Understanding the Rise of the Multiracial Right—And Why It Matters

The Right’s Multiracial Turn

Establishment conservative groups like the Republican National Committee and the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC), Charles Koch’s Americans for Prosperity, and Turning Point Action have all invested heavily in outreach to voters and communities of color and conservative candidates of color. The RNC, for example, opened 38 “minority community centers” in 19 states during the 2022 midterm elections.^[11] More recently, on the south side of Chicago, Black conservative activists opened the Booker T. Washington and Ida B. Wells Renaissance Center to recruit new voters for the local GOP.^[12] Similarly, the Koch network has poured millions of dollars into The Libre Initiative’s programs to recruit and train conservative Latinos.^[13]

Influential right-leaning think tanks increasingly frame their advocacy campaigns in the language of racial justice. For instance, the free market think tank Illinois Policy Institute has argued that racial segregation, poverty, interpersonal violence, high unemployment, education, and other issues can be addressed through conservative, market-based, individual solutions in ways that minimize reliance on public goods and accountability.^[14] In backing charter schools, vouchers, and other privatization schemes aimed at undermining or dismantling public education, they have poured millions into building support for their efforts among Black and Latino parents, students, and elected officials.^[15] Immigration-restriction groups like Numbers USA have similarly reinvigorated their efforts to recruit more Black support and leadership, hiring a director of engagement to Historically Black Colleges and Universities and courting greater Black support for restrictive immigration policies.^[16]

Conservative groups also seek to claim many interests and narratives that have traditionally been the domain of liberals and the Left, declaring that these issues can be solved through right-wing policies. The assertion that charter and voucher schemes can address educational inequality and underfunded public schools is one clear example. Criminal justice reform, proffered by groups like Right on Crime, is another.^[17] Others explicitly adopt critiques of neoliberal economic policies, militarism, and different forms of corporate and state predation.^[18] In nearly all these cases, the proposed solutions, which focus on individual remedies and market logics, do little to address the underlying issues. But they exploit the contradictions of liberal and left-leaning policy solutions and position liberals as the defenders of a failing status quo.

To be clear, none of these projects change the substantive tenor or trajectory of antidemocratic, right-wing projects seeking to reverse the last half-century of reproductive justice, LGBTQ, feminist, and anti-racist movement victories. As their hidden ties to powerful sectors of capital and deep-pocketed conservative think tanks grow stronger, so does the exploitation of workers, consumers, and debtors on which they thrive.^[19]

Some of these efforts are also, as critics contend, little more than thinly veiled attempts to mask racism and White chauvinism on the Right—and they often fail to garner any substantive grassroots support.^[20]

But investments in candidates of color and outreach to voters of color, well-funded right-wing projects to court Black and Latino groups, and efforts to lay claim to issues historically championed by the Left reveal a new strategy on the Right. Stated plainly, many sections of the conservative movement, including the Far Right, seek to cleave away people of color and other sections of the progressive base, alert to new openings to build a multiracial right-wing populism.

From the Southern Strategy to the Multiracial Right

Such efforts to recruit people of color to the Far Right entail a significant shift because, for much of the last half century, the Right’s dominant political strategy involved demonizing people of color to win White voters.

This wasn’t always the case. Through the late 1960s, many Republican candidates, especially in the North, competed to win over Black and Latino voters. The 1964 Civil Rights Act secured as much support among Republican legislators as it did among Democrats.^[21]  While the Republican Party and right-wing groups harbored many explicitly racist, nativist, and antisemitic forces, this was also true of the Democratic Party and some progressive groups.^[22]

However, by 1968, Republican presidential candidate Richard Nixon successfully cut into White working- and middle-class support for the Democratic Party by framing protest, urban revolts, and crime as threats to White Americans.^[23]

In the decades that followed, Republican leaders pinned their electoral hopes on winning large majorities of the White electorate through campaigns that demonized African Americans and Latinos in particular. The examples here are legion: The Southern Strategy of the late 1960s and early 1970s stoked White racial anxiety by framing the dismantling of Jim Crow and the expansion of civil rights as direct threats to White Americans’ status and well-being. Beginning in the early 1970s, the GOP also portrayed the Democratic Party as championing “Black interests,” in contrast to those of White voters—despite civil rights leaders from Dr. King to Shirley Chisholm to Rev. Jesse Jackson explicitly rejecting such framing and asserting a vision of multiracial, working-class solidarity.^[24]

For the next three decades, Republicans and many conservative groups operated under the assumption that the surest way to win local and national elections was to build supermajorities among White voters, often through explicit racist fearmongering. They made little effort to win support among voters of color or recruit candidates from those communities to run as Republicans. Instead, the GOP used demonizing campaigns—from Ronald Reagan’s attacks against “welfare queens” to George H.W. Bush’s infamous 1988 “Willie Horton” ad—as part of an intentional strategy to win elections, especially in the South.^[25] As Republican strategist Kevin Phillips put it in a 1970 interview, “the more [African Americans] who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the [racist] whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans.”^[26]

The twinned politics of racial demonization and racial colorblindness—the latter an insistence that racism is an artifact of the past—defined conservative politics during this period. Though there were pockets of Black and Latino Republicans and other conservatives of color, they played little role in swaying elections. In this context, Democrats and progressive groups had little competition in attracting support within communities of color.

While President George W. Bush did not trade in this rhetoric as explicitly, and RNC chair Ken Mehlman even apologized for the Southern Strategy in a 2005 address to the NAACP, many voters continued to perceive Republicans and conservatives as hostile to people of color.^[27] The demonization of President Barack Obama from many quarters of the Tea Party movement, the racist birther movement, and electoral appeals to White racial anxieties remained a mainstay of conservative political discourse and regular grist for right-wing cable shows and talk radio.^[28]

After Mitt Romney lost to incumbent President Obama in 2012, the Republican National Committee issued an “autopsy report” calling for more inclusive appeals to various communities of color. In calling for a new “Growth & Opportunity Project” it declared: “Young voters are increasingly rolling their eyes at what the Party represents, and many minorities wrongly think that Republicans do not like them or want them in the country.”^[29] The report argued that to shift the perception of the Party among women, young voters, and people of color, “the Party must in fact and deed be inclusive and welcoming.”^[30]

In this calculus, Republicans would draw in greater numbers of people of color by tamping down their demonizing campaign rhetoric and moderating some of their policy positions, especially around immigration. A chorus of GOP leaders embraced the report’s recommendation and findings, and Jeb Bush, among other Republican presidential candidates, took up some of the report’s messaging.

Trump, who publicly criticized the report when it was first issued, took a different tack.^[31] He launched his first presidential campaign in 2015 with false references to Mexican immigrants as “rapists” and criminals.^[32] But unlike the racist vitriol associated with the Southern Strategy, which was explicitly designed to exclude voters and candidates of color from the GOP to curry favor with White voters, far-right strategists like Steve Bannon maintained that an “inclusive nationalism” based on “America first”-style populism could appeal to some people of color.^[33] In contrast to the 2012 RNC leadership’s claim in the Growth & Opportunity Project that the GOP could diversify its voter base and win new supporters by moderating its policies and messages, Bannon and Trump’s 2016 campaign went in the opposite direction: toward a vision of “law and order” in cities, immigration restriction and militarized borders, isolationist foreign policy, and a trenchant critique of the state and of wealthy elites that could bring in greater numbers of people of color, especially as liberal institutions and policies faced growing skepticism from across the political spectrum.

Why People of Color Are Drawn to the Right

The multiracial Right’s growth cannot be explained from the top down alone. It is also a bottom-up story.

For much of the last two decades, Democratic strategists and liberal pundits have claimed that the nation’s growing racial and ethnic diversity would inevitably produce a more progressive electorate.^[34] In this view, voters of color reflexively embrace the Democratic Party’s stated vision of an inclusive, multiracial nation, and favor liberal policy measures that promise racial equality and inclusion.

People of color who defy this expectation and identify as conservative are imagined to be suffering from false consciousness, internalized bias, or a longing to be White rooted in the fantasy of post-racialism.^[35] If the modern Right is understood to be driven by a singular and undifferentiated racial bias and animus, any incorporation of people of color in their ranks can only be explained as tokenism at best and crass manipulation at worst.

But this argument presumes that the default politics of nearly all people of color in the U.S. will inevitably be a form of racial liberalism, and that most voters of color will naturally gravitate to progressive positions around education, government spending, taxation, health care, and criminal justice reform. Only when they are corrupted by an unsavory influence—falling prey, for instance, to Christian fundamentalism, misogyny, or disinformation—do they betray this baseline.

There are other reasons, however, that racial liberalism may no longer be the default politics for many people of color. As economic and social inequality has grown, and precarity has become a defining condition for tens of millions of households and families, traditional liberal policy solutions have faltered. Modest income redistribution through taxes and social welfare, unionization and labor rights, and anti-discrimination protections have proven anemic in the face of concentrated corporate power and intensified economic predation. While the Right has played a leading role in many of the crises of the last two decades—unending wars, the Great Recession, climate change, the prison industrial complex, premature deaths from addiction and the pandemic—growing numbers of people, including many people of color, are apprehensive about whether prevailing liberal solutions can address these conditions.^[36]

In addition, as a recent report from progressive think tank The Roosevelt Institute explains, the wreckage of neoliberal policies is evident not only in worsening material conditions but also in “mounting despair, mental health problems, overwork, addiction, loneliness and social isolation, and internalized shame are some of the profound negative social and psychological consequences of the neoliberal order.”^[37] The authors argue that progressives have largely failed to respond to these cultural conditions and the longing many people have for connection and social meaning. The Right, by contrast, while offering few solutions to address the structural inequalities produced by neoliberal forces, has been far more adept and successful in their “cultural responses to the failures of neoliberalism as a means for shaping worldviews, manufacturing consent, and recruiting individuals into its movements, all while speaking to people’s day-to-day concerns, lived experiences, and discontents.”^[38]

People of color are not immune to such appeals, as a growing body of research and reporting on the multiracial Right makes clear. Shifting material conditions and experiences are reshaping everyday interests, needs, and desires in ways that have allowed the Right to forge new inroads into communities of color.

For example, as sociologist and journalist Anthony Ocampo observed of a 2020 Filipinos for Trump rally, the hundreds of supporters at the event were drawn to it by many issues and interests, ranging from education to abortion to a distrust of the Democratic Party.^[39] Similarly, as scholar Corey Fields explains in his book Black Elephants in the Room, Black Republicans active in local party politics do not see themselves as sacrificing their racialized identities or interests as they embrace conservative principles.^[40]

Similar developments are happening among other groups across different regions. In the Rio Grande Valley, some urban areas of Texas, and other parts of the Southwest, growing numbers of Mexican American voters have been drawn rightward.^[41] Similar shifts have unfolded among Venezuelan, Dominican, and other Latino voters, sometimes shaped by complex histories of migration and economic crises.

In all these analyses, stereotypes of people of color on the Right as self-hating or longing to be White don’t hold up.

***

To comprehend the growth of the multiracial Right today requires attention to why different groups of people, in different regions, and around distinct needs and interests, increasingly seek out alternatives to a governing order that seems to them incapable of addressing their problems, their sense of fear and mistrust, and their yearning for connection.

Even if the wealthy backers of far-right groups profit handsomely from conditions of despair and aggrievement, the Right has been far more adept at positioning themselves in the public imagination as insurgents willing to condemn a failing status quo, while labeling liberals and the Left as accomplices to such failures. Thus, the Right will continue to offer new pathways to people of color, as their presence serves to legitimate the Right’s claims to be principled outsiders standing against elite authority.

Black conservative radio host Sonnie Johnson summed up this position well in suggesting that a shift was taking place in partisan political discourse. As she explained to listeners of her weekly radio show, “The young generation always likes to be the rebels. This puts us in a unique position if we are paying attention and willing to do the work. This puts us in a strategic position because the Left is now the system. The Left is now ‘the Man.’ The Left is now the structure…and it’s only natural for the youth to want to rebel against that. And that rebellion will bring them to conservatism.”^[42]

So far, liberal and progressive responses to the growing multiracial Right have relied on reciting laundry lists of policy accomplishments and recycling outworn stereotypes implying that people of color drawn into right-wing politics are simply racial sellouts and dupes. But such pronouncements do little to help navigate the complex socio-political dynamics behind the multiracial Right’s rise, let alone address the concerns that have enabled those on the Right to position themselves as rebels taking on the status quo.

Instead, absent opportunities for connection and shared political purpose, people from many different backgrounds have found a home in the Far Right, which has become newly energized by today’s social and economic crises. The multiracial Right is thus ultimately part of a broader phenomenon: one in which growing numbers of workers, young people, immigrants, and people of color have come to see far-right groups and movements as capable of speaking to their experiences and anxieties.