Levitsky and Ziblatt trace the rise of Trump to the Republican party’s Obama-era panic about the diversifying electorate. In 2012, they note, exit polls showed that Mitt Romney won a greater share of the white vote than Ronald Reagan had in 1980, yet Obama still won comfortably thanks to landslide margins among nonwhite voters, whose numbers were growing inexorably. Panicked at the prospect that a diversifying electorate would consign their party to minority status, they argue, Republicans turned against democracy itself.
The rise of Donald Trump was an expression of this racialized panic. His “success showed that white identity politics was a winning formula within the party,” they argue. It follows that the answer is to deepen democratic reforms, forcing Republicans to compete for majorities in a multiracial electorate. “Only when the Republicans can legitimately win national elections again will their leaders’ fear of multiracial democracy subside,” they argue. “As long as the Republican Party can hold onto power without broadening beyond its radicalized core white Christian base, it will remain prone to the kind of extremism that imperils our democracy today.”
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/10/anti-trump-republicans-wont-save-democracy-can-anybody.html