Justin Gest is an assistant professor of public policy at George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government. This month, he is publishing a new book, The New Minority: White Working Class Politics in an Age of Immigration and Inequality. For more information, see www.TheNewMinority.net.

Over the past 14 months Donald Trump has upended much of what we thought we knew about American politics. He won the Republican nomination easily with no prior political experience, no filter, and an entirely new kind of political platform—one that, in an almost total rejection of conservative orthodoxy, is anti-free trade, isolationist and doesn’t really seem to care that much about the size of government.

He’s also raised a crucial question: Is the Trump campaign about the man or the message? In other words, will Trumpism survive Trump?


Many in both parties are hoping for the former—that the Trump campaign turns out to be the brief, dramatic story of a celebrity sweeping up primary voters with lavish but empty promises, and that his harsh “America First” worldview will disappear once it’s no longer being flogged from a jet plane by a billionaire TV star.

For people who feel that way, I have some discouraging news. As part of a broad study of white working class politics, I solicited white Americans’ support for Donald Trump, but also for a hypothetical third party dedicated to “stopping mass immigration, providing American jobs to American workers, preserving America’s Christian heritage, and stopping the threat of Islam”—essentially the platform of the UK’s right-wing British National Party, adapted to the United States. How many white Americans do you think would consider voting for this type of protectionist, xenophobic party?

65 percent.

Clearly, Trump’s allure is bigger than Trump himself.

Who would the new party’s supporters be? What I found in the study is that much like those who support the Trump campaign, those who would consider voting for this third party are more likely to be male, of lower socioeconomic status, without a university education and ideologically conservative—in other words, the Republican Party’s longtime base. They are also more likely to be young (under 40 years old)—so this is not a phenomenon likely to pass quickly.

This is most immediately important to the Republican Party: If Trump were the whole story, and his message didn’t matter, then Republicans could dismiss this election as an anomaly. However, if Trump has stumbled upon a policy agenda that has been latent in the Republican base, then the party is faced with a choice: adopt it in the future, or stick with its longstanding principles and risk alienating its voters. That would either usher in a radical turn in the party’s trajectory or open up space for a third party, the likes of which are growing rapidly in Europe.

It is worth putting the results into perspective. This kind of theoretical question, untethered to any specific party or political figure, may well be a useful test of deep support for such policy platforms. But it’s also an imaginary third party right now, free of the media checks and public scrutiny that would accompany it were it to exist in a competitive party landscape. In Britain, for example, UKIP and its precursor, the British National Party, are both stained by allegations of racism and incompetence, while this hypothetical American counterpart is unexposed.

But neither the BNP nor UKIP has ever garnered anywhere close to a majority of the white British electorate, let alone a general majority. 65 percent is a whopping number—in fact, it’s significantly more than those who expressed support for Trump’s candidacy in my research.

This all puts the Republican Party in an unenviable position. Based on my reasearch, even were Trump to lose in 2016, his movement of supporters will likely yearn for others like him to fill the void in American politics. And if Republicans, in an attempt to appeal to independent voters and the growing minority population, pivot away from Trump’s rhetoric, they could face internal upheaval, and perhaps even widescale defection to a third party from this 65 percent of whites. On the flip side, if Republicans do allow Trumpism to define the party, they risk ushering in an era of unprecedented Democratic dominance. Current polling predicts a Democratic landslide.

It is worth acknowledging that these survey results hold some risk for the Democratic Party as well. Hillary Clinton’s campaign has also been tugged to more populist stances by white, nativist voters on the left. So were Republicans were to make this pivot, they could seek to poach support from the far left. However, Trump has pursued this strategy to limited success thus far.

One possibility for both parties is to home in on the underlying circumstances of the 65 percent figure—to figure out and solve what it is that drives people to support Trump or this notional European-style third party in the first place.

From six months of fieldwork in post-industrial cities in the British and American Rust Belts, I observed a remarkable sense of loss. Lost wealth in many cases. But more poignantly, I observed a sense of lost status. And while some white Americans were concerned by their loss of political status as a constituency with power, many others were more frustrated by their loss of social status—their drift from the middle of American society to its periphery. Once America’s backbone, many white working class people now feel like an afterthought.

Among young, white, conservative, working class survey respondents, those who felt a sense of loss in political power were about 30 percentage points more likely to support Donald Trump, 33 percentage points more likely to support the Tea Party and 23 percentage points more likely to support the hypothetical third party.

Among the same group of respondents, those who felt a sense of loss in social centrality were about 26 percentage points more likely to support Donald Trump, 34 percentage points more likely to support the Tea Party and 20 percentage points more likely to support the third party.

More than that, those with this sense of lost social status are more likely to perceive immigrants and other minorities to be ascendant. In short, they are feeling displaced.

While Trump’s nationalism, protectionism and xenophobic rhetoric is a convenient—and clearly, to some extent, appealing—response, Republicans and Democrats do not need to compromise their historic values to recruit this still enormous constituency of people into their tents.

For establishment Republicans, their favor can also be won with a genuine dedication to reviving the American meritocracy by committing to the mechanisms of mobility—equal access to education, strategic taxation, economic development and fair market practices.

For Democrats, their challenge is to draw white working class voters into their diverse coalition by convincing them that challenges in the household and workplace are general working class challenges that have very little to do with being white.

For Republicans especially, such shifts in their appeal will require courage, but also common sense. Unless they address the real problems experienced by their base, their schism will endure and a third party may rise.