MILWAUKEE — From adopting a party platform that downplayed longtime conservatives’ core social problems to selecting anti-interventionist populist Sen. J.D. Vance as his running mate, this week’s Republican convention highlighted and showcased former President Donald Trump’s road map to retaking the White House.
Abortion, gun rights, and the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol received scant attention. Speakers included a union president, an OnlyFans model, and disgruntled Black and Latino Democrats angry about crime and immigration throughout the list.
This is no accident. The Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee, now entirely under his control, are trying to attract traditionally Democratic voters disillusioned with the GOP, including working-class union members and relatively non-ideological young black and Latino voters.
The convention was the party’s most direct appeal to these voters yet, featuring speakers who were somewhat out of step with traditional GOP constituencies. That suggests the Trump campaign believes it has a better chance of attracting these voters than it does of winning back the crossover voters for Trump and President Joe Biden who left in 2020 — particularly the educated, suburban white voters who voted in large numbers for Nikki Haley in the 2024 Republican primary.
“This is not your father’s Republican Party anymore,” Mike Gonidakis, a Republican delegate from Ohio and president of Ohio Right to Life, told NBC News. “This is now Trump’s Republican Party.”
Most Republican lawmakers and delegates who spoke with NBC News embraced what they saw as an effort to broaden the tent rather than an abandonment of some conservative policy goals.
“Of course, I would like to hear about life every night,” Gonidakis said. “But we have to win to govern, and to govern you have to win, right? So we have to broaden our reach to people, because it’s a long-term game, a strategy, to attract a wider audience, to change hearts and minds.”
These appeals were evident in Trump and Vance’s speeches to Congress.
“Do you know who is suffering the most from the influx of millions of people into our country?” Trump asked. “The black population and the Hispanic population.”
The night before, Vance had attacked the other angle, lambasting the North American Free Trade Agreement and American businesses.
“We need a leader who is not in the pocket of big business, but who answers to working people, union and non-union alike,” the Ohio senator said. “A leader who will not sell out to multinational corporations, but will stand up for American business and industry. A leader who rejects the ‘new green scam’ of Joe Biden (and) Kamala Harris and fights to bring back our great American factories.”
A recent NBC News poll demonstrated the weakness of the Biden coalition that Trump is trying to exploit. Overall, Trump leads Biden by 2 points among voters in the new poll. Within the data, the survey showed that among voters under 30, Biden has a lead of just 4 points. (He had a 24-point lead among voters under 30 in 2020, according to NBC News exit polls.) Among black voters, Biden has a 57-point lead (after winning them by 75 points in 2020). Among Latino voters, Biden has a 16-point lead (after winning them by 33 points in 2020).
Democrats have pushed back on Trump’s efforts, particularly his message to black and Latino voters. Democratic National Committee Chairman Jaime Harrison called the move “window dressing and photo ops by Trump,” adding that the convention featured “insulting stereotypes, such as the claim that voters of color should support him because he’s a felon.”
Democrats have also argued that Trump’s agenda as president was detrimental to those voters and that voters of color in particular would see right through his efforts.
“Voters of color are sophisticated and looking for those who will fight for them — they won’t be distracted by Trump’s questionably branded sneakers or fast food giveaways, and they haven’t forgotten Trump’s record of harming our communities,” said Sarafina Chitka, a spokeswoman for the Biden-Harris campaign.
The message wasn’t entirely uniform in its efforts to reach nontraditional Republican voters. At one point in his speech, Trump took aim at the United Auto Workers a few days after giving a speaking slot to Teamsters leader Sean O’Brien. Immediately after Ric Grenell, a Trump foreign policy adviser who is gay, mentioned in his speech Wednesday that Trump “doesn’t care if you’re gay or straight, black or brown or white, or your gender,” Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida took the stage to claim that under Trump “there were two genders.”
Trump tried to make similar appeals to these voters at the 2020 convention, but this week’s iteration was his most comprehensive and revealing effort yet, in part because of who was speaking. Amber Rose, a model and performer on OnlyFans, said she initially doubted Trump’s sincerity until she did her own research. More than any other speaker, her presence signaled a willingness to put traditional conservative social issues on the back burner to better reach nontraditional voters.
“My message to you tonight comes from a humble place: The left told me to hate Trump,” Rose said. “And worse, to hate the other side, the people who support him. When you cut through the lies, you see the truth. American families were better off when Donald Trump was president.”
On the economic front, it was O’Brien’s speech that signaled an openness to the burial of a certain conservative orthodoxy in economics, by attacking the Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable.
“I wasn’t sure how things were going to turn out,” Riley Moore, West Virginia’s treasurer and a front-runner to win a congressional seat this fall, said of O’Brien’s speech. “But I think the reception he got here represented to me a very strong partnership on a national scale. J.D. Vance literally embodies that change. And I think it’s happening quickly. There’s going to be a sea change for this Republican Party. It’s been there since Trump was elected, but it’s going to continue under Vance.”
Biden’s allies were quick to capitalize on the labor movement’s reaction to O’Brien’s speech. As he spoke, the AFL-CIO’s official X account posted: “Some would like working people to take Trump at his word and forget what he did as president. But we haven’t forgotten. And Project 2025 shows he’ll pick up where he left off: disbanding unions, gutting worker protections, and defunding swathes of government that people rely on.”
Still, two union sources said the political threat to Democrats is real, with one saying that “the far-right MAGA ideology” has some influence among rank-and-file union members. NBC News polling data shows the battle for voters in union households is tight, though Democrats still have an advantage.
Milwaukee Republicans, meanwhile, said the message struck the right balance between grassroots interests and tentpole expansion.
“In Goldilocks’ words, the temperature of the porridge is about right,” Sen. Steve Daines of Montana, chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, told NBC News. He added: “The working class of this country (says Democrats) are moving too far to the left.”
The tone was set in the Republican platform’s development before the convention. Even before the text was written, Trump’s allies were actively involved in the fight over who would sit on the platform committee. This was done to prevent conservatives from pushing the document too far to the right on abortion and same-sex marriage, pillars of the platform for years.
The concise platform, which Trump actively helped draft and revise, included elements on abortion, but it didn’t go as far as previous GOP platforms or what anti-abortion activists have called for this time, according to a source familiar with the matter. And it made no mention of same-sex marriage. Other culture war issues that have gained momentum since the pandemic were included, such as banning transgender athletes from women’s sports.
There was still some dissent over the GOP’s path through Congress.
Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley, who was praised by O’Brien, said the platform made a good case for his populist economics and called O’Brien’s speech “electric.” But he questioned why Republicans are distancing themselves from traditional conservative social issues.
“I don’t see any reason to do that,” Hawley said, adding: “As Republicans, I think we should be very principled in our pro-life position, but this platform seems to me to water that down. I just don’t know why. I don’t think there’s any reason for that.”
“I just think it’s an electoral mistake,” he added. “I don’t think it does you any good. I think it hurts you with conservative voters, pro-life evangelicals and conservative Catholics to compromise on this. It’s the same thing with marriage. I don’t understand the math, but I think it’s not wise.”
But one person at a conservative think tank said she didn’t think Trump would lose anything electorally by walking away from those issues.
“Trump didn’t care much about these 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’s got it now. 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 hesitant on abortion is so small.”
Mike Elder, a Republican delegate from South Carolina, said the change in message was a good idea to appear less “hard-line.” He appreciated the speeches by O’Brien and Rose.
“We want to win,” he said, adding: “Trump has been through this before, he knows where he wins votes and where he loses them.”
