Tucker Carlson’s effort to bring neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes into the mainstream of the conservative movement is not only morally reprehensible, it is a path to political suicide for the right. Those defending or excusing Carlson’s sane-washing of Fuentes need to ask themselves a simple question: Do they want to be a majoritarian movement or not?
Conservatives cannot build a lasting majority without appealing to minority voters — and that won’t happen if they embrace White nationalists.
It is true that Democrats have a problem with White men. In 2024, Democrats organized “White Dudes for Harris” — a $10 million effort to appeal to White male voters, particularly in the “blue wall” states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. It failed. Estimates vary, but Harris lost “White dudes” by a double-digit margin. But while Democrats did not make significant new gains with this demographic, neither did Trump. According to the Pew Research Center, Trump got a similar percentage of White men — and White voters overall — in 2024 as he did in 2016 and in 2020.
Yet Trump won a far more decisive victory in 2024 than he did eight years earlier — this time securing a swing-state sweep and popular-vote victory. At 49.9 percent of the vote, he fell just short of an outright majority.
So, what changed between 2016 and 2024? Simple: Trump’s political comeback was powered by significant gains among minority voters.
In 2020 Trump won just 36 percent of Hispanic voters. In 2024, he won 48 percent — a 12-point gain. In 2020, Trump won just 30 percent of Asian Americans. In 2024, he won 40 percent. He also more than doubled his share of the Black vote over the past eight years from 6 percent in 2016 to 15 percent in 2024, when he won almost a quarter of Black men. He also gained 11 points among Jewish voters — jumping from 24 percent in 2016 to 35 percent in 2024. According to the Republican Jewish Coalition, 31 percent of Jewish voters now identify as Republicans, the highest percentage on record.
Trump also made significant gains among legal immigrants. He won 47 percent of naturalized citizens in 2024 — a nine-point gain from over four years earlier. He was nearly even with Harris, who won 51 percent of this voting bloc. Trump won a decisive 57 percent majority of new citizens who had not voted in 2020 — including 55 percent of White naturalized citizens, 51 percent of Hispanic naturalized citizens and 46 percent of Asian naturalized citizens — all double-digit gains from the previous election. In 2020, by contrast, Biden had won naturalized citizens by 21 points.
In other words, Trump’s 2024 coalition was significantly more racially and ethnically diverse than it had been in 2020 or 2016. Indeed, Trump increased his support in almost every key demographic. That’s why he went from losing the popular vote in 2016 and 2020 to winning it in 2024.
A normal political movement would celebrate this success and try to build on it. Instead, some on the right seem intent on driving away these new voters by tolerating or even embracing White nationalists. That is both repulsive and insane.
How long will the gains Republicans made with minority voters last if we cannot bring ourselves to denounce a vile bigot who says Mexicans need to “get the f— out! … Go back over the border”; calls JD Vance a “fat dumbass dork with a brown family” and declares of his South Asian wife: “Jeet First Lady? I hope I never see the day”; who defends Jim Crow and says “White people are every single bit justified in being racist” against Black people; and declares that “perfidious Jews” need “to be given the death penalty, straight up.”
But instead of castigating Carlson for trying to mainstream a White supremacist, some have turned their fire on their fellow conservatives for pushing back on Carlson. Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts said Carlson’s critics are part of a “venomous coalition” that is “sowing division” on the right. This week, Princeton University professor Robert P. George, one of the most brilliant conservative intellectuals in America, resigned from the board of the Heritage Foundation over Roberts’s refusal to issue a full retraction of his defense of Carlson. The wrong man stepped aside. A conservative movement that has room for Fuentes, Carlson and Roberts, but not for Robbie George, is no longer conservative — and no longer politically viable.
Politics is a game of addition, not subtraction. Trump succeeded in adding more minority voters to his coalition not by playing Democrats’ toxic game of identity politics, but by appealing to these voters’ self-interest and desire for a better life. And while he has been very tough on illegal immigration, and is pursuing changes meant to create more rational and better-vetted system overall, he has not embraced restrictionism when it comes to legal immigration. That’s the right way to build a broad, multiethnic conservative majority. Wouldn’t it be ironic if we allowed a bunch of White nationalists to destroy the coalition Trump built because they chose to copy Democrats with their own nativist brand of identity politics?
Allowing overt racists into our movement is a sure way to do just that.
The post Trump built a winning coalition. White nationalists will destroy it. appeared first on Washington Post.
