Did Gaza Cost Harris the Election?
The evidence is thin.
Axios (“Scoop: Dems working on secret report found Gaza cost Harris votes“):
Top Democratic officials who worked on the party’s still-secret autopsy of the 2024 election concluded that Kamala Harris lost significant support because of the Biden administration’s approach to the war in Gaza, Axios has learned.
The Democratic National Committee’s research on what went wrong in 2024 has been under lock and key since party leaders decided last year to hide it from the public — a reflection of how explosively it could resonate within the party and beyond. Progressive and moderate Democrats are particularly divided over Israel, with the left more critical of that nation’s actions against Palestinians in Gaza and many questioning the U.S.’s unwavering support for Israel.
[…]
Activists from the IMEU Policy Project told the DNC that the Biden-Harris administration’s support for Israel was a factor in the party’s losses because it drained support from some young people and progressives. Hamid Bendaas, a spokesperson for the IMEU Policy Project, said that during the meeting “the DNC shared with us that their own data also found that policy was, in their words, a ‘net-negative’ in the 2024 election.” Two other senior aides at the pro-Palestinian organization also said the DNC had drawn that conclusion.
So, what we have here isn’t a conclusion from the DNC of its wide-ranging analysis, but an imput from something called the IMEU Policy Project. Despite studying foreign policy for a living and having spent years working in the DC foreign policy think tank world, I had never heard of it before this morning (even though it has been around since 2005). “IMEU” stands for Institute for Middle East Understanding. Its mission statement:
The Institute for Middle East Understanding (IMEU) works to increase and enhance the public’s understanding about Palestine, Palestinians, and Palestinian Americans through media. We do this by offering mainstream US media organizations and journalists access to facts, resources, analysis, and experts in order to help them cover key issues with accuracy and depth, and by creating and disseminating original articles, fact sheets, videos, photo essays, and other digital content.
There’s considerably more at the website, but you get the idea: this is hardly a neutral party.
Regardless, the topline finding is almost certainly true. The Gaza war was incredibly controversial. It’s almost certainly the case that the Biden-Harris administration’s siding with Israel cost Harris some votes. Hell, taking a stand on any controversial issue will cost any candidate some votes.
But, of course, the Democratic Party has traditionally done quite well with Jewish voters. If the exit polls are to be believed, 78% of self-identified Jews went for Harris, compared to only 22% for Trump. Tablet tells me that this was “a historically high margin.” While Jewish opinion is, of course, not monolithic on Israel or any other issue, being significantly more pro-Palestinian in the conflict may well have cost Harris enough Jewish votes to offset whatever gains with the elusive “some young people.”
IMEU claims the issue was a “net negative.” But, according to the exit polls, the country was almost perfectly split:
Of the “too strong” camp—presumably the IMEU position—67% went for Harris, compared to 30% for Trump. Of the “just right” camp, 60% went for Harris, compared to 39% for Trump. Trump dominated the “not strong enough” camp 82% to 18%.
In any relatively close election, one can point to any factor and make a case that it was decisive. It’s really hard to do here. Assuming the exit polls are relatively accurate (and, let’s stipulate, the increase in early and mail-in voting means they may not be representative), there’s just no evidence that being too strong on Israel was a net negative. Essentially, we have to conjure a large number of angry “too strong” progressives who either voted for Trump (which seems wildly implausible) or stayed home (which is quite possible, but damn hard to prove).
Beyond that, it bears repeating the point Steven Taylor spent weeks hammering: the 2024 U.S. election was part of a global anti-incumbent wave. Years of COVID restrictions, supply chain shocks, inflation, cultural conflicts, and negative-biased information flows across the West left a frustrated citizenry in the mood for someone else. Indeed, we were asking in August 2024 whether Harris would be able to overcome the incumbency curse.
Incumbency plus inflation. People really hate inflation.
Steve
We do know Trump won a plurality of the vote in Dearborn, with Jill Stein taking 18%.
And yes, there were Arab Americans who voted for Trump thinking he was going to bring peace to the region. It’s not wildly implausible. Just wildly stupid, which our country’s citizens tend to be.
All that said, I have my doubts this effect extended beyond Michigan, and it’s not even clear it was decisive on its own in flipping the state to Trump.
I was there.
Lies about the economy, which continue today, turned the election.
Democrats are stupid.
@Daryl:
As are the MAGAt’s who revel in this type of homoerotic fantasy…
https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/116119516514284571
Talk about stealing valor…skates pretty well considering his bone spurs.
IMO, it may have cost her Michigan. I don’t think that state alone would have turned the election, seeing as she also lost Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Nevada (not to mention Arizona and Georgia).
Also, Harris was between the devil and the deep blue sea in regards to Gaza. Support Israel, and she’d be seen as anti-Palestinian. Support the Palestinians, and she’d be seen as antisemitic. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t, and pick one already. It’s gotta be one or the other.
Kathy is spot-on:
And for that reason, Gaza costing Harris the election is an IMEU fantasy. There are SO many other factors, including inflation, immigration and Uncle Joe staying too long at the dance, for any one issue or voting group to have been THE decisive factor in an election that Trump won by less than 2%.
@Kathy:
We agree – Gaza mattered, perhaps most in Michigan.
I’ve had many discussions with friends regarding the 2024 result. I believe that Harris lost owing to five factors: (1) Immigration, (2) Inflation (a-for-da-bi-la-tee), (3) Culture War pronoun panic, (4) she was perceived as the incumbent, and (5) Joe Biden’s debate freeze in June – after that I now believe it was over.
Generally I think that Immigration and Culture Wars fueled MAGA support, and Incumbency turned out to be too much for Harris to overcome.
@Kathy: Splitting the difference is rarely a winning strategy in an election. Ask John Kerry (voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq, opposed going in except as a last resort) or Mitt Romney (supported a state-level equivalent to the ACA, opposed the national version). What usually happens is that you end up pissing off both sides, rather than building a broad base of support from the center. It wasn’t always this way (it’s kind of what JFK did in 1960 to attract black voters while avoiding pissing off the Dixiecrats too much), but it very much is that way nowadays.
Anecdotally, there are Jews who claim to have turned against the Democratic Party due to a perception that it has become anti-Israel since Oct. 7, but I don’t know of any research determining how widespread this was. What’s confusing is that I’ve seen wildly different estimates of the Jewish vote for Harris in 2024, ranging from 66% (relatively low) to 78% (historically high).
Outside of a few small demographic groups, Americans don’t vote on foreign policy. When it comes to questions of foreign policy, Americans are the most ignorant people on Earth. In the case of the Gaza war that ignorance was bipartisan, as it was during Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq.
Right now, today, our new friends, the ‘reformed’ jihadis of the Syrian government have attacked our old friends, the Kurds, and freed tens of thousands of imprisoned Al Qaeda fighters. Tens of thousands of terrorists, released. Is anyone protesting this horror show? Does anyone even know it’s happening? I wonder if we’ll notice when bombs start going off in European cafés, and Americans are targeted throughout the Middle East? How about when the Israelis start bombing the reconstituted Al Qaeda?
Now it seems we are preparing to obliterate the same nuclear facilities we already obliterated in Iran. Is anyone going to notice that the success of the first round was wildly exaggerated? Is anyone – particularly in our flaccid Congress – going to ask WTF the plan is for Iran? Is Trump going to demand Iran give him personal control of their oil production with all proceeds going to a Trump account in Qatar?
Here’s my grand unified theory of the election.
The top line items were:
1. Anti-incumbency plus structural issues (the long GOP slide into maddens and Covid exacerbating the feeling that everyone’s getting screwed.
2. Inflation (which drives me crazy because people don’t understand it and that makes them vulnerable to fantasy bullshit.)
I think those two thing get us like 97% of the way there, then the last little bit is:
3. Turnout/suppression.
I don’t mean suppression in the legal or fairness sense. The turnout factor is that Trump managed to get a whole bunch of people that don’t pay attention and don’t really vote to the polls. The suppression bit is that Trump was able to take a couple of culture war things and hold a mirror up to Harris. Harris looked in the mirror and failed. She didn’t fight for pro-palestine vote. She made it clear that Israel could keep doing whatever it wanted and she would support it. Trump took trans issues and beat her over the head with it. Not because people were necessarily bigoted, but because she didn’t fight at all.
I would also add in jumping into bed with Cheney and muzzling Walz. I suspect that there was a large group of voters that were looking for someone to fight. Harris made it clear that she wasn’t going to fight anyway. She was going to Merrick Garland her way through the crisis.
I don’t have any hard data, but I ran into a whole lot of people were were not energized after the first week or so. I know I felt it by the end. Given the margins, I don’t think it would have taken a whole lot to tip things the other way. But she had to fight.
To be clear, I don’t think that any one bit of #3 is fatal, but taken all together, Trump turned out people and Harris suppressed her own side.
From what I can tell, neither the Democrats in the US, nor Labour in the UK have realized that you have to turn out your base first. If your base isn’t going to vote for you, the otherside definitely isn’t going to be persuaded (where possible) to vote for you. This Thursday’s election here is going to be interesting.
I’m going to repost something I wrote last year, which I think is especially relevant here.
I think it is quite likely that Gaza cost Harris the state of Michigan, even though the national electorate was divided as you say, and didn’t consider it their top issue.
Because Detroit has a very large Muslim population that were specifically targeted by the Trump campaign. Many of those voter groups now think they were swindled by Trump. Ya think?
I think an analysis by national poll here is probably not going to reflect the channeled messaging that is taking place. For instance, how many MAHA voters were brought in by RFK, Jr.? (And now feel betrayed by last week’s announcement about glyphosate.)
In a close election, it doesn’t have to be a lot to make a difference.
@Beth:
I think too often ‘energize the base’ turns into ‘ignore everyone else.’ We need to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time, to appeal to the base and independents.
@Kylopod:
The fatal mistake was made on the day Biden announced he was running for re-election, a hubristic, unrealistic, selfish and dishonest decision. He should have stepped aside and let the primary process determine a candidate, a candidate who could open some distance with the Biden administration. Biden could have been Cincinnatus, instead he held the octogenarian door open for Trump.
@Beth:
This is so frustrating because the Biden admin followed sensible, even necessary, policies – and they worked. They really did inherit a bad economy and turn it around. But too late for Biden/Harris politically.
And yes, the box of rocks electorate is a box of rocks about inflation too. But asking otherwise is asking a lot. I don’t think you can really grok inflation without a grounding in calculus. Not that you need to do any calculation, but it really helps to have the underlying mental concepts around rates of change, inflation = d$/dt. It doesn’t help that the press fixate on year-to-year numbers, which delayed perception of recovery. But how many people could explain the significance of YTY v MTM numbers? The bottom line is that a yard of football, a square foot of carpet, and a pound of ground beef are still what they were in our youth. But a dollar of ground beef isn’t. It’s very unsettling to people. And understandably so.
@Kylopod: That. True last year and still true. I just picked up my phone and upvoted you a second time.
And as I’ve commented before, so much of the press and the political world interpreted it as a vibe shift, a self-fulfilling prophecy.
@Michael Reynolds:
Knowing how much bitterness and division typically come out of competitive primaries, I’m far from convinced that would have improved the situation. The inflation problem, the trans issues, immigration, etc. wouldn’t have disappeared in that scenario; indeed those could easily have been amplified if, say, you had two or more Democratic candidates attacking each other about Gaza or anything else.
We’ll never know, of course. But my broader view is that it was a mistake for Biden to be the nominee in 2020, and no, I don’t agree with the claim that he was the only Dem who could have defeated Trump that year. He was already showing signs of diminishment, and anyone looking four years down the line knew we were potentially headed toward a crisis with his age-related decline.
@Beth and @Kylopod:
Any grand theory or time traveler thought exercise of the 2024 general election that doesn’t include the Republican side of the ledger is missing the biggest part of the story. The non-insane members of the GOP had two relatively straight forward opportunities to rid themselves of the manifestly unfit Trump as the titular head of their party – the second impeachment where Republican Senators acquitted his despite very strong evidence and a Republican primary process that Trump callously skipped and which offered a viable alternative in Nikki Haley.
Given the global anti-incumbency wave, one of our major parties put forward a fascist convicted criminal as the “anti-incumbent” choice for the country. We are getting what the Democrats warned us would happen if the Republicans continued to support this guy. Democratic coulda woulda shoulda is kind of beside the point.
@Michael Reynolds:
Except, we have a natural experiment in this. The GOP has done little except energize the craziest part of its base, to the point that it has chased away people like Dr. Joyner. The GOP does NOTHING to appeal to anyone outside of a narrow band of lunatics. Now, Trump did manage to reach a bunch of idiots. But the thing about those idiots is that they rarely pay attention and vote less.
On the other hand, the Democrats routinely shit all over their base. Why would someone continue voting for them when they know that, at all levels, their needs and wants will be ignored by Dems chasing the illusion of a “moderate” voter. If you don’t turn out your people, if you don’t listen to them, they aren’t going to vote for you. This myth that there is some sort of magic mythic centrist independent needs to die.
Also, why would this mythic independent vote for a Democrat after watching Dems shit all over their own side.
@gVOR10:
The only disagreement I have with your comment is this:
I’m not so sure about this bit, only because I an functionally math illiterate, never had calculus (or anything more advanced than basic algebra), and I can understand inflation as a concept decently well. I don’t think there is anything particularly hard about a low level conceptual understanding of it. What is hard is; 1. inflation FEELS bad, especially in ways that that math won’t help, and 2. the relentless, screeching lying the GOP has done over the last 40 years about it.
@Kylopod:
It’s always a risk, but primaries would have tested candidates, and their messages, and trained up their staff. Also would have drawn media focus to issues we want to talk about.
@Scott F.:
Agreed. That’s why I frame my 1. as Anti-incumbency and structural issues. Structurally, had the GOP put forth a more ‘normal’ nominee, they probably would have done better. I think they got lucky more than anything that Trump was able to activate more Ariana Grande voters than the GOP in general managed to drive away.
@Beth:
You’re overlooking the fact that a wholesale embrace of the most radical Progressive positions would have alienated other elements of the base. I support Democrats despite some of the base’s beliefs. If I (a Blue donor) am turned off by ‘the base’ what effect do you think it would have on the independents we need in order to win?
As for the base being shit on, maybe the base could learn something about compromise and timing and learning to read the room. There are elements of the base that genuinely believe in open borders. Should we have pandered to them?
If the base wants to be pandered to, the base might try being less extreme, less politically suicidal, less elitist and out of touch and generally obnoxious. Marc Maron – as prog as prog gets – has a line: We annoyed the average American into fascism. A joke, obviously, but one with an element of truth.
TL;DR: The base needs to grow up and learn to play the game and keep their eyes on the larger prize.
@Michael Reynolds:
1. I genuinely believe in open borders and I’ve been proven correct. But this just goes to show just how facile your bullshit is. I’m willing to accept compromise, men like you would much rather fight with the lefties in your head than see that. Maybe we’ll live long enough to see my dream of a Canada, United States, Mexico monetary/customs/labor union. That economy would be fucking unstoppable.
2. You are the thinnest of thin skinned people. You will stop supporting Dems because randos on the internet yelled at you. You seem to be infected with the idea that everything left of some mythic moderate center is per se illegitimate. The Democratic Party has been listening to men like you for 20 years and we keep ending up back in this same bullshit place.
3. Dr. Joyner is gonna catch a stray here, but him, I respect, you I don’t. I am almost certainly closer to the median Dem base voter than Dr. Joyner is. I have also voted Dem my whole adult life, and exclusively since at least 2008. Now, if the Democrats want to chase the Dr. Joyners over the world, that’s fine. I’m not going to vote for that party though. Why would I? Cause the other guy is worse? I did that. You know what I got for that? I get shit on by people like you for not being a team player. I’m done with that shit.
Again, if the Democratic party wants to chase after you or Dr. Joyner, that’s fine. I’m not part of that party then. Simple as that. If you’re not going to turn out people like me, and hope you’re going to get the Dr. Joyners, or the non-committal, low information voters, your party is going to fucking LOSE.
Also, remember, I’m entitled to vote in two different countries. I’d almost certainly be a good fit with Labour over here. Labour has done exactly what you want and I’d rather eat hot broken glass than any of those fuckers.
Let me be explicit about this, if me and my family are going be screwed over no matter who I vote for, but you will be safe if I vote Dem (or Labour), I’m not going to vote. We can all drown together.
@Charley in Cleveland:
It was close enough that many different factors could be seen as the tipping point, costing more votes than Trump won by in the swing states.
Being black, for instance. And being a woman. And inflation. And incumbency in a wave of anti-incumbency across the world.
Her relative silence on trans rights could be there, as she allowed Trump to define her as in favor of school nurses performing gender reassignment surgery on unwilling students, and that fired up Trump’s base. This was Trump’s closing argument in a lot of swing states, inundating them with advertisements, so clearly the Trump team thought it was critical. (To be clear, I think Harris should have visibly and vigorously fought for trans folks and tied this to free rights for everyone, rather than be mostly silent or changing policy to attack trans people herself — she allowed herself to get all the negatives of supporting trans folks, but none of the positives)
(People really forget how ugly the Trump campaign was regarding trans folks, as there has been so very much ugliness since then)
And I’m sure there are others. The Techno-Feudalism crowd came out of the closet as the obvious fascists they are around then, and grifting culture really took off, so there was probably some law-and-order case that could be made, for instance.
I don’t know that Gaza was big enough to sway things. If she was short on volunteers, I could make a case that she alienated the exact part of the base she depended on to do the heavy lifting on the ground, but I don’t think she was short on labor.
But, with such a close election, there is no one deciding issue — there were a lot of deciding issues, and a fair number of different prospective paths to victory. She couldn’t do anything about being Black, granted, and changing her gender would probably fire up other issues, but some of the others were more actionable.
@Beth:
The Biden administration, and then the Harris campaign, had been focusing and publically touting numbers that people weren’t seeing on the ground. Instead they went for Gaslighting America. Wage growth was mostly keeping up with inflation, but it wasn’t uniform so there were a lot of winners and losers, for instance.
I think a more nuanced message would have gotten through, or at least not been seen as transparent lying. At least to 2% more of America. I could be very wrong about that.
Don’t rule out cannibalism. Avoid the brain and spinal column, and you should be low risk for prion disease.
@Beth:
Thank you for demonstrating my point: if the base can’t agree, how are we supposed to motivate both you and me? See, their base is united. Our base is clearly not united. We are both ‘base’ and yet you’re furious at me, and insulting toward me for daring to question your notion of said base.
You think you’re the base. I think we are the base – you and me. You’re raging at me, I’m not attacking you, so I’d argue that you are the one demonstrating the limits of turning out the base. There is no the base, singular. We are not in lockstep, we are not Republicans. We need a strategy that reaches beyond the base to bring in independents to overcome the structural advantages of the enemy.
For the record I vote Team Blue, and in the last cycle I put $60,000 into the fight.
@Gustopher:
Since when has “nuance” ever been effective in politics? It’s part of the reason for the so-called bumper-sticker problem, the fact that Republican messaging whittles everything down to short, snappy phrases (build the wall, drain the swamp, America First, drill baby drill, etc.) whereas Dems always wind up sounding like a Tevye monologue.
In any case, it’s very hard to break through the basic law in politics that Americans vote their pocketbooks. It doesn’t always work that way (2004 was won on foreign policy rather than economics, where polls showed Americans trusted Kerry more), but I don’t think it’s something that can be changed by fiat by simply acknowledging voters’ economic pain a little more.
@Kylopod: We’re talking a less than 2% delta in swing states, which means moving 1% of voters from Republican to Democrat.
“We’re working hard to bring things back, and we’re doing better at this than anyone else in the world” is not a huge amount of nuance. It’s a teeny tiny bit of nuance that also says “we’re number one.”
I think it could do better than “the economy is great, ignore everything to the contrary you see in your life.” I don’t think anyone was fooled by that.
Remember Donald Trump was not popular. He won because people were desperate, not because he was appealing to anyone outside his base. People voted for him reluctantly.
Move 1% of the voters, who didn’t want to vote for Trump anyway.
I’d use threads like these if I were teaching Circular Firing Squads 101.
Anyway, the key thing to know and always keep in mind about inflations is this: PRICES ARE NEVER COMING DOWN.
Some volatile commodities and products, like gasoline and some basic foodstuffs, may come down a bit for reasons of supply and demand, but even these won’t get permanently to the levels they were at before inflation spiked.
Consider the Mexican peso. In 1976 12.50 pesos bought you one dollar. the price of the dollar today is nominally around 17 pesos, which doesn’t seem so bad, but it omits the removal of three zeroes from the currency in the 90s.
Stated in equivalent terms, a dollar is now worth 17,000 pesos.
That’s down from around 20,000 (20 with the zeroes omitted) earlier this decade. If El Taco does something really stupid and beyond the pale that causes a massive worldwide dump of US treasuries, it may go down to 12,000 or even 10,000.
When will it be 12.50? NEVER.
So, the best one can hope for is restoration of purchasing power. That can happen, and in fact happened for some during the high inflation period. But it’s not likely until and unless the US gets serious about addressing economic inequality.
Maybe after the revolution…
Just because I don’t recall anyone else doing it, I took a look at WIKI’s data for 2024. Harris lost the popular vote by 1.5% and the EC by 86 votes. She would have needed to flip 44 EC votes to win. Sorting by narrowest loss she needed.
WI with 10 EC votes lost by 0.86%
MI with 15 EC votes lost by 1.42%
PA with 19 EC votes lost by 1.71%
Assuming a uniform vote shift across all states Harris would have needed to flip about 0.9% of voters. Or some equivalent combination of flipping and turnout.
Given that Rs have nothing substantive to offer average voters, Ds should be winning by 20 or 30 percent.
@Gustopher:
There are also plenty who support the MAGA movement’s racism, sexism, and homophobia, and not reluctantly.
The economic anxiety excuse Bernie folks love still rings hollow. The poorest, least privileged, most disadvantaged demos vote against Trump. Blacks and gays are certainly not immune from desperation. They still voted 85%+ against fascism in all of Trump’s elections. The poorest households, making under $30k yearly, broke strongly against Trump in all three of his bids, per exit polls.
“I reluctantly supported white supremacy because desperation” is weak tea. Insufficient at best. Clearly much, much more happening there.
Can people be fooled by an argument not made? Biden didn’t go all the way to the Supreme Court fighting for debt relief and eviction moratoriums (he lost both cases) and Harris didn’t propose the most robust set of national housing subsidies + housing construction measures ever because they thought “everything was fine.”
Nuanced, rational economic policy probably was not going to outdo a general malaise of bad post-Covid economic “vibes” prompting a more or less uniform anti-incumbent wave across the West, whether the incumbent party was more liberal or more conservative. Especially coupled with emotionally manipulative culture war panics that suddenly and magically disapated post-election (I’d throw Gaza in this pile).
@gVOR10:
In a world where 75% of voters decided based on substantive v. not substantive yes. The American electorate’s decision-making process seems more guided by sentiment and apathy.
@DK:
That would be his base. 30% of the population. But, again, roughly 1% of the voting population was needed to swing the election, and only in a few states.
I’m going to let you in on a secret: many, many, many White people don’t think about Black people at all. They don’t contemplate the effects of White Supremacy and weigh it against marginal tax rates, they don’t ponder the impact of overpolicing on communities of color while considering the effects of tariffs.
So long as the White Supremacy happens far enough away that they don’t have to look at it, it’s out of sight, and out of mind. In fact, if it doesn’t happen right in front of them, they will assume the claims are overblown.
They’re no so desperate that they will vote for White Supremacy. They’re just desperate enough to vote for the messy guy, without really remembering the racism that was part of the messiness because the racism never affected them. Deporting a bunch of criminals? Sure, that sounds nice, and last time it wasn’t all that visible, so what’s the big deal?
You might not like these people. That’s understandable. And, if they remember you exist, they may not like you. But they mostly don’t remember you exist.
Not only are you not the main character, you’re not even a minor character in their lives.
—-
Also, just for fun, the popular phrase “I can excuse racism, but I draw the line at animal cruelty” has struck a chord because it’s very true. (Except for drawing the line at animal cruelty.)
@Gustopher:
Does this also apply to cis people and their trans panic? And do we mean many like 1% or many like 30%? It’s implausible. Not just because studies have long shown bigoted resentment as central to Trumpism, and how pervasive daily racial/anti-queeer microagressions are (why work so hard to undermine “minor characters”?) but because of white and straight people’s own self-report.
On the one hand, whites/str8s are insist Trumpism is a rational, inevitable response to their irritation with CRT, DEI, an alleged epidemic of trans people in bathrooms and sports, Defund the Police, groomer gays, diversity trainings, Pride flags, Disney casting black actors, gayness being shoved down their throats, and obvious demographic change that has obviously sapped white power, and in the next breath it’s “we don’t think about minorities at all.”
Which is it? It can’t be both.
Do many/most white and/or breeder Americans really believe that their immigration views are totally divorced from race? That they didn’t notice Obama was black? Or talk about that amongst themselves or notice that some of their white friends and family resented it? That they like are innocents to drama over DEI, CRT, trans athletes, potty policing genitalia, George Floyd and BLM, Colin Kaepernick kneeling, affirmative action, gay/black book bans, Bad Bunny’s and Kendrick Lamar’s halftime show, and on and on?
There’s some huge swath of white voters who’ve heard about, talked about, and factored in tariffs, taxes, and inflation but none of the above? Sounds fake but okay.
There is a political movement that knows just how much whites and everybody else cares about race, and it’s about to be taken over by a vice president who just announced “You don’t have to apologize for being white anymore.” He’s not peddling white resentment because of how much the white voters who picked his ticket don’t factor bigotry into their votes, either to be co-signed or rationalized and overlooked. He, Trump, Musk and all the other MAGA megaphones loudly and constantly peddling white/male/het grievance know how they won and how to try keeping their coalition in line — what do leftists gain by being in denial about it?