It looks like Pres. Trump is headed to a historic victory next week. Kamala Harris is so bad, she is even dragging down congressional Democrats, along with what was left of Bruce Springsteen’s musical reputation.
A decisive part of Trump’s winning coalition will be young black men. Trump did not do anything special or pander to win these voters. He just told the truth about what was going on around them and now they are responding.
For generations, the white-guilt liberal Democrats bought votes by ladling out billions in race-based goodies to win over the black community. Most of this money wound up in disasters like Job Corps or directly in the pockets of vicious grifters like Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson. Affirmative action quotas even benefitted affluent “people of color,” like Obama or Harris, who it turns out, have no actual black American slaves in their ancestry.
Lefty black Democrats like Mayor Brandon Johnson are now exemplars of corruption as their cities collapse around them.
But finally, some black voters are willing to consider something different. Just like the late, great Jack Kemp worked all his political life to see happen.
Jack was truly an “evangelical conservative.” He knew our side had the winning formula — low tax rates, limited government, true self defense and gun rights, school choice, neighborhoods built around churches and private charity, and a vigorous national defense.
And that was just the solution for everybody, especially poor minority communities. He worked tirelessly to bring the good news of what conservative ideas could do for ordinary people of every background.
Jack found a great ally in his friend Ronald Reagan, who eagerly embraced his economic ideas in 1980 and made the Kemp-Roth tax cuts the centerpiece of the Reagan Revolution.
Kemp even won over the Bush Republicans to his pioneering efforts for school choice. It was low-energy Jeb, of all people, who got the ball rolling in Florida. In the poor GOP year of 2018, Ron DeSantis won a close governor’s race for the most interesting reason — school choice black parents. These voters chose the conservative white candidate over the liberal black Democrat because the latter threatened to end Jeb’s burgeoning school choice programs.
Gov. DeSantis then turned his toss-up state to deep red, by building up all manner of school choice programs for Florida families to go with the low taxes and great economy. This kind of success is being replicated in many other states and a second Trump presidency can build on it nationally.
It was also Jack, not the hapless Kamala, who first coined the term “opportunity society,” and he meant it. Sometimes he was so far ahead of everyone, it left even some conservatives bewildered. In 1994, the cynical governor of California, Pete Wilson, embraced the badly written Prop. 187, which would have denied benefits to illegal aliens.
Jack created a furor by pointing out the obvious — like it or not, the federal courts would immediately strike it down (they did), and it would ruin Republican standing among California Hispanics (Democrats have owned the state ever since).
I can’t help but think, though, it’s Donald Trump who finally came up with the bleeding-heart conservative answers on immigration Kemp was searching for.
First, Trump wants the federal government to start doing its job and enforce the laws already on the books. That means a border wall, and remain-in-Mexico for asylum seekers, so they cannot overwhelm the immigration courts and be let in on permanent parole. Nor will he be suckered into another stealth amnesty bill masquerading as reform.
Second, he also has a sensible deportation policy. Since 2016 he has wanted to emphasize deportation of real criminals. And he welcomes lawful immigrants, but would modernize our system to base it on admitting economically skilled migrants, the kind that can pay their fair share in taxes.
That approach has won him what will likely be an unprecedented share of the Hispanic vote for any Republican, and should carry him to victory.
Superficially, you would not think Donald Trump, the profane New York City developer, had much in common with the ebullient intellectual quarterback from SoCal. Yet, at their core, both men embody an unshakable optimism about the American system and what it can do for everyone.
Somewhere in the hereafter, Jack Kemp must be smiling over what is about to happen.
Frank Friday is an attorney in Louisville, KY.
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