Donald Trump might be polling pretty well with white people who don’t have college degrees, but he’s largely missing the mark with everybody else. To put that in perspective, Romney did better than Trump with white and non-white voters and still lost. Trump is setting himself up to trail Romney’s losing campaign by large margins, particularly with minority voters, with whom his performance is dismal — sometimes in the single digits.
Of course, this complete failure to attract minority voters might be because he has occasionally seemed to be actively trying to alienate them. He insists Mexico is intentionally sending us "the bad ones," implying that Mexican immigrants are drug dealers, rapists and killers on more than one occasion. He’s excused racially motivated violence against Hispanic people by saying his supporters were “passionate,” although he's previously blamed “blacks and Hispanics” for the existence of violent crime in major cities. He even acknowledges that “the Hispanics” might not actually love him — by crying about how a judge whose parents are from Mexico is biased against him because of that. His record of both accidental and malicious bias against African Americans is equally as well-documented.
But over the past few weeks, Trump has been reaching out to minority voters, particularly the groups he’s referred to as “the Hispanics” and “the blacks.” For black Americans, this outreach has come in the form of a speech whose gist was essentially “your life is terrible and I probably won’t make it worse, so roll the dice.” To appeal to Hispanic and Latin voters, Trump momentarily wavered on his support of hardline immigration policies — and then went straight back to raving about mass deportation and building the wall.
The most obvious problem with these outreaches, of course, is that they’re ill-planned, ham-handed and display a childish misunderstanding of the problem his campaign is facing. Trump makes the fairly common assumption that to appeal to Hispanic and Latin voters, the only issue he needs to address is immigration. Of course, it is an important issue — and Trump’s gross mishandling of it has lost him many of his most prominent supporters in the community — but with this last week of “Hispanic outreach,” Trump has fallen into a familiar trap.
Hispandering — a derisive term used by political commentators to refer to politicians faking support for Hispanic communities by doing things like eating taco bowls and temporarily easing up on immigration — is something both candidates are guilty of. (Think “7 things Hillary Clinton has in common with your abuela.”) But Trump’s momentary flip-flop on the one issue we all thought he was solid on is substantially more ridiculous even than that.
Not only does it run contrary to everything we know about his feelings about immigrants, his so-called softening does exactly what many other politicians on both sides of the aisle do when it’s time to try to reach out to the Hispanic and Latin vote — forgets that those voters actually have skin in the game on issues that are not the border. In fact, when polled, the voters Trump has been blundering after in the last few weeks said they cared more about the economy, healthcare and terrorism than immigration. Coming in only one percentage point behind immigration is education — which shouldn’t be surprising, because it is obviously possible to care about more than the one issue that some politicians associate you with.
If I had to guess as an outsider looking in, Trump isn’t behind with Hispanic and Latin voters because he hasn’t had enough semi-reasonable thoughts about immigration or eaten enough Taco Bell, it’s because he’s not treating them like real people with real problems. He’s more concerned with looking like he cares about minority outreach than actually learning what the people he’s “reaching out to” want their president to care about.