After sweeping presidential win, the hope hidden in Donald Trump’s massive victory | Opinion
What happened on Tuesday? To listen to the teams of talking heads on cable TV is to be bombarded by a cacophony of campaign mechanic rationalizations that just seem inadequate to explain Donald Trump’s striking national mandate — of the popular vote, the Electoral College, flipping the Senate and maybe expanding Republican majorities in the House of Representatives.
Trump is not president-elect because Joe Biden stayed in the race too long or because too many people knew too little about Kamala Harris or because of shifts in the suburbs or urban turnout. It has nothing to do with money or advertising or the ground game or Elon Musk or Taylor Swift. Google search and X posts didn’t matter.
Something bigger happened that is going to play out in the months to come in ways that will surprise us, but might offer hope for a better America.
Trump played one card in this election over and over. Many people see it as a dark and divisive tactic. But Trump’s “us versus them” framing of issue after issue — from immigration to inflation, abortion to wokeism — was transformed by the American electorate into an opportunity for multiracial, multiethnic, gender-diverse unity.
More Americans than ever before without regard to demographics claimed an identity as Americans first, relegating whatever melanin- or chromosome-based surface characteristics they have to a distant second.
To judge by the exit polls in key states, more Black men than ever before voted to be American before African, call them American African and not the reverse as they have been labeled for so many decades. The jump in support among all Black voters was only from 8% support for Trump in 2020 to 13% on Tuesday, but that is still a dramatic shift, and if it were to continue, would reshape political maps across the country.
In a number of states, Trump won pluralities or even majorities of Hispanic Americans who claim Trump’s “American first” as their identity over their skin color or the nationality of their parents or grandparents.
Women moved a notch more in the Trump camp in a year when Democrats tried to make abortion the election’s central issue with a scare campaign fueled by dubious anecdotes and misreading of state abortion laws. Among pro-choice women, millions pulled the lever for abortion rights even as they voted for Trump.
Spurred by the murder of George Floyd and a turn to wokeism by the knowledge-making elites of media and universities who created a generation of college-educated young workers raised on identity politics, Democrats divided Americans into ever smaller slices. With arcane manners that feature pronoun announcements, land acknowledgments, sensitivity training and fear of microaggressions they alienated Black, brown and female Americans without college educations by the millions.
Those who put their Americanness first rebelled. The insurgency of normal America has now swept away Democratic power at the national level in a way that few expected.
Perhaps nothing exemplifies the divide between the knowledge class who shape how we talk about and understand ourselves and the vast bulk of Americans who don’t have college degrees than the failure of polling. This is the third presidential election in a row when pollsters of all stripes — college educated, all — underestimated Trump’s hold on the public.
With few exceptions, America’s left-leaning elites grasped at a single outlier poll in Iowa that showed a close race in the state to kindle belief in a coming Harris blowout that never materialized. Perhaps the “Americans” who put that identity first just don’t care to explain themselves to their betters anymore.
And that is the message that the college and graduate-school educated elites of America have delivered to those who believe in Trump and his agenda: We’re better than you. Whether it is in calling them a “basket of deplorables” or simply “garbage,” the American majority was listening.
And they’re not buying it. In this new unity of the “trash”-class, Donald Trump, for all his many flaws, has brought at least one glimmer of hope for a better America over the coming four years. I hope our next president seizes the opportunity.
This story was originally published November 6, 2024 at 12:38 PM with the headline "After sweeping presidential win, the hope hidden in Donald Trump’s massive victory | Opinion."
