Taibbi pulls his head up from the media-is-unfair-to-trump trough and looks at the election results. I'm not sure how much we should be believing any polls at this point, or trying to plan a way forward based on them, but the fact that more people voted for the fascist this year than in 2016 definitely requires more study.
In an irony he is humorously ill-equipped to appreciate, Donald Trump by losing this week may have gained something for the Republican Party bureaucracy he took such pleasure in humiliating four years ago: a future.Defying years of muddle-headed media analyses, Trump underperformed with white men, but made gains with every other demographic. Some 26 percent of his votes came from nonwhite Americans, the highest percentage for a Republican since 1960. The politician who became instantly famous — and infamous — by saying of Mexican immigrants, “They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists,” performed stunningly well with Latino voters.
Exit polls, which can be unreliable, pegged his national support at 32%-35% of the Latino vote. More tellingly were results in certain counties. Starr County, Texas, the county with the highest percentage of Hispanic or Latino voters — above 95% — voted for Hillary Clinton by a 60-point margin in 2016, but gave Biden just a five point win in 2020.
Even more amazing was Trump’s performance among Black voters. The man whose 2016 message to “the blacks” was very nearly a parody of long-ago New York mayoral candidate Mario Procaccino’s pledge that “My heart is as black as yours” must have found a new way to connect. Trump doubled his support with Black women, moving from 4% in 2016 to 8%, while upping his support among Black men from 13% to 18%. Remember, this was after four years of near-constant denunciations of Trump as not just a racist, but the leader of a literal white supremacist movement:
Trump’s numbers with the LGBTQ community were a stunner also, jumping from 14% to 28%. In September, a dating app for queer men called Hornet ran a survey that showed 45% support for Trump among gay men. Ever since Trump jumped into politics, media observers have rushed to denounce any Trump-related data that conflicts with conventional wisdom, and the Hornet survey was no different. Out magazine quoted a communications professor from Cal Poly Pomona as saying, “To tout a Hornet poll as evidence of LGBTQ support for Trump is clickbaity, sloppy journalism.” Even the Hornet editor scoffed at his own poll, before it all turned out to be true in the election.
Trump even improved his standing among white women, 53% of whom were already pilloried in 2016 for voting for a man who bragged about how you “grab ‘em by the pussy, you can do anything.” Trump spent four years of being ripped for accusations of sexual misconduct, vile comments, and, let’s not forget also, infidelity! Trump as president was busted for wantonly cheating with multiple women, including porn stars who offered the press incredible, retch-inducing descriptions of the presidential tackle:
Yet even here, Trump gained, earning 55% of the white female vote. These results, juxtaposed against the contrasting media coverage, suggested the basic divide. Joe Biden earned 57% of the votes of college graduates, and cleaned up in the cities. Trump won 60% of voters in small towns and rural areas. In simple terms, Trump won with the sort of people who do not read The Washington Post or watch MSNBC, and disagreed with their myths.
Trump lost the election because of his handling of the pandemic, the top issue for 41% of voters, who chose Biden by a nearly 3-1 margin. But among people whose top concern was the economy — 28% of the electorate — Trump won an incredible 80% of the vote.
All of this points to a dramatic change. Trump may not have done much, politically, to deserve the support of Black, Latino, LGBTQ, and female voters. But the Democrats’ conspicuous refusal to address economic inequality and other class issues in a meaningful way created an opening.
Now, Trump is likely to leave the White House, but he created a coalition that some Republicans already understand would deliver massively in a non-pandemic situation. As Missouri Republican Josh Hawley put it the night of the election, “We are a working-class party now. That’s the future.”
Josh Hawley @HawleyMO
We are a working class party now. That’s the future
November 4th 2020
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What happens from here is a race to see which political party can make the obvious dumb move faster. Will the Democrats, emboldened by the false high of a Biden victory, blow off the clear need to revamp their economic messaging before 2022, when they risk losing both houses of congress?
Or will the Republican opposition give away the Trump coalition just as fast, by choosing Mitch McConnell’s donor list over Hawley’s insight?
Among conservatives, there’s been at least some limited evidence of a willingness to shift to the language of economic populism, whether from pols like Hawley or in the broadcasts of Tucker Carlson, anchor of the highest-rated cable news show in America. For all of Carlson’s other issues, when was the last time you saw a special on hedge fund destruction of rural America on CNN or MSNBC?
The recent story of Democrats and blue-leaning media, meanwhile, shows an opposite narrative. The party of the probable new president just spent years, and hundreds of millions of dollars, in an all-out effort to purge working-class politics from its own ranks, and discredit it as an idea going forward. Every indicator from the just-completed election season suggests the Democrats not only will lose the fight for working-class votes, but want to lose that battle.
During the primary season last year Democrats faced a choice. Do we stay the course followed by Hillary Clinton in 2016, or throw our weight behind the anti-corporate messages of Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren?
That the party couldn’t back Sanders was obvious, if only for self-preservation reasons. The Vermont Senator was a proud threat to the cushy sinecures of thousands of Beltway jobholders. During the campaign he went after boy-wonder candidate Pete Buttigieg — as close a facsimile to early-nineties Bill Clinton as the party could muster, an aw-shucks Middle-American who could talk a dog off a meat truck — by blasting Mayor Pete’s “billionaire” backers. The “CEOs of the large pharmaceutical industries, the insurance companies, and so forth” behind Buttigieg were, Sanders insisted, “precisely the problem with American politics.”
The Democratic Party as currently constructed, a Frankenstein’s monster of corporate cash and middle-class talking points, could not under any circumstances back a candidate who talked like this. That left Warren, whose candidacy was designed to bridge the gap.
Warren’s message was, at least superficially, based upon the idea that modern American capitalism was broken and inherently unfair, and Democrats needed to see this in order to survive as a political force. As a longtime bankruptcy law professor, she often spoke more authoritatively about the details of big business corruption than Sanders, who sometimes seemed disinterested in how things like mortgage-backed securities actually work. The Massachusetts Senator issued proposals like a Real Corporate Profits Tax (which taxed the profits companies reported to investors, eliminating loopholes) and an “Accountable Capitalism” act that would seek to make workers 40% of the board members at major corporations.
At the same time, Warren didn’t blast the party structure or stoke crowds with Burn-the-Rich rhetoric (nor did she walk onstage to Flogging Molly’s “Revolution,” as Sanders often did). She offered a lifeline to the current party leaders by pledging to keep them in the tent in the event of a win.
How did party leaders and pundits respond to these two differing approaches? By dumping prodigiously on both. Note that every other Democrat who surged in primary season — and nearly all of them did, for eight seconds or so — was treated to softball features and Christlike cover portraits:
Warren began surging in late summer of 2019 and finally pushed past Joe Biden in polls in October of that year. Her rise to a poll lead was met not with slavish profiles, but with multitudes of “Whither this anti-corporate bullshit?”-type features. The New York Times specialized. It’s not hard to look back and find Warren stories in the Times featuring pics of the candidate looking dolefully into the distance, as if in lawyerly contemplation of the pros and cons of Marxist revolution. In one Times piece in August of 2019, the paper noted how “Democrats worry that her uncompromising liberalism would alienate moderates in battleground states who are otherwise willing to oppose the president”:
At exactly the moment when Warren rose to the top of the polls, the Times ran a feature that unashamedly quoted the “establishment” in the headline: “Anxious Democratic Establishment Asks: ‘Is There Anyone Else?”
The paper cited the likes of David Axelrod and “Democrats who have spoken with Hillary Clinton” (!) in expressing “anxiety” about the field, which they believed lacked a “white knight” who could come in and beat Trump. They went on to propose a list of people who would calm such worries, including: billionaire Mike Bloomberg, Bain Capital private equity vampire and former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, and Eric Holder, the longtime bank lawyer who briefly pretended to be Attorney General during a period of record unpunished Wall Street lawlessness.
In so many other ways, Warren fit what Democratic Party conventional wisdom was looking for. She was a “first,” i.e. she would have been the first demographic something (in this case, the first female president), something the Party in the post-Clinton era cherished as a selling point. She had connections to the Midwest, sharing through her Oklahoma roots a lot of the same “humble beginnings” biographical features that made Bill Clinton a star. She had been a schoolteacher and, for a time, a single mother. The only biographical negatives she would have had to deal with as a general-election candidate were her association with Harvard University, and her estimated net worth of $12 million. Of course, these were precisely the details that would have reassured the “anxious Democratic establishment.”
Warren fell off in the face of the enormous criticism last fall. Her fatal move may have come when she was at the top of her surge, waffling on whether or not she supported Medicare for All. Mainstream press made tremendous hay of it:
In Iowa and New Hampshire, Warren’s health care turn confirmed suspicions that many voters had, that she was a stalking horse for party interests, a vehicle for marketing anti-corporate rhetoric who would abandon those positions at the first hint of criticism from above. It’s not an accident that Sanders rose as Warren was hurtling downward.
By January of 2020, Sanders became the leading fundraiser of the Democratic field, raising massive sums directly from voters. A logical, sober Democratic Party, one sincerely interested in representing the interests of ordinary people, would have at least secretly rejoiced at this proof-of-concept, which in retrospect remains one of the biggest political stories of this past presidential cycle.
A political party that was genuinely torn between trying to represent business leaders and the employee class would at minimum have used Sanders and his proven fundraising ability as leverage to get corporate donors to compromise on a few key issues — single-payer health care, for instance, or an end to a few key tax loopholes.
Instead, the Democrats and their buddies at establishment press outlets doubled and tripled down on demonization of Sanders, warning that a run by him not only would re-elect Trump but “jeopardize the Democratic majority in the House,” to say nothing of the Senate.
Sanders was a flawed candidate. He was not as natural talking to ordinary people as, say, Bill Clinton was. His strength with such voters was that they didn’t think he was a phony, which went a long way, but isn’t the same as unbridled enthusiasm. In populist terms, he was closer to Bill Kuntsler than William Jennings Bryan. As someone who followed Sanders on the trail a lot over the years, I can report: he does well when wonking out over union issues with rail workers, but would tense up like a man dosed with Vecuronium if ever pushed into a megachurch or a Wrestlemania event. I can see being a Clintonite strategist and just not believing it possible that Bernie could win a general election.
Nonetheless, the party’s unprecedented emergency effort to sink Bernie’s candidacy and elevate Biden before Super Tuesday, coupled with the kneecapping of Warren, took away the establishment’s most obvious play — backing Warren as the “capitalist to my bones” alternative to the Sanders “revolution.” They could have headed into 2020 equipped with a list of 50-point plans to counter any attempt at an anti-establishment message from Trump, and set themselves up as the working person’s party for a generation.
Either Sanders or Warren might have spent the pandemic putting pressure on Trump to offer at least a temporary Medicare-for-All type program, or stronger housing/anti-eviction policies. Instead they were stuck with Biden, who’d been nominated specifically to head off policies in that direction. Democratic strategists did what they always do: they relied on conventional formulas, assuming voters would be satisfied by the appearance of regular-guy-ness on Biden’s part.
There’s ample evidence the party didn’t even know what a “regular person” was. There were so many serious analyses wondering aloud what could be done to convince Homer Simpson not to vote Trump (in the actual cartoon he chuckles at a list of Trump “transgressions” like “Called Carly Fiorina ‘Horseface’”) that it started to become clear that Bart’s donut-loving Dad was the closest thing to a Trump voter most educated people could relate to, or knew even.
Biden was just “regular” enough to win in the short term, but there was long-term damage to be done with this kind of candidate. Scranton Joe frequently betrayed the Party’s poisonous real internal thinking, especially when doing things like announcing “You ain’t Black” if you support anyone but the Democrats, or saying that “anyone who can learn to throw coal in a furnace” should be able to “learn how to program”:
Forty years ago, when Bill Clinton and the DLC decided to accept gobs of corporate cash and rave about shedding the “politics of the past” in favor of a “pro-growth” mindset, the Democrats began to redefine themselves as the party of the urban rich. The move immediately attracted the Gordon Gekkos of the world, i.e. plutocrats with pretensions to social liberalism, like Goldman, Sachs chief Bob Rubin. It worked. By 2020, nearly all of the bank CEOs would be in the blue tent, checkbooks open.
The Democrat calculation was that in gaining such donor largesse, it could survive losing some working-class support, especially since they would never lose a key piece of the actual working class in poor Black and Latino voters. They assumed that a combination of always-crappy bipartisan-approved economic policies, and the Republicans’ dependably vicious messaging on race and immigration, would guarantee those votes would stay in pocket forever.
The calculation held for decades, until now.
The 2020 election showed that the Democrats’ imperious smart-set arrogance, open belief in the idea that minorities owe them their votes, and basically undisguised hostility toward the ordinary small-town person who hasn’t “learned to code,” finally began competing with Republican tone-deafness on race as a negative factor to be weighed by working class voters, of all races.
Unless they stop lying to themselves about this, and embrace a politics that pays more than lip service to the working person, they will become what the Republicans used to be: an arm of the patrician rich, sneering at the unwashed majority and crossing fingers every election season. It’s not that Trump deserved those votes more. But he at least asked for them, and that was almost enough.