No, Republicans Are Not The Multiracial Working-Class Party

The GOP is still very much the wealthy white man's party weaponizing fear and faith

Earlier last month, New York Times opinion writer David Brooks wrote: “The Republicans used to be the party of business, but now they are emerging as a multiracial working-class party.” 

Brooks provided scant statistics or evidence to back up either claim. Brooks is not the first to assert a multiracial working-class GOP is materializing. This is a new narrative Republicans are attempting to promulgate.  The Republican Party, for decades, has falsely painted the working class as white and self-made, and the Black and Brown working class as welfare recipients or the beneficiaries of affirmative action. 

These new declarations of a multiracial working-class party by members of The GOP and conservative media function similarly to their much-utilized dog whistles, as a coded cover for white grievance and a shield against claims of bigotry.

In just the past few years, millions of Americans have witnessed white grievance take the form of an anti-Semitic racist mob in Charlottesville, VA, leaving one dead, and a violent insurrection at The Capitol that left five dead. In the ensuing months, Republicans have attempted to rebrand away from the moniker, “The White Man’s Party”, a title bestowed upon them in 1963 by conservative journalist Robert Novak.

The reality is the Republican Party remains the wealthy White Man’s Party as evidenced by the economics and demographics of their core voter base in which 63% make over $200,000 a year. Many of the insurrectionists who attacked The Capitol on January 6, 2021, were CEOs, business owners, and real estate brokers, not exactly suffering from economic anxiety as the media initially claimed. 

Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan campaign in 1972.Dirck Halstead / The LIFE Images Collection via Getty Images file

Then there is the white monochromatic makeup of Republican officeholders. Elected Republican office holders on the local, state, and federal levels are still mostly white, male, and wealthy.  Congressional Republicans are 92 percent white, and the vast majority of them are male. There are just two Black Republicans in the House chamber, compared to the fifty-five Black Democratic House members. There are three times the amount of Democratic Hispanic representatives in the House than their Republican colleagues.  State legislators across the U.S. are 91 percent white, mirroring the demographics in Congress, most are Republican office holders. Local offices are also wealthy and white, a blaring indication that the gatekeeping starts at the local level.

Republicans have been successful in galvanizing their white base and attracting non-white voters, but has too much been made about Democrats losing Hispanic voters? Hispanics and Latinas/os are a demographic that has always had a firm footprint in the Republican Party. The GOP’s share of Hispanic voters vacillated from a high of 44 percent in 2004 during the Bush administration to a low of 18 percent in 1976 when presidential candidate Gerald Ford lost to presidential candidate Jimmy Carter. While the U.S. Hispanic population, just like the Black and Asian populations, have grown, the Republican vote share of Hispanics hasn’t. Trump received 32 percent of the Hispanic vote in 2020, but it was still a smaller percentage than President Bush in 2004, and the 37 percent President Reagan received in 1980.  

The GOP’s vote share among Black voters hasn’t faired much better. Former President Trump received 12 percent of Black voters' support, but that was far worse than President Ford’s 17 percent in 1976.

Trump received almost 20 percent less of the Asian vote share than President George H.W. Bush who managed an astounding 55 percent in 1992. Trump only made a small improvement over Mitt Romney’s Asian voter share, at 26 percent in 2012. 

While exit polling concluded white voters made up 89 percent of the vote in America in 1976, in 2020, white voters made up just 67 percent of the vote. Despite a shrinking white voting base, it’s clear, that voting patterns for the GOP have mostly stayed the same.

The declining percentage of white voters is the catalyst for Republicans and Democrats to rethink their political messaging over the past few decades. Even with Democrats being the Party of Civil Rights, Democrats from the left to moderate ideological spectrum have, at times, continued to lean into white appeasement. One reason for Democrats' appeasement is a perceived need to prevent the alienation of white voters.  Another reason for white appeasement from Democrats, who are head and shoulders above Republicans in diversity, still remains overly represented by white office holders. 

Republicans, on the other hand, continue to lean into dog-whistle politics that spark racial resentment, queerphobia, and sexism to galvanize cishet white voters. The GOP is cynically peddling faith, self-reliance, and capitalism to attract and retain conservative Black, Asian, and Hispanic Voters. These narratives are no accident. Religion, specifically multiple conservative Christian sects (Protestant, Evangelical, Catholic, etc), still plays a large role in multiple communities. Republicans are working with religious leaders to make a conscious play to diversify their “flock” in order to grow their voter base. Republicans don’t just rely on faith to keep their party in line, they’ve also weaponized fear.

Republicans, like Marco Rubio, have also used the non-existent threat of socialism to galvanize conservative Hispanic voters. Some voters from countries like Cuba or Venezuela, view socialism as an abject failure, the reason for sky-high inflation, and an existential threat to them and their families. Instead of presenting the full picture, like the volatile economics of oil, Rubio uses the fear and pain of a former country’s economic strain and authoritarian leadership, of what can happen here. Incredibly rich coming from The GOP who have a predilection towards authoritarianism and plunged our economy into a recession six times since 1980. 

While Democrats have been timid around the topic of religion and honor the separation of church and state, many Republicans openly quote biblical passages and attribute their faith as guidance as they weaponize religion to codify bigotry.

The claims of a multiracial working-class coalition party have not yet “emerged” as a reality in the Republican Party. Further, The GOP continuously introduces policies that have shown disdain for multiracial and the intersectional working class by introducing a record number of anti-Voting Rights, anti-LGBTQ+, and anti-Abortion access legislation.  

If Republicans were truly the party of the working class they would support a living wage and a strong union presence which has been a proven metric to stabilize our economy and democracy, instead, their anti-union sentiment grievously harms an intersectional working class.  

The GOP are unabashedly the party of cruelty, greed, and whiteness. They have done all they can to line their own pockets from uber-rich donors by shielding them, and their corporations, from paying their fair share of taxes. They’ve gone after Mickey Mouse because the Disney corporation dared to push back on anti-LGBTQ legislation. There is no low with them. Any op-ed writer that claims otherwise should be mocked in every corner of political Twitter.

To use a phrase coined by political theorist Amoja Three Rivers, The GOP has used “whiteness as a political alliance.” You don’t need to be a wealthy white man to be a part of The GOP, you could be poor and white, Black or a person of color, but you are still in service of whiteness as a political alliance, and that alliance is in service of cruelty and wealthy white corporate elites.