MILWAUKEE — From the passage of a party platform that de-emphasized longtime core conservative social issues to the selection of anti-intervention populist Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, as running mate, this week’s Republican convention has underlined and bolded former President Donald Trump’s roadmap to take back the White House.
Abortion, gun rights and the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol received little if any attention. The speaker lineup featured a union president, an OnlyFans model and disaffected Black and Latino Democrats, angered over crime and immigration, up and down the roster.
It was no accident. The Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee, now fully under his control, are trying to entice traditionally Democratic-leaning constituencies that are disillusioned with the GOP, including working-class union members and young, relatively non-ideological Black and Latino voters.
The convention marked the most direct appeal to them the party has ever made, bringing in speakers who were somewhat jarring to traditional GOP constituencies. This indicates that the Trump campaign believes it has a better chance at attracting those voters than at winning back the Trump-to-President Joe Biden crossover voters who left him in 2020 — most notably, the well-educated and suburban white voters who cast many votes for Nikki Haley in the 2024 GOP primary.
“This is not your father’s GOP anymore,” Mike Gonidakis, a Republican delegate from Ohio and president of Ohio Right to Life, told NBC News. “This is the Trump GOP now.”
Most Republican lawmakers and delegates who spoke with NBC News embraced what they saw as an effort to broaden the tent as opposed to an abandonment of some conservative policy aims.
“Of course, I’d love to hear every single night, talking about life,” Gonidakis said. “But we have to win in order to govern, and in order to govern, you have to win, right? So what we need to do is broaden our appeal to people because it’s the long game, the strategy, of actually bringing in a bigger tent. Changing hearts and minds.”
These appeals were evident in both Trump’s and Vance’s speeches before conventiongoers.
“You know who is being hurt the most by millions of people pouring into our country?” Trump said. “The Black population and the Hispanic population.”
One night prior, Vance hit the other angle, railing against the North American Free Trade Agreement and corporate America.
“We need a leader who’s not in the pocket of big business, but answers to the working man — union and nonunion alike,” Vance said. “A leader who won’t sell out to multinational corporations, but will stand up for American companies and American industry. A leader who rejects Joe Biden [and] Kamala Harris’ ‘Green New Scam’ and fights to bring back our great American factories.”
A recent NBC News poll demonstrated the softness in Biden’s coalition that Trump is trying to exploit. Overall, Trump led Biden by 2 points among voters in the new poll. Inside the data, the survey showed that among voters under 30, Biden led by a mere 4 points. (He carried voters under 30 by 24 points in 2020, according to NBC News exit polling.) Among Black voters, Biden led by 57 points (after winning them by 75 points in 2020). Among Latino voters, Biden led by 16 points (after winning them by 33 points in 2020).
Democrats pushed back on Trump’s effort, especially his message aimed at Black and Latino voters. Democratic National Committee Chair Jaime Harrison dismissed the outreach as “Trump’s streak of lip service and photo ops,” adding that the convention included “insulting stereotypes — like arguing that voters of color should support him because he is a felon.”
Democrats also argued that Trump’s agenda when he was president was detrimental to these voters and that, particularly voters of color, would see through his effort.
“Voters of color are sophisticated and are looking for who is fighting for them — they won’t be distracted by Trump’s off-brand sneakers or fast-food giveaways, and they haven’t forgotten Trump’s record of harming our communities,” Sarafina Chitka, a spokesperson for the Biden-Harris campaign, said.
The messaging wasn’t totally uniform in its reaching out to nontraditional GOP voters. At one point in his speech, Trump tore into the head of the United Auto Workers days after giving a featured speaking slot to Teamsters head Sean O’Brien. Immediately after Ric Grenell, a Trump foreign policy adviser who is gay, mentioned in his Wednesday address that Trump “doesn’t care if you’re gay or straight, Black, brown or white, or what gender you are,” Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., took the stage to claim that under Trump “there were two genders.”
Trump did seek to make similar appeals to these voters during the 2020 convention, but this week’s iteration marked his most fulsome and eye-opening effort, particularly because of who was speaking. Amber Rose, a model and OnlyFans performer, described initially doubting Trump’s sincerity until she did her own research. More than any other speaker, her presence signaled a willingness to put in the back-burner traditional social conservative issues to better reach nontraditional voters.
“My message to you tonight comes from a humble place; the left told me to hate Trump,” she said. “And even worse, to hate the other side, the people who support him. When you cut through the lies, you realize the truth. American families were better when Donald Trump was president.”
On the economic front, it was O’Brien’s speech that signaled an openness to burying some conservative orthodoxy on economics, bashing the Chamber of Commerce and Business Roundtable.
“I wasn’t sure how it was going to go,” Riley Moore, the West Virginia state treasurer and a favorite to win a congressional seat there this fall, said of O’Brien’s speech. “But I think when he saw the reception that he had here, that represented to me a very strong partnership nationally. JD Vance literally encapsulates that shift. And I think it is happening quick. There’s going to be a sea change for this Republican Party. It has been since Trump was elected, but it’s going to continue under Vance.”
Biden allies were quick to seize on the pushback within the labor movement to O’Brien’s speech. As he spoke, the AFL-CIO’s official X account posted, “Some would love for workers to take Trump at his word & forget what he did as President. But we didn’t forget. And Project 2025 shows he’ll pick up right where he left off: dissolving unions, gutting worker protections, & defunding whole parts of the government people rely on.”
Still, two labor sources said the political threat to Democrats is real, with one saying that “far-right MAGA ideology” has some momentum and rank-and-file union members. NBC News polling data shows that the battle for voters in union households is close, though Democrats still have an edge.
Republicans in Milwaukee, meanwhile, said the messaging struck the right balance between the interests of the base versus expanding the tent.
“To quote Goldilocks, the temperature of the porridge is about right,” Sen. Steve Daines, R-Mont., chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, told NBC News. He added: “The working class in this country is [saying Democrats are] going way too far to the left.”
The tone was first set in crafting the Republican platform before the convention. Before pen was put to paper, Trump’s allies took an active role in fights over who would serve on the platform committee — an effort that was intended to stop conservatives from pushing the document too far to the right on abortion and same-sex marriage, platform mainstays for years.
The concise platform, which Trump was an active part of drafting and editing, according to a source familiar with the process, did include some language on abortion — but it went nowhere near as far as past GOP platforms or what anti-abortion rights activists pushed for this time. And it made no mention of same-sex marriage. Other culture war issues that have gained steam since the pandemic were included, such as barring transgender athletes from participating in women’s sports.
There was still some dissent to the GOP’s convention path.
Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., who was praised by O’Brien, said the platform nailed its planks on the populist economic front and described O’Brien’s speech as “electric.” But he questioned why Republicans would distance themselves from traditional social conservative issues.
“I don’t see any reason to do that,” Hawley said, adding, “As Republicans, I think we ought to be advocating strongly a pro-life position on principle, then this platform to me seems to water that down. I just don’t know why. I think there’s no reason for that.”
“I just think it’s an electoral mistake,” he added. “I don’t think it gives you anything. I think it hurts you with conservative, pro-life evangelical, conservative Catholic voters to compromise on that. And the same with marriage. I don’t understand the calculation, but I think it’s not wise.”
But one person at a conservative think tank said they didn’t think Trump would lose anything electorally from backing away from those issues.
“Trump didn’t care much about those issues before 2016,” this person said. “He rebranded himself as caring about these issues. It was a way to get the evangelical vote. And once he got it, he now has it. He’s not going to lose it over that. The number of passionate pro-life evangelicals who are going to stay home and not vote for Trump because he’s wishy-washy on abortion is so small.”
Mike Elder, a GOP delegate from South Carolina, said the messaging shift was smart to appear less “hard line.” He appreciated O’Brien’s and Rose’s speeches.
“We want to win,” he said, adding, “Trump’s been through this before, he knows where he’s winning votes and losing votes.”
