Four days after the polls closed, it is now “official”: Joe Biden is president-elect. Given the massive number of mail-in ballots all over the country, the result could have been foreordained as “inevitable,” as it was mainly Democratic-leaning voters who were most eager to be heard “now” instead of just waiting around.
In the meantime, there were those like New York Times columnist Charles Blow who pointed to exit polling as proof of the “power of the white patriarchy” in causing a nail-biting election finish, which was much closer than expected by people (like myself) who convinced themselves that only racist, immigrant-hating, COVID-19 denying, assault rifle-rights fanatics were still in Donald Trump’s corner to their very last breath. Most of these people, we have been told, are white men, and they certainly do make up a significant number of that particular “demographic.’ The Times asserted that
Mr. Biden’s victory amounted to a repudiation of Mr. Trump by millions of voters exhausted with his divisive conduct and chaotic administration, and was delivered by an unlikely alliance of women, people of color, old and young voters and a sliver of disaffected Republicans.
But Blow and others in the media need to step back and take a look at what the exit polling is really telling us in comparison to 2016. Shouldn’t Blow, as a black male, have taken notice of the fact that Trump’s support among black men increased from 13 percent in 2016 to 18 percent in 2020? It didn’t surprise me, given all those black males I see on the bus who wanted to start a fist-fight because they didn’t like being told to wear the required face mask. Are we supposed to pat black women on the back for their votes for Biden? Well, anyone who voted for Biden deserves a pat, but also let’s not ignore the fact that black women’s support for Trump actually doubled, from 4 to 8 percent. How about white women? They backed Trump by 55 percent, up from 52 percent in 2016. Despite his demonizing of Hispanic immigrants, support for Trump among both Hispanic men and women was also up from 2016.
With numbers like that, Trump should have won reelection. There was just one little hiccup preventing that, and that was due to the only demographic where Biden not only improved over the 2016 numbers, but improved significantly: among white men. In 2016, only 31 percent of white male voters opted for the Democratic candidate; in 2020 that support went up to 40 percent, an almost 30 percent increase. The truth is that Biden won the election in spite of the softening of the alleged Democratic “coalition” of women, minorities and younger voters. Biden won because of a major shift in support by white men away from Trump that effectively erased Biden’s loss of support among the “coalition.”
There are those who will say that this is just “evidence” of the “patriarchy” in that more white men voted for Biden than Hillary Clinton, but then that brings up that can of worms of explaining why this time there was near parity in the white male and female vote for Trump; the truth is that white women were just as ripe for far-right radicalism that only needed to “blossom” once watered by a president who shared their insular, white grievance worldview. And we would also have to ask why a higher percentage of minorities voted for Trump than they did in 2016; I have no doubt that many of those supported Trump because of, and not in spite of, his anti-immigrant rhetoric.
Yes, we saw all those white male hillbilly, trailer-trash Trump supporters on our television screens, many toting guns in plain sight, and we see them with their tough-guy posturing daring people to tell them to wear a face-mask. But not all white males are that way, and this election proved that unlike some in the “coalition” who broke for Trump in higher numbers, many more white males saw the need to break from Trump. Those are the ones we should be thanking for Biden’s victory.
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