Instead of wracking our brains trying to figure out why the majority of the country would vote for a proven despicable figure like Trump and every single issue that swayed people one way or another, at the end of the day does it come down to people defaulting to an old white guy to be in charge?
Twice there have been intelligent women running against him yet there must have been a massive swathe that just couldn’t manage to pull the lever for them. In the middle of them along came Biden who was nothing special but of the “two old white men” running gained favor after passing the “am I the right color and gender for you” smell test where people could move on to the next set of deciders.
Of course Obama broke the mold of the “old white guy” tradition but that may have been a once in a lifetime occurrence.
Have Americans of all race and gender simply gone back to their lazy ways of defaulting to having “male?check.white?check.older?check.” be in charge?
A lot of people like what Trump stands for or enables. Scary thought, right? Now, many might also be misogynists, racists, etc.— no contradiction there.
Trump has never existed by himself in a vacuum, and there is much more to being able to upset such a machine than merely not being (or deliberately yes being) an “old white guy” or being intelligent. Note also, speculatively speaking, a female candidate could emerge who is more deceptively and dangerously Trumpier than Trump, and misogyny would not help you there.
Too simple.
It was part misogyny, part racism, part transphobia, part anti-abortion, part gun rights (fear the Dems would come for their guns), a large part the perception of the economy.
I don’t think Biden won so much because of gender but rather because Trump turned in a horrific performance on handling the Covid pandemic. If Trump had done an even halfway decent job on Covid, he’d have won reelection.
And if it weren’t for inflation, I think Kamala beats Trump.
You might be right. “It’s the economy, stupid.”
One of my Facebook friends shared this opinion piece by The Guardian’s senior economics commentator:
And this comment was posted in response:
Yes, it is important to keep in mind that the Democratic party is not, and certainly not economically, a left-wing party that has any appeal to the working class.
An almost 20% increase in grocery prices over the last four years is more than just a perception. Harris didn’t address that since it wasn’t Biden’s fault and there really isn’t much a president can do about it.
People honestly felt they had more money under Trump then under Biden, and they were right. In hindsight, I don’t think Harris had a chance against almost any Republican candidate. As James Carville so aptly put it in 1992, “The economy, stupid”.
Anyone saying this election was lost by any ONE thing seems to be coping with the fact that many factors, even factors they may have been a part of, led to this.
Agreed. And, what’s more, “it’s the microeconomy, stupid.” If someone feels that their purchasing power is less now – due to their own wage increases not keeping pace with inflation and higher interest rates – the macroeconomic numbers (which honestly do look pretty good right now) don’t mean a thing.
It’s a long-accepted truism that the president gets too much credit for a good economy, and too much blame for a bad economy. Harris’s campaign had to fight a serious headwind due to this in the first place, and she wasn’t able to make it clear to voters what her administration would specifically do to help their personal economic situations.
Right – I saw some data on perceptions of inflation, and maybe it’s because we’ve suffered more of it in Europe, but the perception here is different. We know some inflation is good and that when inflation gets high something might need to be compromised to get it down, like allowing unemployment to creep up. (Or conversely, accepting a little above-target inflation while an economy is hot).
Meanwhile Americans just see it as a negative and also don’t see why it has to be traded off against other things.
That’s not to say that the high inflation Europe also saw post-pandemic has not hurt incumbent parties a great deal, it’s just to say that maybe Dems’ goose was cooked on that basis alone, and there’s really nothing that could have been done.
This is at least debatable. The median salary has outpaced inflation so on average people have more spending power.
Of course there are different measures of inflation and minimum wage hasn’t changed etc, hence why I am merely saying “debatable”. Let’s just agree that the standard picture, believed by tens of millions that they were better off under Trump is far from clear, even leaving out covid (which no-one would do for a Democrat president).
Her biggest downfall was her honesty. She couldn’t hold a candle to Trump’s never-ending lies. Unfortunately, his lies trumped her honesty. People believe what they want to believe, and they believed Trump would fix their microeconomic problems, whether real or imagined.
No one seems to want to talk about the elephant in the room. Immigration. Democrats are pro immigration fully understanding how it can be an important economic driver. They are not wrong.
But most immigrants come from cultures riddled in misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, oppression of women, and devout religious opinions. These folks are grateful to be here, and enjoy the prosperity that peace brings with it, but they aren’t going to ever vote Democrat.
The democrats have done little to nothing to educate this group that it’s Democratic policies that open the door, provide food stamps, housing subsidies, school lunches etc, etc.
So they vote with religiously devout factions that reflect their fears. They are very used to strong autocrats, where the most belligerent ass wins. It doesn’t distress them, like us, for them, it’s a familiar actor. They fully understand that guy. While Americans are baffled.
I don’t know what the answer is, but not acknowledging this seems really ill advised to me.
I’m not sure what the solution to this is. If the Democrats fielded a candidate that spewed out lies the way Trump does, it wouldn’t work - the media would hold the (D) candidate to a much tougher standard. That candidate would crater in the polls.
Yep agreed.
Famously many groups like Cuban-Americans just see Democrats as the US version of the Castro regime, and so, ironically, voted for Trump because they didn’t want an autocrat.
And I don’t know how to unwind all of this either. A lot of the op-eds talk about policy, and it’s true that some policy moves would have enticed more progressives out as well as made the messaging carry better. But this was an election of policy versus hateful, divisive rhetoric and lies, and the latter won. “Better solutions” needs to be understood within this context, as painful as it is to confront.
The solution is for the next four years to be so disastrous and reprehensible that the moderate republicans who “held their noses” but voted for Trump anyway come to realize their mistake and successfully beat back the right-wing demagogues who are currently running their party. Will that ever happen? Who knows, but when the US eventually becomes the laughing stock of the world they may feel some regret and be willing to cross over party lines again. I just hope we survive the next four years and come out relatively unscathed.
This, dammit. Just one single thing does not undo the myriad other things that could brought up against Trump or the Republicans. And yes, stating it’s all because of a moral failure of the mainstream society is a way of absolving ourselves from that we may have contributed to it.
And it’s not even about immigrants – there is a whole dimension of Working Class Americans involved in this and I was talking about it all the way back in 2015: to these working-class voters, the figure of the “asshole boss” is NOT something alien, something not to be tolerated, that you have to bring up to HR or subject to a twitter-shaming campaign. It’s something you deal with and at best bitch about over drinks on Friday with the other guys. To this group of Americans, not just to recent arrivals, “the most belligerent ass wins” has been an objective description of reality for generations, so why not be on Team Belligerent Ass?
It’s one of those no-win situations.
The Democratic party writ large is not as pro-immigration as you characterize them, and the Biden Administration has been turning away and deporting more undocumented immigrants than Trump managed to, largely because they actually have a process that isn’t focused on being a punitive as possible and thus, not as subject to lawsuits or restrictions. Biden has also managed to prevent a lot of immigration from Central and South America not buy building a stupid wall that could be climbed or breached but instead using diplomacy and ‘soft power’ policies. to encourage neighboring nations to take in people fleeting violence, oppression, and poverty instead of forcing them to travel thousands of miles to be stuck in Mexico:
“Immigration” is a bogeyman issue created by the modern GOP before Trump but of course he latched onto it because it is a conceptually simple way to foster fear and anxiety. As recently as twenty years ago the Republican party was actually the “pro-immigration” party and the Democrats were up in arms about how immigrants were stealing our shitty, bad paying jobs from honest Americans who would never lower themselves to doing that kind of dirty work.
Stranger
Is there any evidence misogyny is worse in the U.S. than in Britain (which has had women prime ministers)?
This and immigration.
The GOP has done a great job of whipping up emotions among the general public about these two issues.
The Democrats failed by not being able to counter the public’s perceptions about these issues.
Sure feels like it. I just saw an interview between Smerconish and Scott Galloway, discussing “aspirational masculinity”. Among his points is that single mothers are worried for their sons.
‘My daughter is at Penn, my other daughter works in pr in Chicago, and my son is living in my basement, vaping and playing video games’.
I’m really trying to understand the other side; to make an effort not to judge. I hope I’m misunderstanding this because it sure sounds like entitlement and sour grapes to me.
Galloway explains “aspirational masculinity”
This is from CNN, in case the link doesn’t work.