Can White Vote Win White House?
SMERCONISH: Disenfranchisement of the white middle class in America that has been a steady theme throughout this campaign. Is there any way to fix it? In a new column title "Great White Hope," Pat Buchanan writes "middle aged whites are four times as likely as middle aged blacks to try to kill themselves, their fitness levels are falling as they suffer rising levels of physical pain, emotional stress and mental depression which helps explain the alcohol and drug addiction." Joining me now is Pat Buchanan. Pat, what is the social disaster that you see right now for white middle America?</s>PAT BUCHANAN: Partly what you described there. I read that "New York Times'" story and was astonished by it that this is the only group of Americans, middle class white folks and I gather working class whites as well, for whom the mortality rate, the death rate is rising in middle age. In my view there's a number of reasons for it. One is the economy. You've seen the real wages have been flat, of course, tremendous numbers of people even though unemployment is low have dropped out of the labor force. I think culturally, they're under assault. The phrase angry white male is one of the few slurs that can be used today. And I think, let me use something that had - Merl Haggard died recently, Michael, he had a line in his</s>SMERCONISH: When you say they're under cultural assault as I read your piece I thought the W.A.S.P.S probably said the same thing when families like Smerconich and Grovich, my forefathers were coming to this country at the turn of the last century.</s>BUCHANAN: Well, Smerconish and some of my ancestors and folks that came from Eastern and Southern Europe, they were under ethnic and cultural assault, I believe, in this country and they rose up and they came into their own and they came into the middle class. I don't think the W.A.S.P. to their credit, W.A.S.P.S. built America in the 18th century but I don't recall them ever being under cultural assault.</s>SMERCONISH: In the last line of your piece and I'll put it up on the screen, you refer to Donald Trump as the great white hope and indeed you said so just a moment ago. Are you helping or hurting him when you cast his campaign in those terms?</s>BUCHANAN: Well, I think that I just took that term from Jess Willard in 1915, it was a play in 1970 as well, "The Great White Hope," and it's just a term, but what is very important is what it indicates. The largest turnout ever has taken place in the Republican primaries and enormously the votes for Donald Trump had been white votes, working class votes, middle class votes, people driven by nationalism and populism who have never come out before and I think, Michael, we got to explain that and understand it and I make the best effort I can do to do that and I think to have the political correctness line thrown at you on every line you use in the column, I don't think is helpful.</s>SMERCONISH: But isn't Donald Trump stirring that base by pointing in the direction of the others and laying off the blame on them for what's going on among this core constituency?</s>BUCHANAN: I don't agree with that. He says - look predominantly the folks coming across the southern border are Mexican folks coming across illegally. He's referring to them. He's going to build the wall. I understand that and people take that as anti-Mexican where some of us take it as trying to preserve the character and laws of the United States of America which are under assault.</s>SMERCONISH: When you talk about the economic problems of those that you write about, up say it's largely attributable to illegal immigration and you also say the effect of globalization. I think it's probably technology and globalization not so much people who are coming illegally to do jobs that frankly many Americans don't want do and aren't willing to do.</s>BUCHANAN: Michael, I believe I said in the column that I not only referred to legals but illegals - excuse me, I include legals there and the point is if you add 40 or 50 million folks in the United States as we have since 1965 and a million more legal and illegal every year, that's a huge increase in the labor supply and the demand remains constant and therefore the wages go down. Real wages have been stagnant for American workers and American families of the working and middle class almost since 1974. In addition to that 55,000 factories were exported in the first decade of the 21st century and something like six million manufacturing jobs lost. Michael, you got to look at these figures and understand they have a dramatic impact upon Americans working in middle class and those folks that made that Nobel Laureate, I think that report has gotten to the reason why or indicated it.</s>SMERCONISH: Final question, political ramification of all of this. Are demographics not destiny? I've got Neil Neuhaus in the on-deck circle, I'm going to ask him, are there enough of the Buchanan-Trump constituents left to get somebody president.</s>BUCHANAN: I will say this, the Republican party is under a demographic death sentence in these terms. Even if you get 60 to 65 percent of the white vote which Nixon got and Reagan got, both of them winning 49 states landslide. When the white vote diminishes it's now about 72 percent of the electorate, 62 percent of the population. As it goes down further and further you're going to have to get Hispanic votes, you're going to get some more African-American votes and you got to get more Asian-American votes or quite frankly, the Republican party is going to go the which of the wigs. I wrote that in my book "Suicide of a Super Power."</s>SMERCONISH: Pat Buchanan, have a good Memorial day. Thank you so much for being here.</s>BUCHANAN: Well, thank you.</s>SMERCONISH: To make more sense of Pat Buchanan's "Great White Vote," I got Neil Newhouse. He was the lead pollster for Mitt Romney. You heard Neil what Pat just said. Evaluate it.</s>NEIL NEWHOUSE, REPUBLICAN POLLSTER: That was pretty depressing, don't you think?</s>SMERCONISH: For the country or for Republicans or both?</s>NEWHOUSE: I think for both. I think you put it in perspective and Pat kind of gets us started in the right direction. You and I have talked about this before but this is the longest period of sustained pessimism that Americans have gone through in a generation. We've had 12 straight years now where a plurality of Americans leave the country all for the wrong track. That's where we're having swing election after swing election after swing election. You talk to voters and focus groups and what they're telling us is they're working harder and they feel like they're just not getting ahead, that they see everybody else getting bailed out but them. So there is a rising frustration and anger and I think you see that bubbling up both on the democratic side of the aisle with Bernie Sanders's campaign and obviously with Donald Trump on the Republican side.</s>SMERCONISH: On the Republican side of the aisle and we have had this conversation - let me put on the screen what George Will wrote and noted for "The Washington Post." "George Herbert Walker Bush and Mitt Romney 24 years later got the same percentage of the white vote, 59 percent. Papa Bush got 426 electoral votes but Romney only got 206. You can't win the White House with the Buchanan-Trump constituency, right?</s>NEWHOUSE: No, the math is problematic. There's no question about it. I mean, Pat pointed this out, 72 percent of the vote in the 2012 election was among white voters and those numbers are going down. And so, if you have 70 percent or even 69 percent of the vote, voters will come out to vote in 2016 being white, what percent does Donald Trump have to win to win the election? You're talking about 65 percent, 66 percent. I mean, Michael, this reminds me of those days when I worked on the Frank Rizos (ph) campaign in Philadelphia and he wouldn't count on any of the African- American vote and you had to get to 72 percent of the white vote in order to win. There becomes a point in time where it just becomes almost impossible to kind of achieve those numbers in a presidential election.</s>SMERCONISH: Neil, there have been four different national surveys that have come out just in the last week saying it's a neck in neck race between Donald and Hillary. At what point, do these polls begin to matter?</s>NEWHOUSE: Listen, Michael, there's a ton of fluidity out there. When you got a majority of Americans having an unfavorable impression of Trump and a majority unfavourable impression of Hillary and about 1/4 having unfavorable of both, it's going to be a while. Let me recommend people kind of lean back and wait until after the two conventions, things will settle down. I think that - right now you look at the data and Donald Trump is doing better among Republicans and pulling more Republican vote than Hillary is among democrats. That's not what anybody expected but let's see what settles out after the conventions and I think even the state data is going to be extraordinarily fluid until we get through the two conventions in July.</s>SMERCONISH: Final question, in 2013 you and the Barinson group, the Obama and Romney pollsters were hired to work together and find the size of the middle. You said it's 51 percent, which way are the 51 percent leaning?</s>NEWHOUSE: Well, I just finished focus groups this past week in three midwest communities in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Rochester, Minnesota, and Dayton, Ohio and the last question we asked was if we hold the election today for whom would you vote and it looked like we had asked everybody to eat a sour pickle. The looks in their faces were just - it was this is - I call this, Michael, I call this a nose holder election. People want to hold their nose when they vote right now. So, I think those middle voters are -- they're just waiting to see what's going to happen. This is a long ways of being determined who is going to win this election. And the other -- Michael, the other thing is -- there's not a darn thing that's happened in this campaign cycle so far that's been predictable. So, to try to figure out what's going to happen between now and November, you know, it's utter nonsense to try to say that's predictable.</s>SMERCONISH: Neil Newhouse, thank you so much for being here.</s>NEWSHOUSE: Michael, pleasure.</s>SMERCONISH: Coming up, Donald Trump's latest nickname for a person he wants to take down. This time it's Elizabeth Warren -- Pocahontas. Why does he do this? Does it work?