A Presidential Postmortem: Race — The 'Elephant' On The Ballot
In all my channel surfing for postmortem election analysis, almost no one seemed to want to talk about race as a critical factor. That the choice on the ballot was a white man versus a Black woman.
By John W. Fountain
CHICAGO—The Democratic Party bet the house on Kamala Harris. And lost. Big time.
And in some ways, so did every democrat and Harris supporter—who had hoped that the vice president’s candidacy, initiated three months ago at the 11th hour to replace Joe Biden at the top of the ticket—would win the White House.
But on the morning after, the vulnerability of a political party that increasingly has grown out of touch with the times couldn’t have been more glaring. Harris’ loss is symbolic of a party that has increasingly grown out of touch with part of its core base and is in dire need of refining a more centrist, more inclusive message that appeals across racial, socioeconomic, generational and gender lines even in an election when race was the elephant on the ballot.
I hate to say I told you so. But… I told you so. (related column)
Oh, and that false narrative about waves of us Black men vaulting toward Trump and being too sexist and misogynistic to vote for Harris never materialized. Why not? Because it was hogwash from the beginning, a red herring.
In fact an NBC exit poll showed that nearly 8 out of 10 black men voted for Harris and about 2 out of 10 Black men for Trump—a figure nearly unchanged nationally from the 2020 Biden/Trump race.
So, what was it?
Analysts and political pundits have surmised that Americans bought into Trump’s campaign message of stemming inflation and stimulating the economy, of mass deportations of illegal migrants and sealing America’s borders; his message of conservatism; and his purported ear to the working class.
in reality, it came down to simple mathematics. The majority of America once again pledged allegiance to Trump’s vow to “Make America Great Again.”
For many African Americans—gay Americans, Mexican, Arab and Muslim Americans, however—those four words are a dog whistle that conjure anxiety, terror, fear. They hear in them an inherent pledge to take us back to a time in America for “whites only.” Of Jim Crow segregation.
A time before Civil Rights, gay rights, marriage equality, and abortion rights. A time when the winds of hate raged and manifested as sweeping violence that consumed in unrighteous fire towns like Tulsa, Oklahoma, or left a trail of carnage across America in cities like Chicago during the race riots of 1919.
And yet, in all my channel surfing for postmortem presidential election analysis, almost no one seemed to want to talk about race as a critical factor. That the choice on the ballot was a white man versus a Black woman.
Fear of Becoming A Majority Minority Nation
The fact that the majority of white America (55 percent) chose the candidate who would not disavow the Ku Klux Klan or other white supremacist groups, who once told the “Proud Boys” to “stand back and stand by.” The man who took out a full-page ad, calling for the adoption of the death penalty for the Central Park Five—the brown and Black teenagers wrongly convicted and ultimately exonerated of the brutal 1989 rape of a white woman jogging in New York City.
The man who has repeatedly denigrated Black women, who has said that Mexican immigrants are “in many cases, criminals, drug dealers, rapists.” The candidate who is the political poster boy for white extremist groups, protector of the status of “whiteness” in America.
Truth is: At a far greater rate than voters of any other race, white America chose Trump. This is not fake news.
In fact, about 6 in 10 or 59 percent of white men and slightly more than 5 in 10 or 52 percent of white women chose Trump—a slight decrease in support from the 2020 election between Trump and Biden, according to the NBC exit poll. Polls also showed that Trump’s support increased significantly among Latino voters. But that’s not the crux of the matter.
“Most notable was Trump’s performance among white women. The Harris campaign actively targeted the group in the hope that protecting abortion rights would garner their support,” writes U.S. News & World Report. “Yet such support failed to materialize, with Trump winning among white women 53% to 46% over Harris, with that group making up the largest overall voting bloc at 40%...”
Bottom line: Trump won because white America chose Donald Trump in all of his inglorious MAGA malevolence. Despite his vitriol, divisiveness and embers of hate. Despite his pledge to weaponize the Justice Department if reelected, and to heap vengeance upon his political enemies. Despite his promise to pardon convicted Jan. 6 insurrectionists. And despite his well-documented sea of lies.
Why?
Because it is the American way. The American way of looking the other way when evil poses as good and in the name of God and righteousness, though it is often simply white nationalism cloaked as Christianity.
It is the grand old way of star-spangled flag waving and faux patriotism that shrouds flagrant hypocrisy. It is the so-called American way, which pretends to be working for “the good” of “the people” while winking at the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution with sinister disdain.
It is that all too familiar American way that allowed chattel slavery and the treatment of African Americans as less than animals. That allowed white men and white women to turn and look the other way when Black men, women and children were lynched and hung from poplar trees as strange fruit—burned, butchered and otherwise brutalized for centuries. That kept those white women who witnessed such atrocities from being so moved or convicted as to turn in their sons, nephews, husbands, fathers, grandfathers and neighbors for their inhumane crimes and sins against both God and man. Indeed, historical accounts showed they were sometimes also participants not just silent bystanders.
Being a Trump supporter does not make someone a racist. Some of Trump’s supporters are Black. And there are many whites throughout American history who have stood on the side of right and fought against slavery, racial hatred, discrimination and bigotry.
This much, however, is clear: That many of those who love Trump hate people who are Black like me. And many feel threatened by the rise of the minority population, which the U.S. Census Bureau has projected that by 2044 “the United States’ white majority would become merely a white plurality: immigration and fertility trends would lead to America’s ethnic and racial minorities outnumbering its white population,” writes The New York Times.
‘A more perfect Union’
That white America would once again choose Trump was a revelation made clear to me four years ago while standing in the proverbial tunnel and recognizing that the light slowly approaching from the distance was not the light of hope and the shimmering American promise, but a train called Trump, barreling toward the republic with fatal disregard and reckless abandon.
I wished it were not so. But I could not unsee the glaring truth regarding Trump’s supporters and their allegiance to the Maga-verse. That it mattered not to them how many times Trump might be federally indicted, impeached, convicted, or even accused of rape. Or whether someday he stood in the middle of New York City’s Fifth Avenue and shot somebody. That America holds more animus for a Black football player (Colin Kaepernick) who knelt in 2016 at a NFL game during the U.S. national anthem in protest of police brutality than for a U.S. president who incited an insurrection in the nation’s Capitol in January 2021.
Their fealty to Trump could not be shaken.
At first glance, I found his hold on supporters mesmerizing. Then I came to understand that Trump speaks their language—even as a billionaire who has about as much in common with America’s blue-collar working class as an oligarch does to a poor migrant farmer.
Over the last few days, I have witnessed the tears, angst and worry of Americans unsettled by another looming Trump presidency. I am more optimistic. Not about Trump. But about the potential for this nation, as Dr. Martin Luther King said, to someday “rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’”
Amid the winds of hate blowing cold across this nation, I still believe in Dr. King’s dream and that we will someday make America a more perfect Union. For united we stand. Divided we fall. Except my faith is not in man. but in our eternal creator and another four-letter word: hope.
And like my once enslaved ancestors, I’ll bet the house on that.
Email: Author@johnwfountain.com
Nailed it. I sat in on the "Win with Black Women" call Sunday night and Joy Reid did a data dive based on exit polls. According to those data, which are not absolute or final, the biggest rightward shift from 2020 is seen in Latino males. In her analysis (big picture) Trump won because he as able to get more white people to vote, mostly white males, because he promoted early voting which railed against in 2020. The other factor according to that early data: 7% of Democratic voters that voted in 2020 stayed home in 2024. So white people were a bigger share of the 2024 electorate (68%) compared to their proportion in the general population (60%). And they overwhelmingly went for Trump.
Another perspective: 71 million people voted for a black woman to be president. 48% of the electorate. Progress?