Election Reflection - Part 2
In my Election Reflections post, I’d noted the dissonance between our understanding of President Trump as a racist versus the unexpected support he received from Obama voters (2016) and minority voters (2020).
In January, President Obama attempted to explain the gains Trump made with Latinos:
“There’s a lot of evangelical Hispanics who, the fact that Trump says racist things about Mexicans, or puts detainees — you know undocumented workers — in cages, they think that’s less important than the fact that he supports their views on gay marriage or abortion,”
But Obama’s analysis does not explain the shift of numerous Latino-led counties from Clinton in 2016 to Trump in 2020. We can safely assume that Latino voters who opposed abortion or gay marriage did not vote for Hillary last time around. Yet Trump’s 2020 Hispanic support increased markedly over 2016.
This also echoes Obama’s epic remarks about rural voters back in 2008:
“And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”
Yet many of those rural counties did vote for Obama twice over, before turning to Trump in 2016.
The lens President Obama employs to reach his conclusion dominates American political life; the lens of identity. Identity is considered the sine qua non of our society; with race, gender, orientation as the lens through which we perceive one another.
Through the identity lens, President Obama assumes that rural voters can be grouped as white bitter clingers; that Latino Trump voters can be grouped as religious zealots. Once placed in these groups, they can then be dismissed from the political calculus.
The benefit of doing so? There is no need to reevaluate the impact of one’s own policies upon these groups if they were unreachable in the first place.
Lenses can indeed focus. We all use lenses every day to frame and organize the world around us.
Lenses also obscure. When a leader as experienced as Obama uses identity to the exclusion of other lenses, even his formidable talent is unable to square his conclusions with the facts on the ground.
To evade this trap, we need to switch lenses from time to time. There are other ways to engage people besides identity, albeit more prosaic. Economics served as a powerful lens for many years, before being transcended by identity.
If we consider Trump Latino voters through the lens of economics, a new perspective emerges.
“Most Latinos identify first as working-class Americans, and Trump spoke to that,” Josh Zaragoza, a top Democratic data specialist in Arizona, told Politico.
And if we then look at the performance of the American economy during the Trump years, our new lens allows for a more plausible explanation than that of Obama’s depiction of Latino religious zealotry.
Minority unemployment dropped to record low levels. Labor force participation increased significantly. Most importantly, wage gains for lower income workers reached the highest level in 40 years.
Whether or not to credit Trump with these results is a separate conversation, but as was famously said by Bill Clinton’s campaign: it’s the economy, stupid. Fairly or unfairly, the Trump administration was associated with the remarkable improvement of working class standards of living, and many 2020 minority voters turned to him as a result.
Here, the lens of identity blurs, while the lens of economics clarifies. Those leaders and parties who can switch their lenses will be well-positioned to compete for these voters next time around.