Race and the 2020 presidential election: Media focuses on the trees missing the forest

“There’s more that unites than divides us” is the mantra of most of the media and many well-intentioned people. It is also untrue, a comforting fantasy, a formula for deluding ourselves that a return to civility is all we need, not fundamental change.

This election has demonstrated many things but nothing more starkly than the racial divide in U.S. politics. While much of the media has concentrated in man bites dog stories—black men who voted for Trump, Latinos in South Florida and the Rio Grande Valley who went for Trump—the big picture is ignored or missed, probably because it is taken as a given, the way things are, as immutable as the law of gravity. There is nothing to see here seems to be the general attitude.

There is a lot to see, only you need to look. On November 7, the website VOX published a pathbreaking piece that belies the happy talk about American unity. Here are some of the main points:

– “White people, yet again, showed up for Donald Trump.”

• Fully “57 percent” of whites “voted to reelect the president while 42 percent voted for Democratic challenger Joe Biden, according to Edison Research’s exit polls of 15,590 voters.”
• White support for Trump is so robust that he won a higher percentage of the Caucasian vote in 2020 than in 2016, despite the failures and outrages of this administration, such as caging children, separating families, and trying to wrest health insurance from millions of people amid an out-of-control pandemic.
• In 2016, “white voters propelled Trump to the presidency, with 54 percent voting for him and 39 percent voting for Hillary Clinton, according to a…Pew Research Center study.” After four years of failed, cruel, and evil policies, Trump increased his share of the white vote by 3 percent. This is a much bigger story than a relative handful of Black men and some right-wing Latinos going for Trump.
• The gender gap was a huge story in the runup to the election. Here is the real story. “White women…backed Trump in similar or even greater numbers this election than they did in 2016 — 55 percent of white female voters cast their ballots for Trump, according to Edison Research exit polls, while 43 percent voted for Biden.” The story is not the gender gap. The story is that race easily trumped gender on voting behavior.
• There has been a lot of loose and misleading talk about the “failure of the Biden campaign” to perform with minority voters. The VOX story focused on the forest: “87 percent of Black voters, 66 percent of Latinx voters, and 63 percent of Asian American voters — chose Biden.” Biden could have hoped for better, but Trump and any Republican would die for these numbers.
• Different theories have been floated to explain white support for Donald Trump. Working class economic distress has been cited as an important factor. That plays a role, undoubtedly. But research shows that Trump supporters are better off economically than the average American. White grievance over declining dominance over minorities is more important to the white vote for Trump than economic decline. Even a very deep recession did not dissuade white voters from going for Trump.
• Cutting through all the comforting BS, VOX gets to the heart of the matter: “Ultimately, many white voters are simply attached to what Trump represents. These voters are very much about the idea that the status quo isn’t a problem and that we should make America great again back when we didn’t have to worry about PC culture. Because when you’re in power, why would you give it up?”
• Denial of reality is a hallmark of Trump and his administration. But while the mainstream corporate media does not go to the extreme of denying the results of an election, it engages in denial too. Specifically, it engages in the denial of the enduring power of race in American politics, a force that can transcend gender, age, and other social cleavages.
• Among young people, for instance, “white youth were the likeliest to support Trump, with 43 percent of white voters between ages 18 and 29 voting for Trump” compared to “just 9 percent of young Black voters, 13 percent of young Asian voters, and 21 percent of young Latino voters who backed Trump.”
• Unlike a lot of the blather in the mainstream media about fluctuations in minority support for the Democrats, VOX reaches a clear and resounding conclusion:

“White people have been privileged to evade being at the center of the identity politics debate because America normalizes whiteness. While other voters are solely discussed according to their broad-strokes racial groups, white people are free to deflect and scapegoat these other groups, especially in times of fear and uncertainty. Blatantly ignoring how white people vote proves the power structure is not willing to hold a mirror up to itself.

“Biden has defeated Trump, and while there are many factors that have contributed to that victory, one of them is the high voter turnout among Black and Latinx voters. Equally important, though, is underscoring the fact that the majority of white American voters had little to do with it.”

The big story about race and the vote in America can be summarized succinctly, as VOX has:

• “White people once again largely backed a president who champions a brand of nationalism that is steeped in racism and xenophobia.”
• “There has been no widespread rejection of Trump or white supremacy among white Trump supporters or even former supporters.”

This is reality. Biden should face it. The Republican wolves are not going to lay down peacefully with the Democrats. And if the Democrats act like sheep, they will be slain. Obama’s noble but misguided belief that he could work with the GOP cannot be repeated. Republican denial of the Biden victory and obstruction of the transition reinforces that lesson. Biden and Harris can deal with the Republicans in the spirit of Hubert Humphrey, the happy warrior. But war it must be. The Republicans have shown that competing for power in a fair and democratic way is not what they are about, nor recognizing reality and acknowledging it. Meeting them half-way is not an option. They play dirty 100 percent of the time. We should avoid playing dirty. But they will not. The Republican Party has become a criminal organization, responsible for the horrendous COVID deaths of  hundreds of thousands through its blind support for Trump. We should beat them, not meet with them to break bread. And sometimes actions that are morally dubious in normal circumstances are acceptable in abnormal ones. The police can lie to suspects to secure evidence. There is no duty to play fair or tell the truth when dealing with criminals.

We are engaged in a long struggle against what the Columbia sociologist C.Wright Mills called “the politics of the rear guard”, and just about every Republican political leader, from the half decent ones like Jeb Bush, who congratulated Biden but initiated the trend toward defunding public goods in Florida by abolishing the intangibles tax, to the most cynical ones like Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, who are part of a reactionary counterrevolution against economic and racial equality and fairness. We must defeat them, stop them from turning the clock back to a time when America was great for the Donald Trumps of this world but not for us.