Lorcan Nyhan: Donald Trump played the Richard Nixon card and won

Originally published in the Irish Independent.

Donald Trump has just completed one of the most impressive political comebacks in US political history. How did he do it? By following the same playbook that worked for Tricky Dick Nixon in 1968.

In 1962, Richard Nixon was a broken figure. He’d lost the 1960 election to John F Kennedy and then ran for the governorship of California — an unbecoming stepdown for a former party leader.

And yet he lost. Badly. His own chief of staff called the loss “a humiliation”. The Republican party elders no longer wanted anything to do with a serial loser.

The idea he could go from that low ebb to the presidency was unthinkable. Yet, he did. By courting the Republican faithful on the ground and by speaking the language of his target voters.

"People whom he could reach by speaking to their instinctive, reflexive, emotional wants and needs"

In public, Nixon was famous for talking to and about the “silent majority”. But in private, he had a different term for the blue collar voters upon whom he built his comeback. He called them “the gut people”. People whom he could reach by speaking to their instinctive, reflexive, emotional wants and needs.

Those voters delivered him the Republican nomination and subsequently the White House — when he beat the sitting vice president Hubert Humphrey. Their 2024 descendants just delivered the same premises to Donald Trump.

Read Lorcan Nyhan's full article on how Donald Trump played the Richard Nixon card and won here