The name of our late, esteemed president, Ronald Reagan, is called to the fore often when discussions of his handling of the issues of his day are held. As a gentleman now in my 70s, simple math will show that Mr. Reagan was a formative presence in my thirties, and his election in 1980 was a memorable event for all of us.
Those too young to remember will have likely not heard the term "BCEC", which rose to prominence during that election, and faded into oblivion shortly after, although it would still have relevance if it were indeed still used.
BCEC stood for "blue collar ethnic Catholics", and referred to Americans of Irish, Italian, Polish and other extractions, generally descended from immigrants of the early 1900s who had been doing blue-collar work for generations. The implication of that use was that they were generally union members and worked long hours at hard jobs -- trades, mills, factories.
Most relevant, they were Catholic. Democrats too, of course, because the unions, much like today, supported only Democrats and obliged their members to vote for the candidate of their choice, meaning one who was paid sufficiently to support the legislative agenda of the respective, if not respectable unions.
The BCECs, long before they were so named, notoriously were all the above. They constituted a solid Democrat voting bloc for decades -- while that was only because of the politics of their unions, it was still a reliable bloc, because the union was in sync with the second most important aspect of their lives -- their jobs.
The problem for Democrats, at least eventually, was the most important aspect of their lives -- the beautiful combination of family, country, and church. An auto worker in Detroit named Wojciechowski would, as likely as not, have a wife and a half-dozen kids, and reliably attend Mass, along with a bunch of other auto workers named Kelly, Capelli, and ... well, you get the idea.
And that's where the 1980 Reagan campaign comes into the story.
The 1970s were memorable in America, starting with the winding down of the Vietnam war, followed by Watergate and the ultimately resultant election of Jimmy Carter for the great quality of ... OK, for not being Gerald Ford. This led inevitably to the disastrous, inflationary Carter economy and then the Iran hostage crisis -- and for the BCECs, this was an interesting confluence that challenged their ability to provide for their family, and ran up against their innate patriotism.
And then there was the last factor -- as Catholics, the Democrats' comfort with abortion on demand was highly unpopular with their faith and threatened their church's teachings.
The nation at the time was seriously balanced politically -- Richard Nixon had won handily in 1968 and overwhelmingly in 1972, and even as unpopular as Gerald Ford was for having pardoned Nixon to get Watergate off the front pages, in 1976 he had closed the gap by election day to that race being a toss-up that Carter, the Georgian, pulled out only by bringing the entire South.
The 1980 election saw Reagan capitalize on all that, but a key to his overwhelming defeat of Carter was his dramatic improvement, over all his Republican presidential candidate predecessors, in the votes of the BCECs -- so much so that in the latter stages of the polling in 1980, the term was popularized to reflect Reagan's new source of Republican votes.
The point of all that was to note that in 1980, Reagan was able to identify and win over a voting bloc that previously had voted predominantly Democrat. He won a far bigger share of the BCECs, despite the unions not really rallying behind him, by appealing directly to their core values of family, faith, and country -- the 1980 issues being the economy, abortion, and the Iran hostage crisis. Reagan, the "Great Communicator", had no trouble making his case on all those issues.
In the 2024 campaign, Donald Trump, in his own way, did the same thing with a different set of voting blocs. During that campaign, "Trump's BCECs" were black and Latino voters, whose votes would go quite strongly to the former president relative to their percentages in previous elections.
It's a bit difficult to get an accurate exit poll since, when black voters have been expected to vote Democrat since forever, and there is significant pressure to vote that way, the 13% who allegedly exit-polled as having voted for Trump is doubtlessly a severe under-count. But regardless, their proportion voting for Trump was clearly higher than in previous elections.
A similar situation applied to Latino voters, a bloc which split relatively equally between Trump and his opponent, Kamala Harris. Again, Trump's proportion of Latino votes outpaced any previous election and flew in the face of Democrat expectation that his strong opposition to illegal immigration would cost him much of that voting community.
I believe the argument from 1980 comes all the way to 2024 and applies quite well. The 1980 BCECs, like everyone else in the country, saw the Democrats and disagreed with their positions on issues close to them -- abortion, of course, but also a perception that they were inadequately patriotic, weak overseas, and economically incompetent, spending a buck and a half for every buck of hard-earned taxpayer dollars that were seized from the auto workers and steel mill types.
Come 2024, and sure enough, much like in 1980, the Democrats allowed their furthest-left wing to dominate their policies. Only this time, those positions were -- I hesitate to say "even further left" -- just loony in the view of Americans.
Even those not as loony ("loony", as in biological males competing in women's sports, which nobody liked) were counterproductive. Opening the southern border was a transparent Democrat strategy to fill up America with presumed eventual Democrat voters -- but one that America saw as allowing drug trafficking, human trafficking and, as it proved out, an influx of hardened criminals and gang members.
For reasons we may never understand, the Democrats running for office embraced those moronic policies, thinking that ... ahhh, I don't know what they were thinking.
And here is the point. I see the major shift in black and Latino votes toward Trump as being a combination of two significant factors that hearken back to 1980.
First, the Democrats allowed themselves to move themselves into utterly silly positions and did not allow internal dissent on them. They forced their standard-bearer, the presidential candidate, to advocate those positions, or at least in her case, avoid taking questions on them for the whole campaign.
Some black voters looked at the awful conditions on city streets under Democrat mayors and asked themselves how let gang members pour across open borders was going to make that worse. They asked how even the not otherwise-criminal illegals might be taking jobs away from them. And they didn't like the answer.
Latino voters looked at all that the same way, only on top of all that, they saw Joe Biden's FBI going after Catholic church members, too. The overwhelmingly Catholic Latino voting bloc didn't like what they saw, and they really didn't like the Democrats' other stances on issues that flat-out contradicted Catholic doctrine.
Second, they started listening to the second coming of the original Great Communicator. Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump had more than a few differences, but one thing they both could do is speak. Mr. Trump was able to pack 20,000 people into an assortment of venues and have more standing outside just to be close. And the more venues he packed, the more black and Latino voters saw other black and Latino voters who supported him -- and it became more, let's say, "acceptable" to vote for him and even to be quoted as doing so.
Sound familiar? Of course it does. A Republican candidate was able to peel voters away from a group that had previously voted as a Democrat bloc, by appealing to the issues of their actual daily lives, whether from foreign competitors undercutting US automakers and steel mills to cost jobs here, or assaults on women's sports, or, well, assaults from gang members who walked across unguarded borders.
After the 1980 election, the voter calculus flipped so far that the Democrats couldn't win the White House for 12 years. The BCEC voter took a long time to be willing to consider voting for a Democrat again, and even then it took a far less radical candidate from a southern state, whose policies would be rejected by the current party.
It remains to be seen the extent to which the black and Latino voter who gave Trump a chance in November will, at the very least, allow themselves to consider Republicans in future elections. They have broken free of the shackles put on them by their union bosses, their bought-and-paid-for pastors, their self-appointed "leaders."
How free from those shackles they will be going forward remains to be seen.
But one way or the other, Trump found his BCECs for 2024, and the landscape may never be the same.
Copyright 2025 by Robert Sutton. Like what you read here? There are over 1,000 posts from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com and, after four years of writing a new one daily, he still posts thoughts once in a while as "visiting columns", no longer the "prolific essayist" he was through 2018, but still around. Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.
