What The Hell America!

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 — explanations (immigration, inflation, too much emphasis on transgenderism, Harris representing the status quo, etc.), but Phillips mentioned only the one that aligned with his thesis.

Phillips’s implication that one random person’s impression substantiates his claim — at the dinner table of a New York Times podcaster, no less — is misleading and, worse, only helps to fuel the rural-urban, red-blue divide and point Democrats away from doing what’s desperately needed to reverse their mounting losses in rural America.

But if white rural voters are the problem, what explains the exodus of non-white, working-class urban voters documented by frequent Jacobin contributor Matt Karp? What explains Bronx residents who voted for both Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) and for Trump, telling AOC, “Both of you push boundaries and force growth. . . . It’s real simple . . . Trump and you care for the working class.”

For two years leading up to the 2024 election, dozens of focus groups and surveys of swing voters made it abundantly clear that the cost of living was their number one issue. Black, white, Latino, working-class, middle-class, men, and women — they all said the same thing: inflation was hitting them hard, they blamed Joe Biden, and they wanted to see a change. They needed to see a change.

Economic issues have for years topped the chart nationally as the most important problem facing Americans and, among swing voters in battleground states, the economy dwarfs other issues even more dramatically. People are working harder for less, and they’re sick of it.

But Democrats didn’t want to hear it. Confronted with voters’ financial woes, they rebutted actual experiences with economic indicator charts and graphs showing that the economy was hunky-dory actually. In response, people felt gaslit — and understandably so.

Keith McCants, chair of the Bryan County, Georgia Democratic Party put it like this: “Bottom line, Democrats, is you’re tone deaf to people’s concerns. They’re telling you what’s wrong. You need to listen to the people.”

Why was it so hard for Democrats to believe people who said they were hurting? What is so implausible about people in rural and factory towns crushed by deindustrialization and big agriculture monopolization wanting change? Part of the problem lies in the presumption that the real reason is prejudice and that anything else is just a cover story.

Like Phillips, many liberals’ belief in the bigotry thesis is predicated on knowing, just knowing, that racial bias lurks in every polling booth. A typical example of such clairvoyance comes from a reputable resistance newsletter author who sees an aura of internalized misogyny around a comment made by a focus group participant:

Obvious internalized misogyny? The charge has a seductively familiar ring to it — yet, no matter how many times one reads the focus group participant’s statement, it’s difficult to find even the faintest whiff of misogyny.

Bigotry is the go-to for all right-thinking liberals, and to deny it is, in one columnist’s words, “stupid.” But the frequency of the accusation does not attest to its validity. For that, we need to look at the data.

Sociologist Musa al-Gharbi has done just that. According to exit polls, Trump lost white voters and gained non-white voters between 2016 and 2024. Harris, for her part, did better with white voters than either Biden or Hillary Clinton. White men voted for Harris at the same rate they did for Biden and white women moved three points toward Harris compared to Biden.

This does not look like a racist, sexist backlash.

Nor to McCants: “Yeah, sexism and racism were there, but those are the easy outs for Harris’s supporters. This is Georgia, there are racists out there, but to say she lost because of that? No.” McCants attributes Harris’s loss in rural Georgia to high prices and to the Afghanistan withdrawal debacle. (His county is home to the Fort Stewart military base, making this issue unusually salient.) He is highly critical of the campaign’s ground game in Georgia, which he says was extremely anemic and, in rural parts of the state, nonexistent.

Impervious to evidence, bigotry is the zombie that cannot be slayed. Presented with the inconvenient reality of millions of non-white Trump voters, the zombie simply shapeshifts into another unfalsifiable claim: internalized oppression.

Many factors contributed to Democrats’ losses, but party loyalists — especially the ones who oversaw the destruction of small-town and industrial America, are always happy to point the finger at bigotry. It’s a handy excuse for ignoring the party’s many flaws, including its capture by billionaire donors who directed Harris to back off her brief, tepid foray into economic populism.

Despite the rhetoric of the last decade, trying to win elections by exhorting Americans to exorcise their racist demons seems a dubious endeavor and one that, as scholar Adolph Reed has noted, risks “undermining the possibility of a political-economic challenge coming from the lower class.” Under the tutelage of Robin DiAngelo and earlier anti-racist gurus, social justice progressives have been trying for decades to train away the racism they believe is harbored in every “white-skinned body.”

The result? Democrats have now lost the trust of working America. If Democrats’ favorite refrain is that the voters are the problem, the party may as well fold up its tent.