This may be Biden’s best hope of reversing his slide with Black and brown voters

CNN —

President Joe Biden’s weakness in polls among non-White voters is boosting Republican hopes that the GOP is poised to extend its most important political breakthrough of modern times – and potentially to reshape the competition between the two parties along the way.

The most consequential political gain for Republicans in recent decades has been their increasing strength among working-class White voters – a process that began under Presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan in the 1970s and 1980s but peaked in recent years under Donald Trump. Once the brawny backbone of the Democrats’ “New Deal” coalition that dominated American politics from the 1930s until the 1960s, White voters without a college degree have become the foundation of the modern GOP.

Now some political observers believe working-class minority voters are moving along the same track – and largely for the same reasons. Just as millions of working-class White voters recoiled from Democratic cultural liberalism during the social upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s, they argue, working-class Latino and even Black voters are shifting toward the GOP now in rejection of “woke” ideology on issues such as crime, immigration and LGBTQ rights.

Such arguments are fueling the increasingly common assertions that Republicans are building a “multiracial populist coalition,” as GOP pollster Patrick Ruffini argues in his copiously researched recent book, “Party of the People.”

While “the rightward shift” of White- and non-White voters without a college degree toward the GOP in the Trump years “might seem like two discrete, unrelated events …the two groups share a common working-class DNA and their political shifts stem from the same root,” Ruffini writes.