Trump leans on issue of race in bid for a 2nd term in 2020

NEW YORK — President Donald Trump has placed racial animus at the center of his reelection campaign, and even some of his critics believe it could deliver him a second term. “Regardless of whether his tweets are racist or not — I’m not saying they are or not — he is getting the media to make these extremely liberal, socialist, foolish congresswomen the face of the Democratic Party,” said Terry Sullivan, a frequent Trump critic who managed Sen. Marco Rubio’s 2016 Republican presidential campaign. Trump’s allies say they think many voters, both Republican and Democratic, are cool to the “woke culture” of 2019, just as they were to the focus on political correctness in 2016. Nearly 6 in 10 Republicans and Republican-leaning independents said that if the United States is too open to people from around the world, “we risk losing our identity as a nation.” Pollsters in both parties said that white working-class voters in particular feel left behind by the Democratic Party’s focus on racial and gender equality. Republican pollsters suggest the president’s real challenge will be in America’s suburbs, where college-educated women veered sharply away from Trump’s party in the 2018 midterms, giving Democrats the House majority.