As half of America and much of the rest of the world is in mourning after Donald Trump's shocking landslide.presidential election win, the inevitable search for a scapegoat has begun.
Some are blaming Black men, particularly as earlier opinion polls had shown them unconvinced by Kamala Harris, with many of them even drifting towards Trump. But according to exit polls, Black voting at the actual election followed very closely their voting during the 2020 election, i.e. overwhelmingly Democrat (Harris 86% and Trump 12%, compared to Harris 87% and Trump 12% in 2020). As in 2020, Black women were much more strongly Democratic than Black men (women 92%, men 78%, broadly similar to 2020). So, they can't be blamed.
What about the Arab-American vote? I have already railed against the ridiculous idea of Arab-Americans witholding their traditional Democratic vote in order to "punish" Harris and Biden in some way, particularly given that Trump is even more rabidly pro-Israel than either Biden or Harris.
But it looks like many of.those Arab-American single-issue voters DID follow through on their threats. For example, in Arab-majority Dearborn, MI, where Joe Biden won by 17,400 votes in 2020, the city went to Trump by more than 2,600 votes. So, whether they voted for Trump, or for third party Jill Stein of the Greens, or just didn't vote at all, the end result is the same: they helped to hand the election to Trump. And - go figure - they have ended up with a stridently anti-Muslim, pro-Israel President-Elect Senate and House of Representatives. Good job, guys. Who could have seen that coming? Er....
So, yes, some blame does attach to Arab-Americans for the predicament the country (and they themselves) find themselves in. It's hard to feel sympathetic, even if they will likely find themselves in the thick of the first wave of Trump's mass deportations of immigrants. That's what single issue voting gets you. But the Arab-American contingent is not actually that large (although larger than you might have thought). So, just how much blame attaches to them is unclear.
The Latino community is much larger, though, about 20% of the population these days. And, yes, they too abandoned the Democrats for reasons that are also not entirely clear to me, continuing their gradual shift to the right (notwithstanding offensive jokes about Puerto Rico at Trump rallies).
But clearly something else happened too - other, that is, than young, testosterone-fuelled rural guys voting for an octogenarian would-be dictator (almost the definition of an urban elite, despite what he says).
The big one, from exit poll data, is white women. Yes, those blowsy, bottle-blonde, slightly overweight, middle-aged women in inappropriate tight clothing you see holding signs behind Trump in all those televised rallies. White women make up 37% of the entire electorate, and I think we CAN legitimately blame them. Yes, Kamala Harris is a woman, and she made a point of campaigning on women's issues, but apparently issues like the economy and immigration outweighed issues like abortion rights and health care, for white women at least. She actually polled worse with women than her Democratic predecessors. Even younger women flocked to the old lecher. It makes no sense to me.
Of course, this kind of granular postmortem analysis is of limted usefulness, particularly in this particular case, where voters are more likely voting according to their social identity and partisan loyalty, i.e. rational considerations don't come into it.
It's also subject to the phenomenon known as "The Pundit's Fallacy" (or, to give it a more scientific label, "motivated reasoning"). This is the idea that political analysts, to a greater or lesser extent, tend to attribute their own opinions to voters. That is, they assume that the policies and beliefs that they hold with themselves are the most advantageous for the country but also for any party looking to get itself elected. This may, of course, not be the case.
Whether you believe that the "fault" for the Democrats losing this election was Joe Biden's (for not handing over the leadership earlier), Kamala Harris' (for not pandering more to the left wing, or to the right wing), or any or all of the various subsets of American society mentioned above, the bottom line is: I am severely disappointed with the American public, pretty much all of them.
What really rankles is that so many of them couldn't tell the difference between the lies and the (few) truths Trump offered, between the jokes and the threats, between policy announcements and logorrheic drivel. Or, worse, that they could and ignored it anyway because it served their own selfish ends. Kamala Harris repeatedly appealed to their better natures in her campaign, but they threw it back in her face (or maybe they have no better natures).
One of the biggest casualties of this election is respect: Trump's win has vindicated his controversial aggressive campaigning "style". Populists and would-be dictators around the world have been looking on and the see that it's okay to lie, insult, play the victim, and generally engage in ad hominen character assassination. What's more, it works. The Democrats do still have the moral high ground here, but the results show that moral high ground does not win elections.
No comments:
Post a Comment