By Lisa Lerer and Michael Gold
For more than a decade, former President Donald Trump fueled his political rise with dark appeals to white Christian voters, warning of immigrants coming for their jobs and nefarious efforts to undermine what he describes as the country’s true heritage.
Now, facing a neck-and-neck race against the first Black woman to win her party’s nomination, Trump is branching out.
He has repeatedly accused migrants of poaching “Black jobs” and “Hispanic jobs,” which is inaccurate, according to labor statistics. He told Latino voters in Las Vegas that immigrants in the country illegally were “totally destroying our Hispanic population.” He promised women in Pennsylvania he would “be their protector” and that they would no longer be “abandoned, lonely or scared” — a vow based on the hyperbolic premise that criminals who also happen to be immigrants are lurking around every corner.
For all the frequent laments about how left-leaning politicians divide the country through “identity politics,” it appears to be Trump in this race who is making the most explicit identity-based arguments for voters to support his policies.
“He’s way more explicit than most prior candidates with these explicit appeals to Black voters and Latino voters that pit their various identity groups against each other,” said Michael Tesler, a professor of political science at the University of California, Irvine, who cowrote a book about how Trump wields white identity politics. “There’s a unified grievance in terms of ‘I’m not getting my fair share.’”
Many of Trump’s blunt and dire entreaties have been greeted with condemnation, even mockery, for their clumsy invocation of race, gender and religion. Yet, in this final, frenetic stretch of the contest, they also represent a striking effort to expand the tent of economic, racial and cultural grievances that propelled him to the White House eight years ago.
Trump is seeking to win over Black and Latino voters by pitting them against immigrants in the country illegally, whom he has long blamed for a litany of economic, public safety, national security and social problems. He’s blaming an influx of immigrants illegally in the country — he says they were allowed in by the Biden administration — for voters’ economic frustrations.
Appeals to subsets of the U.S. electorate have been part of presidential races for decades, often entwined with shifting racial and gender politics. In 1960, John F. Kennedy campaigned in Harlem in New York City, promising to advance civil rights. Nearly a half-century later, George W. Bush sprinkled some Texas-twanged Spanish in campaign speeches from Iowa to California.
But Trump’s foray into such targeted campaigning has gone far beyond the traditional political stops at Black churches and taco stands.
In 2016, Trump focused on hardworking “forgotten” Americans, a phrase historically used to refer to white working-class voters. Four years later, he embraced white nationalist touchstones, defending Confederate monuments and warning of violent Black Lives Matter protesters invading white suburbs.
But in a race expected to be decided by the slimmest of margins, his campaign aides believe shaving off even a percentage point or two of Harris’ advantage with groups that tend to overwhelmingly favor Democrats could be decisive.
“This is a game of inches,” said James Blair, the Trump campaign’s political director. “It’s about marginal gain with different populations in different states.”
The result is a message that can, at times, feel discordant.
When speaking to Black voters, Trump will highlight his signature criminal justice reform law, the First Step Act. At other events, he’ll call for a return to the stop-and-frisk policing strategy that has been found to disproportionately target Black and Latino men. At an event at a Black church in Detroit, intended to signal his outreach, a sizable share of the crowd was white.
He has also brought Black and Hispanic musicians onstage at rallies, part of an effort to court new surrogates, an effort that is at times awkward. In Las Vegas last month, Trump, clearly reading from scripted remarks, gave a shout-out to Nicky Jam, a male reggaeton star in attendance. “Do you know Nicky?” He asked the crowd. “She’s hot. Where is Nicky?” When Nicky Jam came to take the stage, Trump looked a bit befuddled.
In Johnstown, Pennsylvania, Puerto Rican rapper Anuel AA endorsed Trump in front of a sizable white audience, an incongruity that Trump acknowledged. “I don’t know if these people know who the hell you are, but it’s good for the Puerto Rican vote,” he said. “Every Puerto Rican is going to vote for Trump right now. We’ll take it.”
In his efforts to win Jewish voters from Democrats, he has insisted that Israel will cease to exist if he is not elected. And even as he tries to win Jews, a group of about 700,000 voters across the battleground states, he has said they “would have a lot to do” with a loss, preemptively blaming them.
Those who have watched Trump for decades say such overtures are rooted in an effort to pit various groups against one another.
“Donald always appeals to your dark side,” said Alan Marcus, a consultant who worked for the Trump Organization in the 1990s and opposes the former president. “He deals in hate. If he can make you hate something, he gains.”
Trump campaign aides say they’ve been targeting Black and Latino voters across battleground states, hosting community events from offering free haircuts at a campaign office in Pennsylvania to small business roundtables in Georgia and Nevada.
Vianca Rodriguez, director of Hispanic communications for the Trump campaign, described their effort as sharing “President Trump’s vision for improving the quality of life for Hispanic Americans, many of whom are struggling under” the Biden-Harris administration.
The Harris campaign says it has conducted far more extensive and prolonged outreach in those communities through a field operation that began nearly a year ago. On Wednesday, it began “Hombres con Harris,” an initiative targeted at Latino men in battleground states.
They dismiss Trump’s overtures as divisive, even hateful.
“I think people are exhausted, and they’re exhausted with the lies, they’re exhausted with the selfishness, they’re exhausted with the attempt to divide us as Americans, and they’re ready to turn the page and chart a new way forward,” Harris said in an interview with “The View” on Tuesday.
At other moments, they’ve worked to transform Trump’s own words into potent attacks against him.
“Who’s going to tell him that the job he’s currently seeking might just be one of those ‘Black jobs’?” Michelle Obama, the former first lady, said to thunderous applause at the Democratic National Convention in August.
There are early indications that Trump may be finding some success. Polling shows that he has expanded his support among Latino and Black voters from 2020, a shift that threatens to undermine the multiracial coalition that has long been the foundation of Democratic victories.
The precise level of his support is hard to measure. Trump is explicitly targeting what campaign strategists call “low propensity” voters, particularly a group of Black and Latino men who are less likely to regularly show up to vote.
But it is the small movements of those difficult-to-track voters, say strategists, that could decide the race.
“The most important voters are the ones we know the least about,” said Carlos Odio, a founder of Equis, a Democratic-leaning research group that focuses on Latino voters. “The remaining question that we have at this point is: Can Trump pull out some these Trumpian Latino irregular votes as he has with white working-class men?”
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