Pump the Brakes on the Popular Vote

1,902 words

There is an excellent chance that most people reading this felt a certain amount of relief or elation after last week’s election. Yes, Donald Trump will become America’s 47th president. This will undo the stolen 2020 election and hopefully a lot more than that. There has been much talk on the Right about how the adults are back in the room, that wokeness received a stiff rebuke, and that Americans are finally fed up with wanton illegal immigration, pointless foreign wars, transgender insanity, runaway inflation, and a partisan, left-wing mainstream media. All of this is well and good. And from the early signs, Trump looks like he may follow through on his promises this time. He has said many things he simply cannot unsay, such as stating he will dismantle the Department of Education. His selection of Tom Homan for Border Czar was, by all accounts on the Right, an excellent choice. Furthermore, within days of the election, invader caravans in Mexico have been dwindling or turning back. All good signs.

Commentators on the Right have been running victory laps ever since Trump’s resounding victory—as they have every right to. And I admit, I have been enjoying it tremendously. But there is one refrain I’d like to push back on just a bit—the meaning behind Trump’s winning the popular vote, something a Republican has been unable to do since 2004. Yes, this was the jewel in the crown of Trump’s victory and the ultimate argument to silence the Democrats who’d been crowing about “democracy” ever since Kamala Harris became their un-primaried, unelected candidate this past summer. The Left has nothing now except cope, seethe, and blame—which they have been indulging in quite a bit. And what has to hurt the most is that Trump won the popular vote. The Left cannot even claim a moral victory the way Hillary Clinton did in 2016. They are left with nothing this time, which is frankly what they deserve.

Donald Trump’s rout of the Democrats in 2024 has led some on the Right and Left, however, to do some racial bean counting and read more into the popular vote than what is really there. According to many exit polls, Donald Trump gained with many non-white demographics, especially Hispanic men. This, for many, is a cause for celebration.

According to an exit poll reported in Reuters, Trump won 13 percent of the black vote, up one percentage point from 2020, and 46 percent of Hispanic vote, up 14 percentage points from 2020. With black men, he won 21 percent (up two percentage points from 2020), while he won 55 percent of Hispanic men (up an impressive 19 percentage points from 2020). He won 38 percent of Hispanic women as well, up eight percentage points from 2020,

And for all you visual learners, we have these exit poll results.

From NBC News:

From the BBC:

While this is all good, some are now beginning to downplay the role of demographics in elections. How else to explain Trump railing against illegal immigration and promising mass deportations, yet still gaining with Hispanics? According to conventional wisdom, the opposite would be true. Remember this oft-replayed clip from the View?

A county in Texas which is over 90 percent Hispanic went over 75 percent for Trump. Why? Because of racism or misogyny? No, because they are on the border with Mexico and got tired of illegals breaking into the country. You see, these Hispanics care more about being Americans than they do about being Hispanic. They’ve gotten past race. According to some, we’re beginning to see civic nationalism overtake ethnocentrism, which could spell the death knell of identity politics.

A fairly egregious take comes from one Benjy Sarlin at Semafor. In a piece entitled “The 2024 Election Should End the ‘Demographics are Destiny’ Era of Politics,” he writes:

On the right, the “demographics” talk fed a toxic mix of paranoia, despair, and xenophobia. Figures like Rush Limbaugh made the case that Latino voters and recent immigrants were irredeemably left-wing, and that adding more would soon make Republican victories impossible. Even the more polite Mitt Romney’s private lament that “47%” of the country was too dependent on the government to vote GOP riffed off then-popular theories on the right about a demographic tipping point toward socialism. Renewed pushes for voting restrictions were steeped in Republican pessimism about ever winning Black voters. Over time, and especially in the Trump era, more Republicans embraced the far right’s dark “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory that the left was “importing” voters for nefarious purposes.

This prognostication will age as well as all the giddy “end of history” proclamations made after the Cold War. Francis Fukuyama had actually stated that by the early 1990s we had reached “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” I believe that one day there will be just as much egg on Sarlin’s face as there is currently on Fukuyama’s.

Regardless, Sarlin’s outlandish claim as well as any civnat chest-thumping needs to be taken seriously and refuted from an ethnocentrist viewpoint. Identity politics is not going away just because a handful of non-whites decided to hitch a ride on the Trump train in 2024. Here are five reasons why.

First, the 2024 election was a mismatch. It featured a highly charismatic candidate against a highly uncharismatic candidate. Despite the three-to-one war chest ratio in favor of Kamala Harris and the constant anti-Trump gaslighting from the mainstream media, most discerning voters could tell the difference, regardless of race. Kamala Harris is a repellant  character. Donald Trump is as well, but offsets it with intelligence, humor, vigor, assertiveness, and everything else that makes person charismatic. He attracts far more than he repels. This cannot be said of Kamala Harris, whose most enthusiastic supporters include gender-confused basket cases and unmarried women marching under the blood-red banner of abortion—not exactly a core constituency you’d want to bet a billion dollars on. This certainly fueled much of the enthusiasm gap in 2024. Then throw in Harris’ penchant for word salads, for dodging straight questions, for gross tactical blunders, for insulting voters, for over-relying on the teleprompter, and for not being able to read a room, and you have perhaps the weakest presidential candidate in living memory. Against someone with rock star levels of popularity like Trump, who has none of these flaws, she never stood a chance.

Secondly, Harris’ campaign was not run as intelligently as Trump’s. Harris stuck mostly with boring, softball interviews on mainstream networks, and even there she failed to shine. When given the opportunity to expand her audience on the Joe Rogan Experience, she refused. Her vice presidential nominee, Tim Walz, was weird and undignified and helped little. She chose nonsensical mantras such as “turn the page,” when she was part of the incumbent administration, and “fighting for democracy,” when she herself never earned a vote to become the presidential nominee. Her ads were cringeworthy, ranging from voters being scolded by overpaid Hollywood celebrities, to tapping into white guilt with White Dudes for Harris, to overdoing the machismo in order to attract male voters. She also famously pitched pro-Hamas ads to Muslim voters in Michigan, while running pro-Israel ads for Jewish voters in nearby Pennsylvania. Perhaps she was hoping that her friends in the mainstream media wouldn’t notice.

Trump, on the other hand, ran an excellent campaign. He made the most of his assassination attempt in July with some iconic imagery, to say nothing of his defiant attitude. He trolled Harris brilliantly. His MAGA rallies attracted millions and were full of energy—and he held a lot of them. The 78-year-old Donald Trump campaigned his ass off, sometimes with four rallies in a single day. He also had chutzpah to spare, campaigning in deep-blue places like California, New Jersey, and New York City. What Republican does that? He was on the spot when hurricane Helene hit. His running mate JD Vance proved he could pick up the slack, such as when he was dispatched at the last minute to campaign in light-blue New Hampshire. Advised by his son Baron, he hit the edgy podcast circuit and performed admirably enough on Joe Rogan to get the man’s endorsement along with tens of millions of views. His cat and duck memes, his brief gig at McDonalds, and his garbage truck stunt were creative, memorable, and resonated well with voters. 2024 Trump just may very well be the strongest presidential candidate since Ronald Reagan, and hands down the strongest Republican.

Third, the Democrats were hobbled by the scandal surrounding Joe Biden’s surreptitious ouster in July as well as by a terrible economy and the millions of illegal immigrants that they themselves allowed into the country since 2021. Trump had none of these hindrances. Basically, the Democrat position was a much harder sell in 2024 than it had ever been since the days of Jimmy Carter. This is why Harris often resorted to platitudes, lies, and character assassination in her campaign speeches. She had nothing objective to run on other than healthcare and abortion.

Fourth, I am sure the specter of World War Three, made more menacing by Kamala Harris’ ill-advised courtship of neocon Liz Cheney, may have convinced a handful of non-whites to take a second look at Orange Man Not-So Bad. Trump ran explicitly on pacifism, which he has a proven track record for. I’d bet even a King Kleagle of the Ku Klux Klan could garner 35 percent of the black vote if it meant preventing them from being barbecued in a mushroom cloud.

Fifth, Sarlin and the others make much ado about relatively very little. Yes, Trump made gains with Hispanics and scored a coup with Hispanic men, but he still lost the Hispanic vote. Who’s to say that another America-first Republican has the charisma to equal such an accomplishment? It seems unlikely, given the current crop of contenders for 2028. And Trump’s gains with blacks were both minimal and nearly cancelled out by sex. According to one poll, he lost more black women than he gained black men.

And take a close look at the following bar chart to see what a bathtub tsunami all this popular-vote bluster really is. Note how the two green boxes (which I added for emphasis) illustrate how little Trump’s black and Hispanic gains mattered in the long run:

Here is a close-up of the meager 2020-2024 difference.

So we’re supposed to stick a fork in the side of identity politics over this? Really?

I posit that many non-whites were simply dazzled enough by Trump or repelled enough by Harris to either vote Republican or stay home on election day. It’s not that blacks and Hispanics no longer care about their racial interests and have suddenly sprouted overriding civic concerns. Instead, the 2024 US presidential election presented a highly unusual confluence of events, which produced highly unusual voting patterns. Had Harris been any stronger or Trump any weaker, we would have likely seen blacks and Hispanics revert to type, which is what I expect them to do in 2028. I’d prefer to see increasing numbers of blacks and Hispanics voting for white Republicans over the next three or four cycles even when their candidate is weak before having second thoughts about identity politics and ethnocentrism.

Until then, we can call Donald Trump’s 2024 popular vote victory a fluke. A fortunate fluke, yes, and one that we should make the most of. But a fluke nonetheless.