For a guy running for president as an unrepentant white nationalist, Donald Trump sure does seem fixated suddenly on winning over minority voters.
The chances that any of these ploys will win Trump a respectable share of the African-American and Latino votes are slim to none.
But, of course, as any sentient political observer realizes, Trump’s minority outreach isn’t about minorities at all. Rather, it’s about convincing white swing voters—soccer moms and patio dads in the suburbs and exurbs—that he’s not an irredeemable racist.
This version of “minority outreach” has been a tried-and-true tactic in recent years for myriad Republicans, who’ve made a big show of visiting black churches and securing the endorsements of Hispanic leaders—not because they think it will help them loosen the Democrats’ stranglehold on minority voters but because it will signal to moderate white voters that they’re acceptable.
The problem for Trump is that, even for white voters, he’s still sending exactly the wrong signal. Consider how he couches his supposed pitch to minority voters: He caricatures their communities as bleak hellscapes—“dens of crime, poverty, and shiftlessness,” that only he can save.
This is Trump, speaking in Ohio: “Poverty. Rejection. Horrible education. No housing, no homes, no ownership. Crime at levels that nobody has seen. You can go to war zones in countries that we are fighting and it’s safer than living in some of our inner cities that are run by the Democrats.”
This sort of talk not only repels minorities, who don’t recognize their own communities in Trump’s portrayal, it also doesn’t appeal to moderate white voters.
Trump is currently polling between 1 and 2 percent among black voters—lower even than George Wallace’s 3 percent in 1968.
http://www.gq.com/story/donald-trump-cant-even-pander-to-white-voters-the-right-way