa’s population would soon surpass one billion. There are already 1.5 billion. If this is emblematic of Biden’s debate performance, Trump can be expected to be quick and show no mercy.
A New York friend immersed in American politics told me yesterday that the election was somewhere between “too crazy and too old.” It seems like we’re stuck in the “too crazy” category, but “too old” may not survive the summer.