Is Trump The Strom Thurmond Of 2020?

If you remember Strom Thurmond at all, you probably recall him as a senile, diaper-wearing far right Republican Senate pal of Joe Biden's, who died in 2003 (age 100)-- but that Republican part wasn't part of the equation until 1966. He was prominent politically decades earlier-- even as a presidential candidate. Earlier still, he was elected governor of South Carolina in 1946 as a Democrat (and with no opponent). Two years later, furious that Truman had desegregated the U.S. military, he jumped into the crowded 1948 presidential election as a Dixiecrat (States' Rights Democratic Party), winning 1,175,930 votes (2.41%), carrying 4 states-- South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana-- and being awarded 39 electoral votes, including one from a faithless Harry Truman elector from Tennessee. His most famous campaign speech included the line: "I wanna tell you, ladies and gentlemen, that there's not enough troops in the army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the Nigra race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches."

Even after that shit-show-- which could have thrown the election to Thomas Dewey-- and after the beginning of an unending rant about the Democrats being "socialists," the Democratic Party was still happy to have him and his blatant racism in the party. Big tent! In 1952, he endorsed Republican Dwight Eisenhower over Adlai Stevenson... but the Democrats still kept him in the party.

Two years later, still as a Democrat, he lost the Democratic Senate primary to incumbent Olin Johnston and then 4 years later (1954) ran as a write-in candidate ("Independent Democrat") and won over 63% of the vote against Democrat Edgar Brown. After that, he ran as a Democratic incumbent (1956) and (1960) winning with no opposition. He was the longest-serving senator in U.S. history but left the Democrats in 1964 over passage of the Civil Rights Act. (In 1957 he had conducted the the longest filibuster ever by a single senator-- 24 hours and 18 minutes-- against a very modest GOP-backed Civil Rights Act). It's worth noting that when he was 22 he had raped his family's 15 year old African-American maid, and never acknowledged their daughter, Essie Mae Washington, but did pay for her education and gave her money from time to time to keep her from exposing him, although she says she kept silent out of respect for him.

Having switched parties in the middle of his term, he was reelected 1966 as a Republican and became the first Republican to win a South Carolina Senate seat since 1872. He was reelected in 1972, 1978, 1984, 1990, and 1996, after which he retired, barely cognizant of his name and unable to control his bowels at his Senate desk.





If Trump keeps running the kind of campaign he's running today he's likely to win the same 4 seats Thurmond won plus Tennessee, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Wyoming, West Virginia, Idaho, Kentucky, North Dakota, probably Kansas and possibly Nebraska and South Dakota. That's 82 electoral votes. But, according the Washington Post columnist Greg Sargent, that-- and all the House and Senate seats they would lose with Trump at the top of the ticket-- would be just the beginning of the pain for the GOP. His point yesterday was that young people’s attitudes toward the protests should worry the Republicans, which, he wrote, "could create long-term problems for the party. He noted that the New York Times has a good report on how dramatically the culture is shifting on questions involving systemic racism and police brutality, and how isolated President Trump has become on these issues. This quote really jumps out:

“Younger Republicans want to see racial disparities fixed,” said Wesley Donehue, a South Carolina-based G.O.P. strategist. “If Republicans don’t address these issues now, we will lose the next generation of young voters, just as we have minorities.”

Sargent backs it up with poll numbers, noting that 60% of Americans "think Trump has been delivering the wrong message about the protests. Remarkably, a majority of white Americans, 52%, say the same." And it gets worse for the GOP as you dig down:

The youngest U.S. adults, those ages 18 to 29, have the harshest assessment of the message Trump has been delivering about the protests. About three-quarters (76%) of those ages 18 to 29 say his message has been wrong, including close to half (48%) who say it has been completely wrong. Just 22% say it has been right.

"What’s more," wrote Sargent, "the new Pew polling also finds that an extraordinary 80 percent of those young Americans support the Black Lives Matter movement, 54 percent of them strongly. A recent Post Schar School poll helps underscore the point. Here’s what it found among Americans aged 18 to 29 years old:

• 82 percent of them support the protests
• 77 percent of them see the killing of George Floyd as a sign of broader problems in police treatment of black people
• 63 percent of them disapprove of Trump’s response to the protests
• 83 percent say police need to keep making changes to treat blacks equally to whites
• 58 percent prefer a president who will address the nation’s racial divisions, as opposed to restoring security by enforcing the law

Domestic Terrorism: The Oval Office by Nancy Ohanian

This group was born roughly between 1990 and 2003, when Thurmond finally died in a pool of his own excrement. "For them," wrote Sargent, "the touchstones we keep using to discuss this moment-- the racial turbulence of the late 1960s and early 1970s, Richard Nixon, 'law and order,' the 'silent majority,' hippies, hardhats, etc.-- might as well have unfolded in black and white. The oldest in this group turned 18 at around the time Americans elected their first black president. The youngest spent much of their childhood and teen years with America’s first black president in the White House. A large chunk of them probably don’t have any clear memory of any presidents other than Barack Obama and… Donald Trump."

Yet Trump, the only Republican president many of them really lived under while being politically aware, is entirely out of step with them on the underlying issues at stake. Numerous Trump administration officials have denied in recent days that systemic racism is a problem in law enforcement.

And even when Trump edges toward saying the right things, he does it with a sneer: He just told Fox News that it might be time to end chokeholds, but he also said the tactic “sounds so innocent, so perfect.”

Meanwhile, those young people are seeing mass protests fill cities across the country, in perhaps the largest outpouring of political aspirations they’ve ever experienced.

Yet they’re watching as Trump calls the protesters “THUGS,” rages that "when the looting starts, the shooting starts,” threatens to send in the military, lords over and then celebrates the tear-gassing of peaceful demonstrators, and urges Republicans to stand behind keeping military installations named after Confederate figures, in effect demanding that the GOP brand itself as an explicitly neo-Confederate party.

“This is a movement that’s questioning the power of the state-- the power of the police to kill people,” GOP strategist Rick Wilson, a frequent Trump critic, told me. “These young people are seeing this up close.”

Wilson added that many young people are experiencing this political movement in an “intimate” way, noting that its “size and demographics” threaten to usher in a “disastrous political moment” for Republicans.

“This has the potential to shape 20 years of American politics," Wilson told me. “It’s got every downside in the world built into it for the GOP."