In an interview with the Never Trump outlet The Dispatch last week, former President George W. Bush lambasted the current GOP as “a one-person party” that will not succeed due to a lack of racial diversity. Data from the 2020 presidential election refutes that.
When asked by staff writer Sarah Isgur about “Anglo-Saxon traditions” in the Republican Party and whether Bush would ever leave the party, Bush implied the supposed homogeneity of the GOP would make it dissolve.
“No, I’d say there’s not going to be a party,” he said. ” …And the idea of kind of saying you can only be Republican ‘if,’ then the ultimate extension of that is it ends up being a one-person party.”
“I know this — that if the Republican Party stands for exclusivity, you know, used to be country clubs, now evidently it’s white Anglo-Saxon Protestantism, then it’s not going to win anything,” Bush added when asked by editor Stephen F. Hayes about the America First caucus GOP members of the House floated in April.
A leaked document about the caucus’s platform said, “…[A] certain intellectual boldness is needed amongst members of the AFC to follow in President Trump’s footsteps, and potentially step on some toes and sacrifice sacred cows for the good of the American nation. Policy areas as far ranging as foreign intervention, economic development, immigration, trade, tech regulation and social policy need to be re-examined from the ground up to ensure that what remains keeps the interest of Americans at heart.”
Bush took issue with the current America First Republican Party as one-sided and fostering “exclusivity,” but Trump performed historically strong for a Republican among minorities in the 2020 election. Trump received 12 percent of the black vote, which is four points better than he did in 2016, and nearly double more than Mitt Romney did (7 percent) in 2012. John McCain received only 4 percent of the U.S. black vote in 2008.
Due to increases in U.S. population and numbers of voters, in 2020 Trump earned the largest number of minority votes of any Republican presidential candidate ever. After corporate media spent five years smearing him as a white supremacist, Trump earned 26 percent of the U.S. minority vote in 2020, compared to Bush’s 28 percent. Since these are exit poll numbers, which are notoriously unreliable, Trump is easily within the margin of error for tying with Bush’s minority vote earned.
Trump performed well with Hispanics and Asians as well in 2020, garnering 32 and 31 percent of the vote, respectively. According to exit polling, these numbers are better than both Romney and McCain’s. Exit polls showed Trump lost ground with white voters — which would be quite ironic if he were in fact the white supremacist legacy media insists.
White supremacist loses support among whites with gains among black, Asian, and Hispanic voters.
Only one party got more white this election, and it wasn’t the Republican Party. https://t.co/q0Gjr8CosI
— Tristan Justice (@JusticeTristan) November 9, 2020
Upon leaving office, Trump had a higher approval rating than Bush and left a significantly higher proportion of Republicans in the Senate. Trump left the White House with a 40 percent approval rating, whereas Bush had a 30 percent approval rating at the same point, according to a RealClearPolitics aggregate of polling data.
Bush may malign the post-Trump GOP as homogenous and not appealing to diverse numbers of Americans, but trends revealed last year indicate otherwise.
