The Democrats, mainstream news media and other political watchers are continuing with their postmortems of the 2024 election. Many remain confused by how the country arrived at this disastrous moment for its democracy and civil society. In a series of essays here at Salon, I have also been examining the wreckage of the 2024 election, Donald Trump’s victory and Kamala Harris’ defeat. Of course, there are the macro level explanations about the economy and inflation, racism and sexism, extreme wealth and income inequality, public opinion polls and the Democrats' and news media’s failures to interpret them properly, campaign strategy and messaging as well as a general feeling that the country is heading in the wrong direction and that the elites have failed. Of particular note, the 2024 election is part of a global move towards right-wing authoritarian populism and neofascism.
But in the month or so since the election, I have been thinking a great deal about what I learned from listening to everyday people and their thoughts about the election, politics and American society more broadly. Unfortunately, too many members of the news media and political class do not practice such close listening. They are stuck in their own echo chambers, where they impose their own meaning(s) and interpretations onto the mass public and everyday people instead of closely listening to what the American people are actually saying and experiencing. As The Independent observes in a recent story about the reckoning that the mainstream news media is facing after their failures in the 2024 election: “We were so Harris propaganda that when she lost, viewers were shocked,” one anonymous on-air pundit told the outlet. “It turned into one giant circle j**k and echo chamber. If MSNBC wants to be of service to its viewers, they can’t keep them in fantasy land.”
I am also informed by my conversations with sociologist Arlie Hochschild and her rigorous practice of what she describes as finding “the deeper story”:
Your working-class background gives you access to an important mode of communication — one that many if not most journalists and reporters do not yet have. One of the reasons I wrote “Stolen Pride” is to help us all become bilingual by understanding the language and logic of Trump and his appeal. You can take what Donald Trump says literally, and by doing so miss what is being said emotively. In red states, and Appalachia in particular, that I write about in "Stolen Pride," there is a story of struggle, loss, poverty and addiction….
To answer that question, we have to look at politics as felt, and sometimes the best way to convey feeling is through a deep story. So, if you’re a Trump voter, here’s your deep story: You’re waiting in a long line leading up to the American Dream. The line is not moving. You're not looking at the long line of people behind you, instead you are just looking ahead, and you see you're not moving. Then you see people you perceive as “line cutters": women, Black and brown people, immigrants, refugees, and well-paid public servants. You notice a bad bully in line who is helping these undeserving line-cutters. But — hey — there is the good bully, who is going to help people like you. Yes, he has flaws, but he is still your bully: Donald Trump.
People on the left are aghast and decry the bully and yell about how he or she is a bad person. The Trump voters and other people on the right set all that aside because Trump is a charismatic leader defending them, their “good bully.” That’s how one of many explained things to me, and others agreed with him.
So here are some of the things I heard and learned from my fellow Black Americans, most of whom appeared to be working class if not working poor, in the neighborhood where I live and in other parts of Chicago.
While walking past groups of migrants begging with their children for money and food — or using their smartphones to translate Spanish into English as they aggressively asked for help — I heard, sometimes quite loudly, Black people telling them to, “Go back to where they came from. We don’t have anything for you. We are struggling too. Get your kids out of here! Kids shouldn’t be used for begging!” In one of the most telling moments, I heard several Black men, who appeared to be working poor if not unhoused, say that the city doesn’t have any help for our own poor and homeless people, but they got money for the “illegal aliens.” The other Black people nearby nodded in affirmation.
Democrats need to do a much better job of listening to everyday people, meeting them where they are and taking their concerns and agency seriously.
During one hot summer afternoon, I heard a spirited conversation about how “lots of the Hispanics are racist against Black Americans and think they are better than us. They are taking our jobs, so why should we help them? They need to leave and go back home. This is our country!”
I also heard the complaints and anger, on more than several occasions, that the migrants got “free money, cars and nice apartments from the government" and are “living better than us.” I also witnessed many more acts of kindness and generosity from Black folks towards the migrants and other “illegal aliens.” But with those repeated acts of kindness and generosity, I sensed a growing frustration and resentment, building up over time, in response to a human problem caused by a broken immigration system and “border crisis.” After you see the same group of able-bodied young people who are asking for food and money every day, in the same location, when you are having a difficult time yourself, there are limits to one’s generosity. It can grind even the most empathetic person down. Contrary to how too many in the news media and political class think about politics and society, people do not live or experience “the economy” and their sense of financial and social precarity in the aggregate through statistics. These are personal, immediate and lived experiences.
Social scientists and other researchers have consistently found that nativism, xenophobia, racism, social dominance behavior and concerns about “cultural change” are driving factors behind support for Trumpism and other forms of illiberalism and populist authoritarianism. To wit. In an article at ABC News political scientist Michael Tesler explains how concerns and anger about migrants and refugees, helped to drive African-American and Hispanic voters to Donald Trump and the MAGA movement:
President-elect Donald Trump's relatively strong showing among voters of color has been one of the most striking takeaways from the 2024 election. According to data from AP VoteCast, the Associated Press's next-generation spin on the traditional exit poll, Trump's share of the Black and Latino vote increased by 8 points each between 2020 and 2024.
Analysts have proposed several different explanations for those shifts, including sexism within communities of color, pessimistic views of the economy and inflation, disinformation, social class and the ongoing ideological sorting of nonwhite conservatives into the Republican Party. While there's probably merit in some of these, my analyses suggest that one of the biggest factors behind Trump's growing support from nonwhite voters may be opposition to immigration.
There are two main reasons for this. First, nonwhite Americans' attitudes about immigration moved sharply to the right during President Joe Biden's term. That resulted in a much larger pool of Black and Latino voters who were receptive to Trump's anti-immigrant rhetoric. Second, voters of color with conservative immigration attitudes were especially likely to defect from Biden in 2020 to Trump in 2024 — even after accounting for other plausible reasons for these changes.
Tesler continues, “Those sizable shifts were not limited to any single racial or ethnic group, either. In fact, the chart below shows that the percentage of white, Latino and Black Americans who agreed with the statement "immigrants drain national resources" all increased dramatically from June 2020 through December 2023 in YouGov's biweekly tracker surveys.
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We'll need more post-election data to help pinpoint the causes and durability of Trump's surging support from voters of color. However these preliminary findings strongly suggest that immigration attitudes are a big piece of the puzzle. They also dovetail with prior political science research showing that voters of color who had shifted to Trump from 2016 to 2020 had more conservative views about race and immigration. So even though voting was less polarized by race and ethnicity in 2024 than it's been in the past, racial attitudes and opinions about immigration are more important than ever in explaining many people's votes.
The story of Trump and MAGA’s victory over Harris and the Democrats extends beyond migrants and “the border crisis.”
There is a group of Black men who hold court, convening their own salon of sorts, outside of a coffee shop I walk by almost every day. These men were and continue to be very upset about “the deep state” and “that a vote for Harris or Trump does not really matter because the winners have already been determined because the election is rigged.” Some of the men are also convinced that supporting the Democrats is foolish because “they take the Black vote for granted.” As a group, these men are obsessed with YouTube, social media and the "news" apps on their phones and computers. At various points in their conversations, they enthusiastically advocated for various online “news” personalities and “influencers” who they said tried to get "the truth" out there by going around “the system.”
Getting “news” primarily from social media and apps was a deciding factor in voters’ support for Donald Trump and the MAGA movement in the 2024 election. As has been widely documented, these digital spaces and the larger right-wing “news” ecosystem are rife with disinformation as part of a propaganda and influence campaign by malign actors (both foreign and domestic) to undermine democracy and create a compliant, ignorant, confused and apathetic public who no longer can distinguish between truth and facts, so yearn for a strongman leader.
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In total, these Black men’s political values are far more conservative if not reactionary than many white Democrats, liberals and progressives would likely expect (or even understand).
There were two distinct moments when I concluded, with near certainty, that Donald Trump was going to take back the White House. Several days before the election, I watched a shoplifter run out of a discount retail department store. It was 1 pm. The man’s hands were full of clothes and other things he had stolen. He then got on a bicycle and rode away as a woman security guard tried to catch him. The shoplifter mocked and laughed at her. They were both Black. All of us watching this fracas were Black. My eyes met the eyes of an older woman who was standing next to me. She looked at someone else. Their eyes met. As a group, we just shook our heads in disgust. I heard some choice expletives and “this has to stop” come out of my mouth followed by “that fool had better pray that Trump doesn’t win.” Public opinion polls and other research show that voters who were more worried about crime were more likely to vote for Trump.
And then there was the following phrase (or some version of it) that I heard many times on the bus, the train and in my conversations with Uber and Lyft drivers. “Donald Trump may act crazy or be a jerk, but he is right about that!….” Donald Trump’s raw honesty and lack of a filter or self-censoring are central to his appeal. Many Americans may disagree with the specifics of what Donald Trump says about immigration, women, racial and ethnic minorities, or how he will rule when he is back in power. But as shown by polls and focus groups, many of them do like the fact that Trump, unlike Kamala Harris and the mainstream news media and other elites, is at least talking in a clear and direct way about the things that are causing them anxiety and upset in their daily lives.
To that point, during an interview with Mehdi Hasan at Zeteo News, political strategist Steve Schmidt shared a powerful insight about how Trump was able to defeat Harris and the Democrats by creating his own multiethnic “rainbow coalition of malice”, a coalition that includes the Democratic Party’s base voters.
If this becomes a trend, the 2024 election may signal a fundamental realignment of American politics — in favor of Trumpism and right-wing authoritarian populism. Contrary to what the Democratic Party, its consultants and the mainstream news media and the pundit class would like to believe, demographics and “the browning of America” may not in fact be destiny.
To win back their own base voters — and more importantly to expand their support among independents, undecided voters and those who have dropped out of politics and the country’s civic life — Democrats need to do a much better job of listening to everyday people, meeting them where they are and taking their concerns and agency seriously. Whatever one may think about Donald Trump, his propagandists and other agents, at this moment, they and the MAGAverse are doing a much better job of listening to and shaping public opinion and the national narrative and mood than are the Democrats and the legacy news media.
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