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For many years, conservatives’ chief complaint about race was that liberals were constantly and unfairly accusing them of racism.

They believed only in equality and not special favors for anyone, they insisted; why, they even liked to quote that Martin Luther King line about the content of your character! So why couldn’t liberals stop shouting “Racism!” every minute, when we as a society had already solved that problem? Can’t we just stop talking about it?

As absurd as that argument always was, what’s striking about it today is not that it imagines a post-racial future we haven’t yet reached, but that it has come to describe a Republican Party of the past. The party of today, embodied as it is in Donald Trump and the administration he leads, is no longer so worried about being called racist, because it has unashamedly taken white supremacy as its cause.

In some cases, that has meant putting into action what Trump only talked about in his first term. In others, it has meant exploring entirely new frontiers of racism and xenophobia, of a kind we thought we left behind decades ago.

This appears to be an attempt to prove that the arc of history does not bend in one direction, but can double back and reverse course. Just a few years ago, conservatives struggled to navigate a world in which everyone was expected to pay fealty (whether sincerely or not) to the idea that the United States could be a multi-racial democracy in which equality was the goal toward which we all strove. But now, they’re pretending nothing of the sort.

Here are some recent developments from the president and his administration:

• Using the killing of a National Guard soldier by an immigrant from Afghanistan as a pretext, Trump announced that he “will permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries to allow the US system to fully recover.”

• The administration has embraced the concept of “remigration,” a watchword of far-right and white supremacist groups in Europe to refer to mass deportation of non-white immigrants.

• Trump has essentially shut down the refugee program, with the exception of one group: white South Africans. Trump has also said that South Africa will not be allowed to attend the 2026 G20 summit, apparently in response to the imaginary oppression of its white citizens.

• Vice President JD Vance, who falsely blames high housing prices on immigrants, said that “it is totally reasonable and acceptable for American citizens to look at their next door neighbors and say, ‘I want to live next to people who I have something in common with.’” This is precisely the argument made by segregationists when opposing the Fair Housing Act of 1968, which made it illegal for landlords to refuse to rent to someone based on their race, religion, or national origin. Vance also insists that Canada is “stagnating” because it has too much diversity.

• The Department of Labor is using creepily Aryan imagery in its social media, while the Department of Homeland Security implores us to “Protect the homeland. Defend your culture.”

• According to a recent study by the Brookings Institution, Trump has assembled the least diverse administration in decades. Of his appointees confirmed by the Senate, 91 percent are white and 84 percent are men.

• The State Department has instructed US embassies and consulates to pressure our allies to adopt restrictive immigration policies, in an apparent attempt to export Trump’s own brand of xenophobia. Diplomats, the order says, should “regularly engage host governments and their respective authorities to raise US concerns about violent crimes associated with people of a migration background” and emphasize the threat immigrants pose to “social cohesion.”

• The administration has gone on a tear through the federal budget, slashing funding and eliminating projects that focus in any way on race, whether it’s pulling books by Black authors from Department of Defense libraries, deleting datasets on minority health and pollution exposure, or removing museum displays about Black soldiers.

• Not content to eradicate government diversity programs, the administration has pressured private companies to do the same, including by warning that approval for corporate mergers could depend on the elimination of such programs.

• After military bases honoring Confederate leaders had their names changed under the last administration, the Trump administration changed the names back to celebrate the white supremacist slave-owning traitors who waged war against the United States of America. Trump also ordered that a statue of one of those traitors, Albert Pike — a key figure in the early KKK — be placed back in Washington DC (it was toppled in 2020).

To be fair, this is not all completely new; the anti-anti-racism backlash from the right has been in motion for some time, particularly after the flourishing of the Black Lives Matter movement in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020.

To take just one example, in 2023 at Gov. Ron DeSantis’s urging, the Florida Board of Education approved history standards that described slavery as a brief and helpful job-training program (“slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit”). During the “critical race theory” panic, almost every Republican state passed some kind of law banning discussion of certain ideas relating to race in schools, sometimes explicitly citing the danger of making white students uncomfortable.

But as is so often the case with Trump, we are seeing a difference in degree so dramatic that it becomes a difference in kind. The thin veneer of race neutrality, so often a cover for the maintenance of a status quo that advantages whites, has been cast off.

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Subtlety is no longer necessary

In 1981, legendary Republican strategist Lee Atwater explained to an interviewer how in the preceding decades conservatives had to change the language they used around race.

“You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘N*****r, ‘n****r, n****r.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘n****r’ — that hurts you, backfires,” Atwater said. “So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.”

Atwater’s point was not that Republicans had stopped using racism as a political tool — not by a long shot. The man who seven years later would build a presidential campaign around a lurid tale of a Black convict raping a white woman merely meant that as society and its mores had evolved, a more subtle approach was necessary to activate racism. As Richard Nixon’s chief of staff H.R. Haldeman wrote in his diaries, Nixon privately “emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.”

That was a means of creating plausible deniability, so as to deflect criticism from liberals and the news media. The 1988 Bush campaign would claim, however absurdly, that the Willie Horton story was about crime and prison policy, not about race-baiting. But just as important, the turn from explicit to implicit racism allowed voters themselves to indulge their prejudices without considering themselves prejudiced.

Scholarly research backed up Atwater’s point. In her influential 2017 book “The Race Card: Campaign Strategy, Implicit Messages, and the Norm of Equality,” Princeton political scientist Tali Mendelberg argued that explicit appeals to race had become ineffective because many voters had a conception of themselves as believers in equality even as they continued to respond to race-based appeals. In order to work, those appeals had to be packaged in a way that enabled voters to maintain that self-conception.

Trump’s political success suggests that may no longer be true. Or if nothing else, his administration is certainly acting like it isn’t. Perhaps it’s because Trump realized that the GOP rank-and-file were waiting for someone who would speak plainly and let his bigot flag fly, giving them permission to indulge their worst selves in the way he does. Or perhaps he’s simply incapable of engaging in cleverly subtle rhetoric; if the man who would convince you he’s smart by saying “I have a very good brain” wants you to vote for him because he’s white and hates just about anyone who isn’t, he’s just going to come out and say it.

But it isn’t just Trump. His second term has made clear that there was no shortage of people waiting to put his ugliest impulses into action not despite what they themselves believe, but because of it. The army of goons kidnapping people off the street, the edgelords crafting the administration’s social media trolling, the spokespeople spreading lies about immigrants, the mid-level staffers giggling in their Nazi group chats — none of them are unwilling participants in Trump’s white supremacist project. They were just waiting for the chance to join in an effort like this one, and now they finally have it.

Previewing a stressful night for Republicans in Tennessee

By Joseph Dye

Today, voters in Tennessee’s 7th Congressional District go to the polls to vote to replace outgoing GOP Rep. Mark Green, who resigned earlier this year. On paper, this seat should not be competitive.

In 2024, President Trump won Tennessee’s 7th by 22 percent, putting up huge margins in every county except Davidson, home of Nashville. But the race to replace Green is surprisingly close. A recent Emerson College poll showed Republican Matt Van Epps with just a two percentage point lead over Democratic candidate Aftyn Behn. Older public polls have shown the race within 10 points, an unthinkable number just a few months ago.

Van Epps boasts a strong resume as a former Army operations officer and current commissioner of the Tennessee Department of Services. But Trump’s unpopularity has put the race in striking distance for Behn, a Tennessee state rep and longtime activist.

Though Van Epps is still favored to win, the election being this close is a bad omen for Republicans. On the right, some are trying to spin Van Epps’s impending underperformance as mainly due to high propensity voters being more Democratic and Democrats spending more money on the race than Republicans. But in fact, Republicans have sunk a lot of resources into this race.

As of November 24, Republican-aligned super pacs spent $2.3 million boosting Van Epps, more than the $1.8 million spent for Behn. President Trump hasn’t traveled to the district, though he did literally phone in a message of support for the Republican during a rally on Monday.

Why is this race so close? What are the signs to look for on election night? And, can Behn actually win?

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Trump’s unpopular, but that doesn’t explain everything

This is even a race because Donald Trump is very unpopular. His approval rating sits at about 41 percent with 56 percent of voters disapproving of him. This is horrible, especially considering we’re less than a year into his second term. For context, Joe Biden’s net approval rating was just eight points underwater on this day in 2021. Even worse for Trump is the fact his approval rating on the economy is 21 points underwater due to frustration over tariffs and the cost of living.

But Trump’s unpopularity doesn’t explain everything. According to Emerson, Trump is basically even in Tennessee’s 7th district, having a net approval rating of minus two percent. Meanwhile, Behn has run a visible, quality campaign. While she has appeared with polarizing national figures like AOC and Jasmine Crockett, her in-district commercials focus on kitchen table issues.

Other ads of hers have touched on Republicans burying the Epstein files and passing tax cuts for billionaires. Behn has taken some really unpopular stances, such as saying she “hates Nashville” and supporting defunding the police. While Republicans are trying to seize on them, they have not succeeded in disqualifying her in the eyes of voters.

Behn’s strategy of associating with national progressive figures but presenting as a cost of living centrist is novel. Trump’s unpopularity created an open for her, but she’s also helped herself.

Breaking the gerrymander

Tennessee’s 7th Congressional District was drawn to split Nashville in three, after the 2012-2022 map kept it whole.

2024 Presidential Results in Tennessee’s 7th District:

Dividing Nashville in this way makes it difficult for a Democrat to win this seat. But Behn’s path to victory requires high Democratic turnout in the city, low rural Republican turnout elsewhere, and a strong performance with suburban voters.

The current early vote gives us clues that the first and third requirements are happening. In Nashville, turnout is currently 28 percent of the total 2024 vote, higher than the 25 percent district average. Conversely, rural turnout is awful. In the seven southern rural counties, turnout is just 21 percent of the 2024 total vote as of Sunday. Even with a Republican surge on election day, Democrats will have a turnout advantage due to high Democratic turnout in Nashville and low Republican turnout elsewhere.

Democrats have passed the initial test of viability. But, if Behn is going to win, she needs to run up the score in Montgomery County and put up better numbers in the other suburban counties.

Montgomery County, home of Clarksville, is one of the fastest growing areas in the country. Between the 2010 and 2020 census, the county’s population grew by almost 50,000 people, going from 172,000 to 220,000. This brought a lot of younger, more educated voters, which many thought could swing the county left. This happened in 2020, as President Biden lost the county by 13 percent. But Vice President Harris didn’t fare as well and lost the county by 18 percent last year. For Behn to win, she likely needs to narrowly win Montgomery County. If she does, a big upset is possible.

Behn’s other giant challenge is cutting the margin in Williamson County. Just south of Nashville, this county is very Republican. In 2024, President Trump won this county by 32 percent. Behn will have to improve on this significantly in order to compete. If Behn can hold Van Epps below an 18 percent victory in Williamson County, she has a shot.

But even if Behn comes up short, her competitiveness is still a failure for Republicans.

The bigger picture

Most do not expect Behn to win on Tuesday. Though she has run a strong race, experts expect her to lose by about four percent given how gerrymandered the seat is. But don’t let the Republican spin machine convince you that all is well for them if that’s how it turns out.

If Behn loses by four percent, she will have overperformed Vice President Harris by 18 percent, meaning she will have overperformed by enough of a margin for Democrats to win 294 congressional districts. While no one earnestly expects Democrats to do that well next year, pundits have to be more open minded about just how large a Democratic wave in 2026 can be.

Most people, including the president, expect Democrats to take back the House. Currently Democrats have about a five percent lead in the generic ballot, meaning they probably would flip 10-15 House seats and put up a strong fight to retake the Senate too.

But given the large Democratic wave we saw last month in Virginia, New Jersey, and Georgia, it’s not inconceivable that Democrats could hit or narrowly exceed their 2018 generic ballot win of eight percentage points — and even that might be setting the ceiling too low.

In 2018, though President Trump had a low approval rating, he was still relatively popular because the economy was strong. Furthermore, his base was much more enthusiastic about supporting him and supporting Republicans. Almost 51 million Republicans turned out in 2018, just shy of the 54 million who turned out in 2022, despite the country growing significantly in the intervening years and 2022 being a midterm under a Democratic president.

Republican turnout next year is a big question mark. Sure, diehards will show up and vote, but what about rural and low propensity supporters?

Tennessee’s 7th Congressional District election will not change the House majority, and the seat likely won’t be competitive in 2026, especially if Van Epps wins. However, if Behn wins, Republicans will face a narrative of an inevitable Democratic majority. And even if she doesn’t, her performance should still give Democrats hope that a better tomorrow is possible.

That’s it for today

We’ll be back with more tomorrow. If you appreciate PN, please do your part to keep us free by taking advantage of our special offer and signing up for a paid subscription.

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