Belcher: Trump Is ‘Existential Threat’ To ‘Communities Of Color’

Joining left-wing MSNBC’s Morning Joe on Thursday, Democrat pollster and political strategist Cornell Belcher described the election of President-elect Donald Trump as a backlash by whites against a black president.

Belcher was also promoting his recently published book, “A Black Man in the White House: Barack Obama and the Triggering of America’s Racial-Aversion Crisis,” in which he argues that “racial antagonism” among whites has risen since 2009 as a reaction to President Barack Obama’s race.

While stating that Obama would have defeated Trump in a hypothetical election in the absence of presidential term limits, Belcher also noted that Obama failed to secure a majority of white voters in his 2008 and 2012 electoral victories:

“[Obama] got 38% of white voters last time around, right? He’s not president because white voters started voting for him. He won because in 2008, he said we’re going to expand the electorate. We’re gonna make the electorate look more like what the American people look like. And so we expanded the electorate. In 2008, in fact, 11% of our voters were in fact new voters to the process, right, and they were browner voters.”

In explaining Hillary Clinton’s political disadvantages, Belcher stated that the news media had been hostile to the former first lady for decades. “Thirty years of negative [coverage] does have an impact,” he said.

Millennials who opted for a “protest their vote” by voting for someone other than Trump or Clinton, said Belcher, chose not to “make the choice of the lesser of the two evils.”

On the danger of Trump’s pending presidency, Belcher described the president-elect as an “existential threat” to “communities of color.”

Belcher also predicted political doom for the GOP owing to trends of demographic change:

“Demographics are destiny. We are not becoming a whiter country, right? So as we become browner, we are going to have to solve for this rise in racial aversion. And in my data in my book, I show the way which racial aversion rose over [Obama’s] presidency.

…

The Democratic Party relies a lot on people of color to overindex in order to win. And this electorate was actually 2% browner than 2012.”

Resources expended on winning over “blue collar white voters,” said Belcher, were often wasted:

“So many [Democrats] talk about, ‘We gotta win more blue-collar white voters.’ Yeah, we should win more blue-collar white voters, but the truth of the matter is, we haven’t been winning blue-collar white voters for a long time. And so the question becomes this: do you actually spend your resources chasing these voters? Do you double-down and spend more of your resources chasing a shrinking, more resistant marketplace, or do you actually spend more of your resources chasing a growing, less resistant marketplace, which is a younger, more browner version of America?”

Forecasting demographic changes in America relating to race, Belcher predicted that Republicans will not be able to win presidential elections in the future.

Watch the segment below.

Belcher’s recently published book argues that “racial antagonism” – related to “symbolic racism” and “racial resentment” – has risen among whites since 2009 as a function of President Barack Obama’s race.

Belcher’s polling firm, Brilliant Corners Research and Strategies (which , surveyed white voters with the following “question statements” to measure “racial antagonism:”

According to Belcher’s methodology, higher degrees of agreement with the above-listed statements from the poll’s respondents (who were all white voters) indicate higher degrees of “racial antagonism” among white voters.

Left-wing CNN neo-Marxist Van Jones expressed a view similar to Belcher’s on the night of the presidential election, describing Trump’s win as a “whitelash.”

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