The story of the wreckage of this administration will be new Trump voters getting what they voted for and protesting non-voters choking on self-righteous false equivalence between the parties.
Hispanic men voted to deport people without due process, imperiling themselves and their families. Arabs in blue states enabled Trump Gaza and actu…
The story of the wreckage of this administration will be new Trump voters getting what they voted for and protesting non-voters choking on self-righteous false equivalence between the parties.
Hispanic men voted to deport people without due process, imperiling themselves and their families. Arabs in blue states enabled Trump Gaza and actual ethnic cleansing. Black men were so irate over cancel culture that they voted for canceling Maya Angelou. Tech bros voted for tariffs and the elimination of H1B visas. Lots of folks who couldn't pull the trigger for Harris because they're too online to exist in the real world, who didn't seem to know what they were voting for despite the two candidates making the choices very clear.
I see your point, but whenever anybody makes a list like this, it bothers me that the words "white people" never seem to be included. The overwhelming majority of Trump's voters are white. Nice, ordinary, comfortable white people of both sexes gave us this situation. Looking at what changed at the margins to return him to office while ignoring his enduring fan base of mainstream whites — who are also going to get the inflation, loss of services, and erosion of civil liberties they voted for — strikes me as a form of scapegoating, even if it's not intended that way. We're 10 years into this madness, and well-meaning white folks still don't want to own the problem. I think we need to get over that.
Nevertheless, Dearborn and Dearborn heights were won by TRump. Jill Stein got a large protest vote there as well. Trump won Michigan by 80,000 votes. The difference between 2020 and 2024 was among non-white voters. Trump made gains among non-white voters all over the country. That's why he brings this up.
I'm aware. And my point is that focusing on the small number of nonwhite voters who gave him his slim margin is ignoring the elephant in the room, which is the millions of white people whose votes made that margin matter. Sure, Trump made some gains outside his melanin-deficient base, chiefly among Hispanic men, but the most important and alarming story is how little white support he lost nationwide between 2020 and 2024. A few points with white women, that's it. It's like we just accept as a given that half the white people in this country are irredeemable bigots, so we're gonna get mad at a handful of voters from other groups because they didn't save us from our own monster. It's wild when you think about it.
Nevertheless, that was the change that made the difference. Did the democrats give up on the white voters? Were they not paying enough attention to people of color or men. They have to look at what the actual difference was. Trump's people got more voters at the margins. And they made an effort to do so, while keeping hold on their apparently immovable base.
I am an old white woman who voted for democrats. I have never voted for trump. I used to be a moderate republican 20 years ago. I saw a lot of ads this time from the democrats reaching out to women. It seemed like every third or fourth ad was about abortion. Which if you put that in the face of evangelical Christians over and over again, that will harden their resolve to vote republican. Even if they don't like Trump.
Yes, I don't mean to let us white folks off the hook, and certainly us white men are the worst offenders by far. We seem incapable of voting beyond our own narrow interests, or what we perceive to be our interests, anyway. Somehow, though, this jackass keeps getting more votes than he did the previous election, and it's as though Trump is extending the pathologies that lead white people to vote for him to other ethnic groups. The increase in support for fascism among groups that will no doubt be the target of fascists is highly perplexing.
None have clean hands, but it was the White vote that carried Trump, and of that mostly nominally Christian. Of all the groupings of people who need to clean up their act it is the majority in this country who need to.
"None is righteous, no, not one; no one understands; no one seeks for God. All have turned aside; together they have become worthless; no one does good, not even one."
I have to note here that very, very, very few Black people voted Trump. The media made a big stink over a very tiny handful of people, as they do. Manufacturing Consent.
True, but the shift in Hispanic and Black men made a significant difference in the swing states. I haven’t done the statistical analysis, but a number of statistical commentators claim it was enough to allow Trump to win instead of Harris.
Yeah, a good point. His gains among people of color were mostly among the males, and while Trump got a much higher percentage of the black male vote than he did previously, Harris still won black males by a very wide margin, because Trump lost them so badly in 2020. It's largely a problem with us men broadly, where we get wrapped up in voting for the pretend manly man.
I love this assessment Don. Especially “protesting non-voters choking on self-righteous false equivalence between the parties.” To me, most trails of our current crisis lead back to narcissism; our new national trait in both leaders and voters. Protest votes have an overlay of self-importance way outside of reality.
Voting behavior is primarily about making yourself feel good (if you want to put it in simple terms).
That is why most people vote for their team, regardless of what a PoS their team is or how far it has strayed from what it was when they joined the team. Not voting for your team causes problems on a couple of levels:
1) You feel like you let your team down;
2) You are worried someone will find out that you weren't a team player (which has downstream implications).
Most people who identify with a team have a hard time breaking with the team. This is paticularly true on the Right and on the extreme left, less so on the center/center Left (because the center/center left prides itself on its "pragmatism" and rationality, which provides loopholes).
Voting certain ways is basically cheap virtue signaling. "Independents" regularly flip-flop (regardless of what the actual political/policy/economic results are) because they are demonstrating the virtue of "independence." See I vote for both sides. Time for he other team to run things for a while.
[There is also a substantive dissatisfaction effect here as well--in that NO government is actually going to satisfy people (especially independents), so dissatisfaction builds and triggers the flip-flop}.
Minority party members (libertarians and socialists mostly) have their own teams to demonstrate virtue to. And team solidarity is very simple here, because your team is never really in a position to disappoint you, because they are never in power.
One issue voters ignore everything else to demonstrate their virtue WRT their one issue (even if voting differently would actually serve their issue better). These are generally what the protest votes (or I just stayed home vote) are (like Arabs/Palestinians not voting for Harris).
One issue voters do not have a team. The issue is their team.
Independents are all about displaying their independence--which is, to them, a display of superiority. Independence is their team, with a subtext of intellectual superiority or a superiority of character/principle.
The team players (who readily self-identify with a political party) obviously have a team.
And then the none voters do not have a team or an issue that they care deeply enough about or identify with. They also tend to believe that they do not have any substantive agency--so why bother. This is the leave me alone while I keep my head down team.
All of this is pretty simplistic (reality is more complex) but it captures a key thing.
"Independents are all about displaying their independence--which is, to them, a display of superiority. Independence is their team, with a subtext of intellectual superiority or a superiority of character/principle."
The story of the wreckage of this administration will be new Trump voters getting what they voted for and protesting non-voters choking on self-righteous false equivalence between the parties.
Hispanic men voted to deport people without due process, imperiling themselves and their families. Arabs in blue states enabled Trump Gaza and actual ethnic cleansing. Black men were so irate over cancel culture that they voted for canceling Maya Angelou. Tech bros voted for tariffs and the elimination of H1B visas. Lots of folks who couldn't pull the trigger for Harris because they're too online to exist in the real world, who didn't seem to know what they were voting for despite the two candidates making the choices very clear.
When you’re right, you’re really right.
This exactly how I feel about our fellow citizens. They were too stupid to absorb any news from the real world.
I see your point, but whenever anybody makes a list like this, it bothers me that the words "white people" never seem to be included. The overwhelming majority of Trump's voters are white. Nice, ordinary, comfortable white people of both sexes gave us this situation. Looking at what changed at the margins to return him to office while ignoring his enduring fan base of mainstream whites — who are also going to get the inflation, loss of services, and erosion of civil liberties they voted for — strikes me as a form of scapegoating, even if it's not intended that way. We're 10 years into this madness, and well-meaning white folks still don't want to own the problem. I think we need to get over that.
Nevertheless, Dearborn and Dearborn heights were won by TRump. Jill Stein got a large protest vote there as well. Trump won Michigan by 80,000 votes. The difference between 2020 and 2024 was among non-white voters. Trump made gains among non-white voters all over the country. That's why he brings this up.
Time to grab that clicker and change the channel, folks. See above
I'm aware. And my point is that focusing on the small number of nonwhite voters who gave him his slim margin is ignoring the elephant in the room, which is the millions of white people whose votes made that margin matter. Sure, Trump made some gains outside his melanin-deficient base, chiefly among Hispanic men, but the most important and alarming story is how little white support he lost nationwide between 2020 and 2024. A few points with white women, that's it. It's like we just accept as a given that half the white people in this country are irredeemable bigots, so we're gonna get mad at a handful of voters from other groups because they didn't save us from our own monster. It's wild when you think about it.
Nevertheless, that was the change that made the difference. Did the democrats give up on the white voters? Were they not paying enough attention to people of color or men. They have to look at what the actual difference was. Trump's people got more voters at the margins. And they made an effort to do so, while keeping hold on their apparently immovable base.
I am an old white woman who voted for democrats. I have never voted for trump. I used to be a moderate republican 20 years ago. I saw a lot of ads this time from the democrats reaching out to women. It seemed like every third or fourth ad was about abortion. Which if you put that in the face of evangelical Christians over and over again, that will harden their resolve to vote republican. Even if they don't like Trump.
Yes, I don't mean to let us white folks off the hook, and certainly us white men are the worst offenders by far. We seem incapable of voting beyond our own narrow interests, or what we perceive to be our interests, anyway. Somehow, though, this jackass keeps getting more votes than he did the previous election, and it's as though Trump is extending the pathologies that lead white people to vote for him to other ethnic groups. The increase in support for fascism among groups that will no doubt be the target of fascists is highly perplexing.
Human are confounding.
None have clean hands, but it was the White vote that carried Trump, and of that mostly nominally Christian. Of all the groupings of people who need to clean up their act it is the majority in this country who need to.
"None is righteous, no, not one; no one understands; no one seeks for God. All have turned aside; together they have become worthless; no one does good, not even one."
The Vengeful Cancer in me LOVES seeing people getting *brutally* D-slapped for their own gratuitous idiocy...regardless of the context.
At this point, I say "Keep slapping, Karma...in fact slap them HARDER".
I have to note here that very, very, very few Black people voted Trump. The media made a big stink over a very tiny handful of people, as they do. Manufacturing Consent.
True, but the shift in Hispanic and Black men made a significant difference in the swing states. I haven’t done the statistical analysis, but a number of statistical commentators claim it was enough to allow Trump to win instead of Harris.
Yeah, a good point. His gains among people of color were mostly among the males, and while Trump got a much higher percentage of the black male vote than he did previously, Harris still won black males by a very wide margin, because Trump lost them so badly in 2020. It's largely a problem with us men broadly, where we get wrapped up in voting for the pretend manly man.
Bravo!…:)
100%
I love this assessment Don. Especially “protesting non-voters choking on self-righteous false equivalence between the parties.” To me, most trails of our current crisis lead back to narcissism; our new national trait in both leaders and voters. Protest votes have an overlay of self-importance way outside of reality.
Voting behavior is primarily about making yourself feel good (if you want to put it in simple terms).
That is why most people vote for their team, regardless of what a PoS their team is or how far it has strayed from what it was when they joined the team. Not voting for your team causes problems on a couple of levels:
1) You feel like you let your team down;
2) You are worried someone will find out that you weren't a team player (which has downstream implications).
Most people who identify with a team have a hard time breaking with the team. This is paticularly true on the Right and on the extreme left, less so on the center/center Left (because the center/center left prides itself on its "pragmatism" and rationality, which provides loopholes).
Voting certain ways is basically cheap virtue signaling. "Independents" regularly flip-flop (regardless of what the actual political/policy/economic results are) because they are demonstrating the virtue of "independence." See I vote for both sides. Time for he other team to run things for a while.
[There is also a substantive dissatisfaction effect here as well--in that NO government is actually going to satisfy people (especially independents), so dissatisfaction builds and triggers the flip-flop}.
Minority party members (libertarians and socialists mostly) have their own teams to demonstrate virtue to. And team solidarity is very simple here, because your team is never really in a position to disappoint you, because they are never in power.
One issue voters ignore everything else to demonstrate their virtue WRT their one issue (even if voting differently would actually serve their issue better). These are generally what the protest votes (or I just stayed home vote) are (like Arabs/Palestinians not voting for Harris).
One issue voters do not have a team. The issue is their team.
Independents are all about displaying their independence--which is, to them, a display of superiority. Independence is their team, with a subtext of intellectual superiority or a superiority of character/principle.
The team players (who readily self-identify with a political party) obviously have a team.
And then the none voters do not have a team or an issue that they care deeply enough about or identify with. They also tend to believe that they do not have any substantive agency--so why bother. This is the leave me alone while I keep my head down team.
All of this is pretty simplistic (reality is more complex) but it captures a key thing.
"Independents are all about displaying their independence--which is, to them, a display of superiority. Independence is their team, with a subtext of intellectual superiority or a superiority of character/principle."
I feel wonderfully, horribly seen here!
Ha. Me too. No matter what your vote or philosophy, your vote is a virtue signal to someone! Or a sign of superior intelligence. :)