If you want to know why seventy-seven million people voted for Donald Trump, don’t assume. Just ask them. As the election postmortems attest, there’s no single reason Trump won, but one common explanation stands out for its presumptuousness and ubiquity among progressives: bigotry.
This Democratic consultant’s election night hot take is typical of the genre:
But this is more than just sour grapes. It points to a deep and very dangerous delusion that’s taken hold of the Democratic Party. One that casts rural voters — supposedly the source of all American backwardness — as scapegoats for electoral catastrophes like this one all while running cover for liberals’ own failed strategy and out-of-touch priorities.
Despite this “it’s the bigotry, stupid!” school of thought, a 2024 metastudy showed that female and non-white candidates do not suffer a penalty. One can’t rule out the possibility that some voters are so racist or sexist that they simply could not pull the lever for Kamala Harris despite being more ideologically aligned with her. But to presume, as many liberals do, that this was a major driver of Harris’s defeat requires a certain amount of mind-reading.
This presumption is treated as so incontrovertible that its adherents scarcely bother making the case for it, opting instead for snarky, know-it-all tweets and memes over reasoned articles or studies. They just know it in their bones.
A rare exception is a piece in the Nation by Steve Phillips, founder of Democracy in Color. Phillips unequivocally asserts that Harris’s loss was rooted in “white racial resentment.” He rests his case on an off-the-cuff comment made at a Thanksgiving gathering of a podcaster’s friends and family in a Chicago suburb: “People just came out of the rural areas and came out of everywhere to make sure that that black woman would not win.” Others at the gathering had completely different — and equally unsubstantiated…
Auteur: Erica Etelson
