The media, doing its usual bang-up job, is framing Donald Trump’s 1.5-point win as a landslide, and making it to be the result of Black and Latino voters abandoning Democrats.
What they’re trying to do here, obviously, is cover for White voters, who still make up 71 percent of the electorate, and gave Trump a 57 percent to 41 percent majority, according to the exit polls, and when you look at the subgroup numbers, it was practically every White demographic subgroup involved.
The media is also covering for men of all races and ethnicities, who split 55 percent for Trump, 42 percent for Kamala Harris, as women were 53-45 in favor of Harris.
I get it, that we don’t want good White folks, and good men, of all races, but particularly Whites, who voted for Harris, and even the White folks and White and Latino and Black men who voted for Trump claiming it was only because of the economy, to feel bad that we somehow elected a proto-fascist to the White House for the second time in eight years.
American history suggests that we’re good at blaming people of color at the expense of blaming White people and people of the masculine persuasion whenever something stupid takes place.
Here’s your reality check.
White voting groups
Young White voters were supposed to save us from ourselves, but 18-29 Whites split down the middle, 49 percent for Donald Trump and 49 percent for Kamala Harris.
Our White kids failed us miserably.
White women overall gave Trump a 53 percent to 45 percent majority.
White male college grads went 50 percent for Trump, 47 percent for Harris.
White women with college degrees actually split for Harris – 57 percent for the vice president, to 41 percent for Trump.
We finally have a White demo that went majority Democrat.
White evangelicals were a solid Trump demo – 82 percent for Trump, 17 percent for Harris.
White Catholics: 60 percent Trump, 35 percent Harris.
Another winner coming up here: White Jews were 80-20 Harris.
White Jews make up 2 percent of the electorate, so.
Minority voting groups
Latinos are 12 percent of the electorate. Latino voters were 52 percent Kamala Harris, 46 percent Donald Trump.
There was a gender gap there: Latino men were 55-43 Trump; Latino women were 60-38 Harris.
Black voters are 11 percent of the electorate, and were 85-13 Harris.
Black women: 91-7 Harris.
Black men: 77-21 Harris.
Gender gap among minority voters
There was a lot of focus on the Black male electorate in the weeks leading up to Election Day.
The back-of-the-envelope math suggests the Black gender gap that we saw in the exit polls, with men shifting to Donald Trump by 14 points, cost Kamala Harris roughly a million votes, so, not insignificant in a race that is going to end up going about 2.5 million votes in Trump’s favor in the popular vote when the final votes are accounted for.
Factor in the Latino gender gap, with Latino men shifting 17 points toward Trump, and doing some more back-of-the-envelope math, and you get another 1.5 million votes that could have gone to Harris.
What’s going to end up being a 50.0/48.5 race in favor of Trump would move in favor of Harris, based on those quick calculations.
This is what the media is trying to make out to be determinative – that all it would have taken would have been for Latino and Black men to have voted in accord with Latino and Black women.
Let’s do that same math with white voters
Even just eliminating the gender gap between Whites with college degrees swings 2.4 million votes from Donald Trump to Kamala Harris.
See how easy that was?
Just having White dudes with college degrees vote the way White women with degrees voted makes up the ground that Black and Latino dudes combined would have made up.
Sorry to use similar sentence structure, but even just eliminating the gender gap between Whites without college degrees swings shifts 1.6 million votes from Trump to Harris, and that itself could have been the deciding factor in a couple of swing states, like Wisconsin (Trump +30,000), Nevada (Trump +45,000), Michigan (+80,000).
What are we seeing here?
Trump’s MAGA acronym stands for Make America Great Again, and it’s worth examining what he is selling with those words.
Everything that we’ve heard Trump try to articulate in terms of his vision for making America great again sounds like the 1950s that TV sitcoms pretended was the reality then – nuclear families with the man as the head of the household, the woman as a stay-at-home wife and mother, and the kids, with people of color, if they existed at all, tokens on the periphery, and there was no such thing as an LGBTQ+ community, even though there was, folks back then just didn’t know it, or acknowledge it.
Who would this ideal appeal to, you wonder?
Yeah, White people, who don’t have to worry when a cop pulls them over for a busted tail light that they might get shot, who have better schools and more familial wealth giving them a head start when they’re entering adulthood, you’re going to be more likely to think that the playing field is leveled out when it’s tilted in your favor.
And then, men – White men, sure, first and foremost, but Black and Latino men, even being second-class citizens, things, though unequal relative to Whites, are tilted in their favor within their communities.
What I’m getting at: there was White privilege at play here with what went down in the 2024 election, and at the same time, male privilege, across racial and ethnic lines.
It’s never a good thing to elect a guy who wants to be a dictator, but if you’re White, if you’re a White male, and if you’re a Latino or Black male, you’re more likely to have convinced yourself that you’ll be OK, and even if things don’t work out on the whole, you might at least get a tax break out of the deal.
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Chris Graham
