Election Reflection - Part 1
As we wind down the Trump interregnum, there’s value in considering how we got here.
I use the word “interregnum” deliberately; as a “period where normal government is suspended…”.
And if there’s anything that Trump devotees and detractors can agree upon, it’s that he was definitely not normal. Trump served as a pause, an interruption of governmental and cultural trends underway for many years prior to his entry into the political arena.
Many now believe these trends can be safely reinitiated. President Biden is committed to “Build Back Better”, echoing the perceived stately performance of government during the Obama era. More motivated progressives seek to accelerate the positioning of the Federal government at the center of our lives, most notably with Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal.
Progressive confidence in the raising of the State is predicated on the razing of the conservative electorate. This strategy is underwritten by the conventional wisdom that Donald Trump’s election represented a last gasp; the death throes of the straight white Evangelical males. It remains central to such thinking that America’s inexorable march of demographic diversity will inevitably eclipse the declining power of the ur-racists.
The analysis runs like this: White supremacists may have found their Dear Leader in Trump, and thus shocked the world four years ago. But that setback was merely temporary. The conventional wisdom believes that with Trump’s corporately-enforced digital exile, we can resume our progressive parade, and render Hillary's Deplorables permanently irrelevant. This trend will only accelerate as minorities become a majority of the population.
Such a strategy rests upon this primary assumption: people are motivated by identity to the detriment of all other factors. Our identity (race, gender, orientation) is the principle lens by which we engage with the world – indeed, per the activists it is the only way we can engage with the world. Identity trumps (so to speak) all other perspectives.
But if we follow the data of the 2016 and 2020 elections, an interesting question emerges: does race, et al, truly explain the results we saw?
In 2016, approximately 100 counties in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania flipped from blue to red, tipping the election to Trump. If we apply the lens of identity to this flip, we conclude that these voters were triggered by Trump’s racist dog whistle. Yet these same counties voted for Barack Obama, our first black president twice. Did they suddenly become more racist after 8 years of an African-American presidency, or were other factors in play?
2020 produced an even greater challenge to the conventional wisdom: Trump captured the largest GOP share of America’s minority vote since Nixon in 1960: 26%. Trump made impressive gains in the Latino community, particularly in Texas. Trump numbers improved among black men, black women, gays, Muslims, Asians and many more. Trump support increased in every demographic except one: white men. Had Trump retained the same percentage of the white male vote he garnered in 2016, he would have won reelection.
For four years, many wise people viewed Trump through the lens of identity, perceiving his every act as that of an inveterate racist, and assuming the rest of America would do the same.
And yet he gained ground in the minority vote, while losing the one demographic that his purported racism should have secured.
This is so counterfactual that it’s nigh on impossible to process.
Unless other lenses matter more than identity. I believe they do, and that will be a continuing theme of this blog.