I remember the day after former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke lost the Louisiana governor’s race in 1991, Romania-born poet and NPR commentator Andrei Codrescu, a professor of English at LSU, observed that despite Duke’s defeat he still felt anger and disillusionment. Codrescu admitted that when he looked around him, he could only wonder in frustration at which of those 3 out of every 5 white people he walked by actually voted for this despicable excuse for a human being, as the exit polls reported.
PBS released a documentary not long afterward called Backlash: Race and the American Dream, which investigated why someone like Duke would “appeal” to a majority of white voters. It can be found here 1 , dissecting Duke's “platform,” which inflamed the “passion” of white voters’ “anger” at black crime, welfare, and affirmative action—all under the invisible umbrella of white supremacy and privilege.
I’m sure that some people, like myself, somehow believed that after Trump’s Nazi Party rally in Madison Square Garden, at least some Trump voters would have second thoughts that would not be reflected in the final polls. But it was too little, too late for “celebrities” and Geraldo Rivera to change their minds at the last minute and urge their social media followers to vote for Kamala Harris, especially those who already cast a vote for Trump in early voting. The final tally shows Harris losing all seven swing states (looks like that Brazil-based pollster was “right” after all), and it also appears that Harris will be only the second Democrat to lose the popular vote since 1988.
It was simply astonishing to me that many people simply believed Trump’s lies about how “bad” the economy is compared to when he was previously in office. Even when it was double-digits, inflation only kept pace with rising income after the pandemic, and was a function of low quantities of consumer goods with workers at home and little foot traffic in stores before people suddenly decided they wanted to buy things.
Otherwise, the economy was in far better shape than economists had predicted. So that was a fake issue played-up by Trump, and louder the lie, the more gullible people actually “saw” it. “Little” lies are ignored or forgotten; it is the “big” lies that “stick,” because people then think there must be something “there.”
We are told that 8 percent of all voters, those called “double-haters” because they “hate” both candidates, voted for Trump, compared to 3 percent in 2020. The question is why did they “hate” Harris? She was not a convicted felon in the hush money case, a convicted financial fraudster, convicted of lying in a civil rape case, she wasn’t giving secrets to the Russians or betraying the identity of an informant in the Kremlin, she didn’t leave Kim Jong Un waiting at the alter and make him even more insane than he already was, she wasn’t keeping a stash of classified documents in the bathroom for barter to our enemies, she didn’t disrespect our international allies and give them concern if the U.S. still wanted to be the leader of the free world or just a friend of dictators, she didn’t pass a tax cut for the rich that was paid for by working people, and she didn’t cause that insurrection on January 6.
In fact, why don't we "speculate" further and come to the conclusion that Trump's principle motivation for running for president again was not to "save" the country, but to "save" himself from the consequences of his crimes, since as president, the Supreme Court has given him virtual immunity. If he was any other citizen, he would be sentenced to prison time after 34 felony convictions to cook the books and direct his underlings to conceal fraud as in the hush money case; instead, he will "pardon" himself.
In fact, you don’t hear any talk from “radical leftists” erupting in violence, which was just another lie devoid of evidence from Trump, when it was reported that it was his supporters who were preparing for violence if he lost. There were a dozen bomb threats in Pennsylvania polling places on Tuesday. Did those attempts at voter intimidation and suppression matter, in the end? Probably not, but why have such threats in Democrat-leaning districts if not to “convince” many it was “unsafe” for them to vote?
Let’s look at a couple of NBC exit polls and see if they mean anything:
The first is from the 2020 presidential election, the second one from this year. What do they tell us? They tell us that white voters, male or female, didn’t vote much differently in either 2020 or 2024. Although a slightly higher percentage of white women voted for Harris, a majority still voted for Trump; the fact that 15 percent more white women voted than in 2020 (37 from 32 percent of total votes) meant that the total number votes they cast for Trump was likely the same.
Overall, non-white voters accounted for a lower-percentage of the total vote, from 33 percent in 2020 to 29 percent in 2024. The black vote was slightly depressed, and the percentage of black male and female votes for Trump was actually little differentiated; in 2020, 19 percent of black males voted for Trump, statistically insignificant from the 20 percent in 2024.
But it was the Latino and “other races" that apparently made the difference. For “other races," support for the Democratic candidate fell from a positive 20 percent gap to just 5 percent, while for both Latino males and females, support for the Democratic candidate fell significantly, with Latino female voters apparently less motivated to vote by one-quarter over 2020’s numbers.
I think that the problem with Latino voters was two-fold. Harris did not really differentiate herself from Trump in regard to border policy, immigration or asylum policy, so there was no real “choice” there other than whether or not you liked Trump’s dehumanizing and demonizing rhetoric. The failure to humanize migrants and tell their stories as I tried to do in my last three posts in regard to the election showed that neither party really “knew” this segment of the electorate.
But I also blame Latino voters themselves, especially those of Mexican heritage who should know better the dangers and difficulties people face today in a violent society controlled by cartels, where whole communities were wiped-out for daring to oppose cartel gangs. Surely they knew friends or family effected by this violence, and knew how nearly impossible each successive immigration “reform” law made it to immigrate legally into this country, and for plainly racist and xenophobic reasons.
Voting “Republican” doesn’t make them immune from racism, no matter how “white” you think you are, because white nationalists only see someone who is “probably” illegal. In Texas, Ken Paxton’s actions to deter Latino votes shows that white Texas fears the time that Latinos actually realize that they have the power to say enough is enough, and that they will speak for themselves, and not allow racist whites who want them to “disappear” to do it “for” them—if, of course, Democrats are willing to allow them to.
So what do these numbers “really” tell us? Or better yet, what does it say about “us”? As in 2016, as much as people disliked Hillary Clinton and the media acting like she was “entitled” to the presidency, few people—even most Republicans—believed that a clown show with as much “baggage” as Trump could possibly be acceptable as the “leader” of the free world. And yet against all probability he won, and he proved that he himself didn’t expect to win because all he brought to the “table” were the scraps of his racist beliefs and disgust with “rules” and “laws” that he spent a lifetime having his stooges commit crimes to evade.
Everyone with any credibility who worked with Trump were as one that he was incompetent and dangerous, at least in foreign affairs and the military. Like Hitler, Trump had little patience for policy or paperwork (let alone reading it), but he allowed his henchpersons free reign to pursue their own destructive, racist agendas if it “pleased” him. He allowed the Federalist Society to handpick the most extreme-right judges to the federal benches without regard to their qualifications or respect for the law, only abiding by their own “cultural” prejudices without regard to the rights of others to hold and practice contrary beliefs.
Trump is now telling us that “God” chose to “save” him in order to “save” the country. Can there be no better reason to disprove that there is a “god” in this universe? I still don’t understand what it is that Trump is trying to save us from. Again and again, he can’t think of anything himself, but himself and his own vindictive, petty grievances which apparently many millions of people share. The truth doesn't matter, and he has told us before that ignorant, ill-informed people will believe any of his lies and made-up “facts,” the bigger the “better”:
Why the media or the Harris campaign didn't find this clip and repeated it over and over again in campaign ads I don’t know, but in retrospect it would have certainly been more effective than just calling him a fascist over and over again, and actually showed voters how fascists use propaganda. Forcing voters to come face-to-face what he actually thought of “common people” and used them for his own benefit may have worked wonders.
In the end, people need to self-examine. I mean why was it that in two elections, voters seem to prefer a boorish, disrespectful liar over a female candidate more qualified for office and experienced in public service than he was (well, in Clinton’s case, not by that much, admittedly). As much as we might criticize the Latino vote, at least both male and females voters showed a significant preference to Harris over their white counterparts. Is it white people who are not “ready” for a female president?
And while we are at it, what are people thinking voting for a Republican-controlled Senate, giving Trump the power to stack the federal judiciary with more far-right judges, and a House with another Republican majority after it spent the past two years wasting tax payer money on pointless "investigations." It is just so, well, stupid.
As much as people think Latin culture is “macho,” Mexico at least beat the U.S. to the punch and elected its first female president, and given how much Trump feels contempt for any female world leader who dares to speak to him as if they are “equals,” we can surmise that a majority of voters in this country feel the same way. I mean, why not if the fact of Trump's incomprehensible election bears it out?
Perhaps some voters do not believe that Harris “earned” the presumptive nomination, and there should have been some mini-primary, followed by a vote at the Democratic convention after a debate had taken place for delegates to decide who they preferred. It is interesting to note that polls had shown that voters preferred “any” Democratic candidate over Trump other than Biden—and apparently Harris as well.
Harris probably should not have made abortion “the issue” early on, because as it turned out, it didn’t help her win. She probably should have pivoted from that earlier and made an effort to “speak” to male voters—but more especially to the issues of non-white voters, male or female, because as seen in the exit polls, that is where she lost the election; aping the far-right line on the “border crisis” and immigration did not help her with white voters, and merely underlined the fact that she didn’t understand what would motivate minorities, especially Latinos, to vote for her.
In the end, what we might see as a result of all of this is that it won’t be just the people that Trump voters inhumanly want to hurt that will be so, but in the inevitable economic downward spiral that economists had predicted but didn’t happen during the Biden administration, and will engulf Trump voters as well. It will because they didn’t listen to the experts who told them that Trump’s “promises” on immigration, tariffs and taxes will have a disastrous effect on the economy if implemented.
In fact, it appeared that people were desperately searching for reasons not to vote for Harris, choosing to ignore Trump's unfitness and countless negatives that were apparent every time he opened his mouth.
What is really unfortunate about all of this is that Trump voters, who haven't see any substantive difference in their lives from one administration to the next, will when Trump actually carries out the radical "plans" he and people with fascist inclinations like Stephen "America for (white) Americans" Miller and Elon Musk have for the country. And when that happens, it will be just too bad for the rest of us that it won't just be deserving Trump voters who gets sucked into the maelstrom of his vindictiveness and lies, but those who tried to stop the destruction of democracy itself.
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