Politics
The Republicans aren’t a multiracial, working-class party yet—but the gains have been undeniable.
In 2013, I began working on a city council campaign in Queens, New York and we desperately needed more people to man the phones. We put out an ad on a local job website and a young Hispanic man from Northern Queens walked in our office a few days later. After describing the job to him, he asked what political party this was for; when I replied Republican he looked stunned. “I’ve never actually met a Republican before,” he replied.
He probably wasn’t lying.
The Republican Party was basically non-existent in large swaths of the nation’s largest city, including big parts of Queens and Brooklyn and almost the entire borough of the Bronx. In the most recent presidential election the year prior, Mitt Romney won less than five percent of the vote in six state house seats in the Bronx. Throughout the whole borough of the Bronx, he won less than 30,000 votes to President Obama’s nearly 340,000 votes—the worst performance for a Republican ever.
So when Trump announced that he was holding a rally in the Bronx, it was mocked by the left as a political stunt and rumors spread that he would need to bus in his white voters from other parts of the city to draw a crowd. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries tweeted, “The Boston Red Sox was more popular in the South Bronx t
