In Iowa and New Hampshire, Republicans quietly court their angry white majority

Iowa perfectly represents the white face of the 2024 GOP voter.

The state is 89 percent white according to the 2020 Census. That fits with the Pew Research Center’s finding that as of  2022, 85 percent of GOP voters are white.

And that tracks with the fact that Donald Trump won 57 percent of the white vote in the 2020 presidential election. President Joe Biden won the election but got only 42 percent of the white vote. 

Biden overcame his deficit with white voters by winning 87 percent of the black vote and 66 percent of the Hispanic vote.

Those big margins among minorities allowed Biden to win the nationwide popular vote and the electoral college to claim the White House. Trump later suggested the election was stolen and still claims there was voter fraud in areas where minorities voted.

Most Republicans — mostly white people — tell pollsters they buy Trump’s lie, based on the idea that minority voters cheated.

One week from today, the Iowa caucuses will be held on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, at a time when the nation looks less and less like Iowa.

According to the Census Bureau, America today is 19 percent Latino, 14 percent Black, and 6 percent Asian. Iowa’s nearly 90 percent white population is distinctly larger than the 59 percent of all Americans who identify as solely white.

That’s why GOP candidates campaigning in Iowa speak carefully to the white voters there. 

But even when they are doing their best to navigate the politics of white racial anger there are risks.

Nikki Haley tripped up while trying to avoid reminding white voters of the simple fact that the cause of the Civil War was Southern whites’ insistence on a right to hold black people as slaves.

She got tongue tied during a campaign appearance in New Hampshire, a state that is 92 percent white.

Haley feared upsetting white voters in a year when the leading candidate, Trump, speaks openly about nonwhite immigrants “poisoning the blood of our country” — an appeal to racist ideas popularized by Adolf Hitler.

Trump also has a long, ugly history on the subject of race.

As a presidential candidate, Trump had claimed that the judge hearing one of the many civil lawsuits against him was “Mexican” and therefore incapable of giving him a fair trial. Given a chance to walk back this crudely racist comment about Indiana-born Judge Gonzalo Curiel in an interview on CNN, he instead doubled down.

As president, Trump spoke disparagingly of immigrants from “shithole countries.” He said there were “very fine people on both sides” of the controversy over removal of a Robert E. Lee statue, right after that controversy had burst open into the 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., featuring the antisemitic chant, “Jews will not replace us!”

Take a look at my book “What The Hell Do You Have to Lose? Trump’s War on Civil Rights,” for a comprehensive review.

Haley’s central competition to finish second to Trump in Iowa is Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is also tailoring his campaign to appeal to white, conservative voters. He campaigns on a record that includes having ended the Advanced Placement African American history curriculum in his states’ schools, as well as approving a curriculum that teaches that some Blacks learned skills while being held in slavery that benefitted them later.

He also used state money to lure recently arrived Venezuelan immigrants on the streets of San Antonio, Texas — far from Florida — to get on private flights, paid with Florida funds, that landed in Massachusetts.

His political aim was to appeal to white Republicans in Iowa and elsewhere. The Americans with the most concern about the nation’s rising percentages of non-white people are white Republicans.

DeSantis specifically wants to turn frayed immigration laws, long in need of legislative update in Congress, into a political problem for Democrats, especially President Biden.

DeSantis and House Republicans are calling attention to a recent surge of immigrants illegally crossing the border as a crisis. But there were surges before and during Trump’s presidency. And even when Republicans had total control of Congress, and the GOP failed to pass comprehensive immigration reform. They also failed to keep Trump’s promise to build a wall on the Mexican border and have Mexico pay for it.

While Republicans are focused on white resentment and anger this year, Democrats decided to move the start of their primary election calendar away from Iowa and New Hampshire.

President Biden is not on the ballot in those states. Instead, the Democratic National Committee will begin voting in more racially diverse states.

South Carolina, Nevada and Michigan are mostly white states — 69 percent in South Carolina, 72 percent in Nevada and 79 percent in Michigan — but they are closer to national averages in terms of minority population.

“For decades, Black voters in particular have been the backbone of the Democratic Party but have been pushed to the back of the early primary process…” Biden wrote in a December 2022 letter to the DNC. “It is time to stop taking these voters for granted and time to give them a louder and earlier voice in the process.”

It was the black Democratic vote in South Carolina that delivered the nomination to Biden in 2020 after he had lost in Iowa and New Hampshire.

Biden had to appeal to black and Latino voters during the campaign and as president, he has made good on his pledges. He selected the first black woman vice president; appointed the first Black female justice to the Supreme Court; and nominated the first Black secretary of defense. 

The diminished importance of the Iowa caucuses is partly a result of changing demographics. But Iowa is now a mirror reflecting Trump’s exclusive reliance on exploiting white racial grievance.

Juan Williams is an author and a political analyst for Fox News Channel, and author of “What the Hell Do You Have to Lose?”