1 week Ago By Firstpost
The magnitude of Donald Trump’s victory will take time to sink in. It emerged on Wednesday that Republicans have retained control of the House, albeit with a thin majority. This means Republicans have the White House, the Senate and the House, sealing their hold over a trifecta of the elected branches of the government and handing president-elect Trump an unprecedented opportunity to drive through his agenda with little curbs on power.
This prospect alone should scare the Democrats out of their wits. But they have plenty more reasons to worry. Kamala Harris, according to Democrats and their aligned media outlets such as MSNBC, ran a “flawless campaign”, securing dime a dozen celebrity endorsements.
One anchor, her face beaming, gushed that Queen Latifah (American rapper) who “never endorses anyone had made an exception for Harris.” When the results came through, the shell-shocked anchor was seen blaming the voters. Who could blame the MSNBC anchor? It has been a devastating few days for Democrats, Harris and her supporters.
They are yet to fully grasp the depth and scale of the public rejection handed out to the Democratic presidential candidate. Harris had a humongous war chest, a well-oiled electoral machinery, the backing of a volley of billionaires and the support of a fanatical liberal media that had taken a clear side in the elections. The stunning repudiation that came her way should give the Democrats pause.
People are not buying whatever they are selling. And this is true across the class, race and gender divide. Trump has gained among Black as well as Hispanic Americans – especially blue-collar Latinos and Black men who have long been loyal Democratic voters.
Among Hispanics, a core voting segment for Democrats, this is particularly true of the seven so-called ‘swing states’ that were swept by Trump. Exit poll figures show while Hillary Clinton won Hispanic voters by a margin of 38 percentage points in 2016, by 2020 Joe Biden’s margin had shrunk to 33 points, and according to a CNN exit poll quoted by The Economist, Harris’s margin of victory among Hispanic voters is just eight percentage points—a “remarkable collapse.” Other exit polls indicate a similar trend of not just white working-class voters, but even significant portion of non-white population bumping up the numbers for Trump.
Edison Research survey indicated a 14-percentage-point swing in Trump’s share of Hispanic voters, up from 32% in 2020 when Trump lost to Biden to 46% this year, presumably due to Trump’s focus on restoring manufacturing jobs and proposing a wide range of tax relief. Hispanic men’s swing in favour of Trump resulted in the highest share for a Republican presidential candidate in exit polls going back to the 1970s, according to the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. Reuters reported that Trump won 55% of Hispanic men, 19 points more than the 36% share he won four years earlier, while he garnered support from 38% of Hispanic women, up eight points from 2020.
This is no less a remarkable development. The Democrats ran on the twin planks of abortion rights and ‘saving the Constitution from Trump’. There was huge hoopla and hype around Harris’s appeal among young, white, educated women – a demography that was supposed to see Harris through in a tough electoral battle.
It turns out that not only did Trump improve his vote share among men, women too voted for him in larger numbers than in 2020. NBC News exit poll notes that “Trump picked up a larger proportion of voters (under 30) than any Republican presidential candidate since 2008, improving with both young men and young women. In 2020, Biden beat Trump by 11 percentage points among young men; this year, Trump beat Harris by two points.
Among young women, Biden’s 35-point lead over Trump in 2020 shrunk to a 24-point lead for Harris.” It is AP VoteCast’s data that may tip Democrats into depression. Among white women, a group actively targeted by the Harris campaign, Trump registered a 53% to 46% win over Harris, with that group making up the largest overall voting bloc at 40%.
This erosion was also visible among Blacks, a community that has stayed historically committed to the Democratic Party. The biggest reason, say reports and surveys, is Democrats’ failure to match words with actions and lack of credibility. As New York Times points out, “working-class Black men.
.. said they doubted their circumstances would fundamentally change, regardless of who won.
The dissatisfaction — evident in urban centers in swing states, like Milwaukee and Philadelphia, as well as remote reaches in the Mississippi Delta — was potent enough to depress turnout in some Democratic strongholds and even flip some majority-Black counties to Trump.” AP VoteCast, that claims to have surveyed more than 120,000 voters across the United States, found that “Trump gained a larger share of Black and Latino voters than he did in 2020..
. and most notably among men under age 45”, and around “3 in 10 Black men under age 45 went for Trump, roughly double the share he got in 2020”. The extent of Democrats’ failure is so comprehensive that it is difficult, and may even be misleading to assign this to a single cause.
If Harris did poorly in cities, suburbs, counties and college towns, and among a range of demographics, then it must be a multi-pronged failure. Data also points to that reality. According to an assessment by Blueprint , that surveyed 3,262 national and swing state 2024 voters from November 6 to November 7 and weighted to education, age, gender, race, and 2020/2024 election results, voters ditched Harris primarily for three reasons: inflation was too high (+24); too many immigrants crossed the border (+23); and that Harris was too focused on cultural issues such as transgender rights rather than helping the middle class (+17).
Among this list, one should also add the persecution of Trump by the Biden administration through a relentless lawfare campaign, the frivolity and vindictiveness of which helped generate a massive sympathy wave for Trump – propelling his re-election bid. By the end of December 2022, a beaten down Trump looked down and out. The candidates he promoted during midterm elections had lost and Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor, was beating him 52% to 38% among likely GOP primary voters as a potential 2024 presidential nominee, according to a Wall Street Journal poll.
From that point, Trump’s stunning turnaround owes no small measure to the witch-hunt launched by the Democrats by weaponizing the legal system to get at their enemy. Trump capitalised on the lawfare by crafting a narrative of relentless persecution that forced his Republican colleagues to back him up, and the fact that a prospective presidential candidate was made to stand in trial for trivial cases pursued by partisan prosecutors and egged on by the Democrats, ultimately contributed to the restoration of his fortunes. It also exposed the Democrats as hypocrites and weakened their case chief case against Trump – that he is a danger to the rule of law – when the Democrats themselves were found to be weaponizing the legal procedures.
On this issue, Fareed Zakaria writes in Washington Post, “The indictments confirmed to his base what it had always believed — that overeducated urban liberals were hypocrites, happy to bend rules and norms when it suited their purposes...
Lawfare turned Trump from a loser into a victim, and as his list of indictments grew, his campaign contributions increased and his poll numbers solidified.” Similarly on immigration, the Democrats simply came across as dishonest and tried to repair the damage when it was too late. In the process, Harris might even be guilty of overcorrection that pushed some Hispanic voters away.
Simply put, illegal immigration became a lightning rod for Biden administration because Democrats misread the shifting mood of Americans over a porous border and a concomitant rise in crime amid a growing clamour for deportation of undocumented immigrants. Data suggests that illegal immigration and abuse of the asylum system by noncitizens in America brought increased crime, and almost two-thirds of federal arrests involved undocumented aliens. According to a June 2023 report by The Heritage Foundation, a Conservative think tank, “since Biden took office, over 6.
2 million illegal aliens have been encountered at the nation’s borders, and over 2 million of them have been released into the nation’s interior. A considerable number of them have engaged in criminal activities once they settled. “In 2023 alone, Border Patrol agents have encountered thousands of illegal aliens with prior criminal convictions, including assault, rape, and murder.
The true extent of crimes committed by illegal aliens remains unknown because there are also over 1.5 million unaccounted for ‘gotaways’ since Biden’s term began.” Data from Pew Research data shows that “foreign-born population (in the US) reached a record 47.
8 million in 2023, an increase of 1.6 million from the previous year. This is the largest annual increase in more than 20 years, since 2000,” adding that “immigrants today account for 14.
3% of the American population, a roughly threefold increase from 4.7% in 1970. The immigrant share of the population today is the highest since 1910.
” These figures matter. Americans were so fed up with the spate of illegal immigration – that also has an adverse effect on housing market – that an April 2024 poll by Axios showed that “half of Americans — including 42% of Democrats — indicated that they’d support mass deportations of undocumented immigrants.” Ironically, the party that stresses on ‘progressive values’ and ‘human rights’ sees no moral hazard in letting in millions of undocumented immigrants for a flood of cheap labour and resultant income inequality.
For voters who agreed with Trump’s tougher stance on border and welcomed his promise of mass deportation due to everyday concerns over schooling, housing and healthcare, the Democrats either spoke with a forked tongue or asked people not to act as “bigots”. Inflation also played a big part in the souring of mood for voters. Among the working class, especially, despite a rise in wages and a booming economy, economic concerns played a big part in their voting decision and a feeling (also captured by surveys) that Democrats in their pursuit of elite agendas have alienated themselves from working class concerns.
Reporter Jack Herrera, who extensively covered Latino-majority places in America during election coverage, wrote in Politico that many Hispanics “stopped believing that the party actually cared about working people like them” and in working-class neighbourhoods like meatpacking industry town Denison near Nebraska border, some Latino voters who had earlier voted Democrat, said, “Under Biden, there were days I couldn’t afford to fill up my truck with gas; the price of eggs doubled; my rent went up. Entonces, Biden is fired. It’s time for change.
” Data backs this up. Financial Times points out that “voters who care most about the economy and immigration largely voted for Trump” and “all income groups feel worse off than they did when Biden started his term, although it is more stark for the bottom and middle thirds of earners.” While Harris inherited a tough problem for which there was no immediate solution, she also failed to distance herself adequately from Biden’s perceived ‘mismanagement’ of the economy.
That can’t be said about the most significant reason behind the drubbing received by Democrats, however. What I have discussed so far have doubtless contributed to Trump’s victory, but what has triggered disillusionment and angry backlash from voters, and even radicalised some in favour of the Republicans is the culture war focused on transgender activism. For most Americans, this elite hobby horse of donor-funded institutions and academic fetish of Ivory Tower residents served to only make Democratic politics a toxic concoction of progressive orthodoxy, thought policing and endanger the future of the next generation.
The polarizing politics of identity did nothing to endear different communities towards the Democrats. Instead, an obsessive focus on race, and reducing people to their ethnicity or gender identity estranged voters who found the diktats suffocating, excessive and superfluous to their daily existence. When it emerged that Harris in 2019 had supported far-Left causes such as taxpayer-funded gender transition surgeries for detained undocumented immigrants and federal prisoners, the Trump campaign went to town with one of its most impactful ad campaigns: Kamala is for they/them; President Trump is for you.
Scrolling through the YouTube link for the commercial you may see the first comment from viewer who wrote, “I’m a 48 year old black man from Texas who’s never voted. I did this time. For Trump.
” One of these ads, hammering Harris on her ‘progressive’ positions on far-Left issues, reportedly “shifted the race 2.7 percentage points in Trump’s favour after viewers watched it.” But it wouldn’t have, had it not touched a chord with the general public.
The Democrats never figured out that gaslighting, obfuscation and progressive orthodoxy on identity politics that labels ordinary people as ‘right-wing bigots’ if they don’t subscribe to the new religion of trans activism may end up triggering revulsion for the Left. Whereas the Democrats wanted to focus their message on abortion access and attacks on Constitution, it ended up as a referendum on immigration, crime and culture war. In each of these issues, Trump fashioned himself as the ‘change candidate’ and forced Harris on the defensive.
The vice-president, clearly uncomfortable with the line of attack, tried to avoid the debate and stay silent, cementing the notion that Democrats have become the flag-bearers of uber elite occupied with esoteric fixations who neither care nor understand working-class problems. As Sam Harris said in his recent podcast, “We’ve got an epidemic of teenage girls wanting double mastectomies—and some are actually getting them, based on ideas being spread on TikTok—and any parent who resists this trend gets demonized and, under certain conditions, could lose custody of their kids? Congratulations, Democrats. You have found the most annoying thing in the fucking galaxy and hung it around your necks.
” Transgender activism remained a wedge issue for voters even if they were not personally affected by it. As JK Rowling said, “When you throw open the doors of bathrooms and changing rooms to any man who believes or feels he’s a woman – and, as I’ve said, gender confirmation certificates may now be granted without any need for surgery or hormones – then you open the door to any and all men who wish to come inside.” The Biden administration’s advocacy for lowering age limits for gender surgeries for minors, Democrats’ weird vocabulary of using terms such as ‘birthing person’, ‘chest feeder’, ‘people with vulva’ or refusal to clarify who is a ‘woman’ – as Ketanji Brown Jackson, Biden’s nominee for Supreme Court did in January 2022, nullified the existence of women as a political and biological being.
Thes fetishes portrayed the party and its leaders as a bunch of activists who must always pass the ‘progressive purity test’..
