I spent election night watching the coverage on PBS and it was an interesting night of punditry with some occasionally very honest moments. Judy Woodruff (host), kept coming back to a question over and over again through the night that began to sound like a hostage negotiation. “But what do these people want? I mean, what exactly did Trump promise to them that would make them decide that they’ll take their chances with him regardless of the negatives?” She said something like this over and over again and one talking head after another took swings at the question and came up empty again and again. None of the economic arguments they brought up made any sense. Some of them even flat out said they didn’t know and we’re going to learn a lot in the coming weeks when we look through the data with hindsight as a benefit.
The early post-mortem was that Trump only did 1% better than Romney with White voters. That sounds like an electoral disaster for Republicans, but the reason why it wasn’t was because Hillary did markedly worse with Black and Brown voters. I think that’s the story of this election. Hillary couldn’t pull together Obama’s minority coalition even with all of the offensive things that Trump said to Latinos and African Americans and everyone who’s not Caucasian.
Perhaps Trump’s embrace of White Supremacy was really a gamble that he could turn this election into the third election in a row about race. Who knows if he’s really as racist as he made himself out to be. Look, I’d bet money that Trump has strongly racist tendencies, but I wouldn’t go as far as to say that he’s really as racist as he portrayed himself. Quite possibly, he “went there” because he believed that White America was ripe for the picking after 8 years of feeling like the country was changing too fast for them and that he could get away with it because Hillary Clinton’s lack of melanin would make her less able to connect with minority voters. He could directly connect emotionally with White angst whereas Hillary could only offer bland policy proposals to minorities.
If indeed it was about race all along, Bernie Sanders would have done no better.
I think it begs asking why minorities wouldn’t turn out in record numbers of support the opponent of the man who’s demonizing them. Well, I happen to be a POC myself and the best answer I can come up with is that a lot of us deal with racism all the time and we’ve become desensitized to the point that we can point to a truly deplorable man like Trump, shrug our shoulders, and ignore him. Maybe that’s what the Trump campaign expected to happen in the end.