One of the underreported stories of the 2016 election cycle is the huge increase in turnout for Republican primaries and caucuses. Records have been set in virtually every state that has voted so far indicating a significant enthusiasm gap between the two parties. The principal reason for this is due to one person: Donald Trump. Love him or hate him, there’s no doubt that Trump has created a surge of enthusiasm and new voters coming out to vote in GOP contests. But the question political observers should be asking is not whether the Trump surge for Republicans is real but whether it will generate an equal or greater turnout for Democrats in November.
Some of this may be due to people making a special effort to vote against him, and part of the problem may be a Democratic race that isn’t seen as terribly competitive even if some on the left are excited about the Bernie Sanders insurgency. But there’s little doubt that Trump is attracting large numbers of working class voters who are attracted to his aggressive rhetoric about illegal immigration and terrorism and his willingness to flout conventional decency in the name of an attack on political correctness. Moreover, a lot of these people are clearly Democrats. The fact that in places like Michigan there are voters who are having a hard time choosing between a candidate who is appealing to xenophobia and one spouting socialist rhetoric is a commentary on the general dissatisfaction with the political leadership on both sides of the aisle.
Trump worries many, if not a majority of Republicans who see him as conducting a hostile takeover of a conservative party by populists that are attempting to change it into a nationalist vehicle for a personality cult. But even many of Trump’s sternest critics acknowledge that he has injected new life into the party that he is hijacking. Republicans have spent decades seeking to woo back the stereotypical Reagan Democrats that helped the GOP dominate the politics of the 1980s. Moreover, with the changing demographics of the electorate that is making it increasingly non-white and thus less Republican, Trump can claim to be the answer to the party’s prayers as well as being the conservative movement’s greatest nightmare. That’s why, despite his poor showings in head-to-head polls with both Hillary Clinton and Sanders, Trump and his supporters believe he can change the country’s electoral map and win blue states the GOP has given up on.
There is some reason to be skeptical about this claim. There is no historical precedent for an increase in primary turnout translating into a similar general election surge. The circumstances of primaries and caucuses are also very different from regular elections. Nevertheless, it would be foolish to deny that Trump has excited a lot of people who haven’t been as motivated to vote in past election cycles. Those who underestimate Trump’s appeal do so at their own peril.
But there’s a flip side to the Trump phenomena that Republicans, including those who are cock-a-hoop about the frontrunner’s ability to create excitement among new voters, ought to be aware of. Just as white working class voters are turning out in large numbers for Trump, we shouldn’t be surprised if at the same time he is generating similar interest in voting from Hispanics who want to vote against him.
As the New York Times reports today in a front-page article, Trump isn’t just giving Hispanics a reason to vote. He also may be giving them a powerful incentive to become citizens in order to be eligible to vote. As the paper notes, naturalization applications from legal residents that have not yet acquired citizenship were up by 15 percent in the last six months of 2015. And, if the report is to be believed, a lot of these would-be new citizens want to do so specifically in order to be able to cast a ballot against Donald J. Trump in November 2016.
This sort of story is, of course, the worst nightmare of those on the right that have always viewed the push for immigration reform as a thinly-disguised voter registration drive by the Democratic Party. Since Hispanics tend to be overwhelmingly Democratic, the beneficiary of any increase in their turnout will go to Hillary Clinton this fall. But while the debate about amnesty is largely moot while the courts are deciding the legality of President Obama’s executive orders, what seems to be happening is that a lot of people who were content to merely be legal residents without bothering to get citizenship are now motivated to swear allegiance to the Constitution in order to register their disgust for a candidate who denounced Mexican immigrants as being largely a group of criminals and drug dealers.
We don’t know how much of an impact these new applicants will have on the 2016 election nor whether enough of them will get their citizenship in time to register and vote in November. But we do know that fear of Trump could be exactly what a lackluster Clinton campaign is looking for as the Democrats seek to replicate President Obama’s ability to generate a huge turnout of minority voters.
In 2008 and 2012, the Democrats won largely on the basis of historically high turnout rates among minorities and young voters. But with Obama off the ballot, there is no guarantee that Clinton, who is the epitome of the politics of the past and her party’s establishment, can produce the same sort of enthusiasm. That’s where Trump comes in. He may steal a fair number of Democratic white working class votes. But given his toxic reputation among minorities and women, those gains could be offset if not outnumbered by other people coming out just to prevent him from becoming president. As Democrats prepare to hammer Trump on his record and statements in ways that Republicans didn’t start doing until it was almost too late, the GOP needs to be aware of how their frontrunner may drive turnout for both parties.
Republicans understood after their 2012 defeat that they needed to address their problems with a demographic group that is the fastest-growing slice of the electorate. In Trump, what they may have is a candidate that can win more white votes. But he may also create an equal or greater number of other voters who are just as determined to stop Trump, as his fans are to pledge allegiance to him.
