Why Was 2020 Different From 2016?
The last time a Presidential campaign was as deeply embedded in racial issues as last year’s campaign was in 1988, when a TV ad featuring Willie Horton moved what was a competitive contest between Mike Dukakis and George Bush into an easy win for the GOP.
Guess who helped the Bush campaign come up with this blatant appeal to racism in 1988? None other than our good friend Roger Stone. Here’s a picture from 1989:
Know who these guys are? On the left it’s Paul Manafort. On the right, it’s Lee Atwater. In the middle? That’s Roger Stone. These three characters had a lobbying and PR partnership in DC workING for the 1988 Bush campaign. Lee Atwater is ‘credited’ with coming up with the idea for the Willie Horton ad. Stone was somewhere in the mix.
The problem in 2020, however, was that when it came to the Presidential campaign in which Roger Stone played and continues to play a central role, the racism went the other way. This time we didn’t have Trump bounding down the escalator in his office-building lobby ranting about all those non-Whites, non-English-speaking pauvres coming up from the South. This time we had ongoing, powerful narratives about ‘endemic racism’ coming from the other side.
In a desperate and almost comical attempt to retain his presence atop a crumbling, GOP infrastructure, Trump keeps talking about how his 2020 vote total was the highest ever gained by a sitting President, despite the fact that Joe outpolled him by more than 7 million votes.
But the real lie that Trump keeps pushing is the lie about how he commands significant support from minority voters. Take, for example, a statement made by one of Trump’s most fervent GOP promoters, Senator Roy Blunt, who said, “The president got the highest percentage of minority votes of any Republican candidate for president in over 100 years,”
Trump got 12% of the Black vote in 2020, and I completely agree with what Joe said about how if you were Black, you weren’t voting for Trump and if you did vote for Trump, you weren’t Black. But even if you were Black and you voted for Trump in 2020, Nixon got 15% of the Black vote in 1968, Ford got 17% in 1976 and even Reagan in 1980 got 14% of the Black vote.
Forgetting the national numbers, let’s look at the three states — Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisonsin — that Trump flipped in 2016 which made him a winner and which Biden flipped back in 2020 and pulled him past Trump. Trump got 6,655,560 votes in 2016 from those three states, Hillary got 6,577,816. In 2020, Joe got 7,893,235 votes, Trump pulled 7,637,710. Joe sure didn’t win those three states by 200,000 votes because so many Black voters came out for Trump.
Here’s the bottom line: When your campaign relies on a guy like Roger Stone who has been developing racist and/or hateful political narratives for more than 30 years, it doesn’t work when the target is a Black guy who is stomped to death on national TV.
But the last thing we need to bring out the Democratic vote in 2022 and 2024 is another racist assault.
