The Issue Most Republicans Care About: Illegal Immigration
Trump’s demonization campaign is working.
By León Krauze
Oct 17, 20185:17 PM
Donald Trump embraced his role as a radical nativist from the very beginning of his presidential campaign. Whether it was a conscious strategic decision or a product of his substantial populist instincts is almost beside the point. It was certainly counterintuitive, though, at least from the perspective of the Republican Party’s more centrist wing, which had determined, after Mitt Romney’s defeat in 2012, that the future of the GOP depended on courting the Latino vote through, among other things, a more moderate stance on immigration. Trump took those calls for moderation and threw them out the window. Instead, he gleefully approached the most radical anti-immigrant voices in the conservative movement and carried out a narrative coup. Nativism—the irrational scapegoating of immigrants, of foreigners, of the other—has engulfed the Republican Party’s mainstream agenda and seems to have taken hold of the conversation among its voters.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/10/republicans-illegal-immigration-2018-midterms-pew.html
