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. Yet, she actually polled worse with women than her Democratic predecessors. Even younger women flocked to the old lecher. It makes no sense to me.
The bottom line is: I am severely disaapointed with the American public, pretty much all of them.
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