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Saturday, November 09, 2024

White women handed Trump his win. Racism and sexism defeated Harris - Los Angeles Times

Column: There’s no mystery. White women handed Trump the election

A group of white women cheering at a Trump rally holding signs that say "Women for Trump"

Women at a rally for Donald Trump.

(Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images)

"So … what happened?

How is it possible that this country reelected Donald Trump after everything he’s been convicted of doing, everything he has said he plans on doing, and everything he did to that poor microphone?

The answer isn’t that deep: The majority of white women in this country want a male president — preferably white. That’s not me talking; that’s nearly a century of voting data speaking.

When Barack Obama made history in 2008, he did so with less support from white women than Al Gore had.

It’s uncomfortable, I know.

The hunger to dig into the weeds of data, to make the outcome about policy and not identity, speaks to our desire to be united in these states.

However, you can’t talk about the results of the 2024 general election — specifically what Kamala Harris’ campaign or Democrats did wrong — without acknowledging the fact a Black female candidate was going to face resistance. No state in this country has even elected a Black woman to be governor.

Also: White women didn’t support Nikki Haley, Hillary Clinton, Carly Fiorina, Elizabeth Warren or Amy Klobuchar. The presence of Geraldine Ferraro on the 1984 Democratic ticket “made the South ours,” said Edward Rollins, President Reagan’s political director.

I keep hearing shock at the outcome of Tuesday’s vote, at Harris’ resounding defeat. I can understand being appalled, but not shocked.

We are not better than this. “This” — the racism, the sexism — has always been a major part of who we are.

Roy Wilkins, a longtime executive director of the NAACP, once wrote that Brown vs. Board of Education, the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision to end segregation in schools, was “a Second Emancipation Proclamation.” He also shared the country’s reaction to that decision: “I remember picking up the newspaper and reading an interview with a fourteen-year-old Dixie belle who said, ‘I’d rather grow up to be an idiot than go to a school with a n— in it.’ Anyone could see that she was well on the way to becoming that idiot.” Wilkins added: “A little integrated schooling might have saved her from her fate.”

And yet here we are, after two “proclamations,” and real emancipation still hasn’t come. Segregation is still the norm.

It’s long been said that Sunday morning is the most segregated time in America, but Monday through Friday mornings aren’t much better. Over decades of federal redlining to keep Black people out of nice neighborhoods, to the construction of highways, to the white flight of the ‘50s and ‘60s, the demographics of today’s local schools reflect the ugliness of yesteryear.

During her campaign, Harris often pointed out that just 1% of all public school teachers are Black men. Black women are less than 5%. Latinos make up 7%. According to Pew Research Center, nearly 80% of white elementary and secondary public school students went to a school where at least half the students were also white. It would be easy for a white student to grow up in America’s schools without having a classmate of color or seeing a person of color in a leadership role.

This is why most of the people who made Harris’ shortlist of VP candidates were white men. In order to give voters a degree of comfort, she was expected to have someone with the “look” of leadership on the ticket. And so despite having been elected a vice president, a senator and a state attorney general, Harris still apparently needed a white man on the ticket to give it gravitas in the eyes of voters.

We all know it.

And that’s why explanations of the 2024 outcome that dwell on the economy or Gaza or other policy matters are so disingenuous. We all know the real reason Harris lost.

If a Black woman had cheated on all of her husbands and had three sets of children, I doubt she would have gotten the white evangelical vote as Trump did. And yet when given an obvious choice — between a white man who can be heard on a recording pressuring officials to help him steal the election and a Black woman whose most egregious offense was being against fracking five years ago — most white women went where they’ve always gone.

@LZGranderson

White women handed Trump his win. Racism and sexism defeated Harris - Los Angeles Times

I feel betrayed’: For Black women, Harris’s loss creates new wound

‘I feel betrayed’: For Black women, Harris’s loss creates new wound

NAACP chapter member Barbara Sherman, left, and Georgia NAACP Executive Director Tonza Thomas work last month in Dawson, Georgia, to encourage people to vote. (Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post)

“DULUTH, Ga. — When Kamala Harris emerged as the Democratic presidential nominee this summer, many Black women across the country began dreaming of a potentially historic, glass-ceiling-breaking victory.

As Harris’s loss to former president Donald Trump came into focus this week, that enthusiasm turned into disappointment and concern over the future of the country. Some Black women, long among the most reliable Democratic voters, said they were frustrated that their investment in party politics hadn’t resulted in the election of the first Black female president.

“I feel betrayed. I do,” said Cindi Jackson, 48, a local public school teacher. “This country is just behind, just backwards. We would rather elect a criminal than a Black woman.”

Jackson grew up in Gwinnett County, which has transformed from a predominantly White sleepy suburb northeast of Atlanta to a diverse community filled with immigrants from around the world. Those demographic changes, she said, bolstered her hopes that Harris, whose mother emigrated from India and father from Jamaica, could win the presidency.

She considers the evolution of her community beautiful, she said, but acknowledged that there had been some tensions.

“I think people just freak out over change,” she said. Maybe that’s what led to these election results, Jackson said. Despite the increase in immigrant, Latino and Asian voters — voting blocs that typically lean Democratic — the county shifted right by almost two percentage points.

Black women have long been the bedrock of the Democratic Party. But while their votes have been key to delivering victories for Democrats, some Black women leaders say they are frustrated that they have largely been excluded from top positions in government.

There has been a steady increase in Black women being elected to political office since the early 1990s. And they account for a greater proportion of Black elected officials compared with the share of White women among White elected officials, research shows. As of 2018, there were more than 3,000 Black womenholding elected office across the country, primarily at the local level.

But Black women have largely been left out of the highest offices. No Black woman has ever served as governor of a state, and according to Higher Heights for America PAC, a political action committee dedicated to electing progressive Black women, few have ever held a statewide office.

“There’s certainly a lot of work to be done around people’s perception about Black women running for the highest office,” said Glynda C. Carr, president and co-founder of Higher Heights for America. “But Harris ran a campaign in just 107 days, which is unprecedented, and she was able to build out a coalition of voters that were excited, enthusiastic. So when we look at the numbers of volunteers and the amount of money that she raised, those are all game-changers for Black women seeking the highest offices.”

Carr also pointed to another historic moment of this election cycle: For the first time, two Black women will serve in the U.S. Senate at the same time: Angela Alsobrooks (D-Maryland) and Lisa Blunt Rochester (D-Delaware).

Those victories help illuminate the path forward for Black women seeking the most powerful offices in government, she said.

But the unfounded attacks on Harris’s intelligence and the racist suggestion from Trump and some of his supporters that she would be a “DEI president” show just how far the nation still has to go, some Black women said.

“People keep saying we need to soul-search to figure out what happened,” said D’Ivorie Johnson, 50, who lives outside Dallas. “Listen, the racism and sexism is what it is.”

With the elevation of Harris to the top of the ticket in July, many Black women said they thought it was finally their moment — that their loyalty to the Democratic Party would vault one of their own into the highest office in the land.

Within hours of President Joe Biden announcing he would end his bid for a second term and quickly endorsing Harris, a Zoom call aimed at reaching Black women raised $1.5 million. The more than 2 million members of the “Divine Nine,” the country’s nine most prominent Black sororities and fraternities, quickly united to mobilize Black voters nationwide.

Members of Harris’s sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha, which she joined while she was an undergraduate student at Howard University, started posting memes and selling merchandise online in the group’s signature pink and green to get out the vote.

Monica Williams, 49, said she was thrilled to cast her vote for Harris on Tuesday. “Men have been running things into the ground way too long,” she said that morning outside her polling site at the Gwinnett County Public Library in Suwanee, Georgia. “We need this change. The time is now.”

On Wednesday, she woke to a barrage of texts and learned that Trump had won.

“I don’t have words. I don’t know if I have fully accepted it. Maybe something will come up in the numbers,” she trailed off. “Probably not.”

“I’m just disappointed,” she said. She repeated three times: “I’m just so, so disappointed.”

America is not ready or willing to accept a Black woman at the top, she said. “I don’t have a clue what comes next. I’m pretty much just dumbfounded.”

Felicia Theobold, 39, said she was upset but not shocked by the results. Before the election, she had allowed herself to dream of what a possible Harris presidency might look like, said Theobold, who works in health care. “Seeing someone that looks like me? Yes, very exciting,” she said.

But she had doubts and the election results reaffirmed those fears, she said.

“How can I sum up my feelings? I’m relieved that it’s over,” she said as she stared off at a rain that quickened from a drizzle to a downpour Wednesday afternoon. “I can’t really put my feelings into words. It shows that nothing has really changed in terms of what a leader should look like.”

For many voters, support for Harris was not rooted in representation but in her policy agenda — many of which were in sharp contrast to Trump’s.

Christine Harrell, 40, was worried about what Trump’s victory could mean for Georgia, where there is already a six-week ban on most abortions. There could be “a bigger push for more restrictions on abortion access, birth control, all of that,” she said.

On her 7 a.m. commute to work on Wednesday morning just hours after Trump was declared the winner, she said riders on the MARTA — Atlanta’s public transit system — were unusually quiet as rain showers and a patchy fog blanketed the city, minus a few people she assumed were Trump supporters.

As she rode the metro, Harrell hung close to a quote she had read while scrolling her social media feed that morning: “The ancestors already gave us the blueprint.”

“We can overcome this, we got each other, and we can support each other,” she said. “We could still find joy, and we can still build community, because we’ve done it before, and we’ll do it again no matter who is in the White House.”

Felton reported from New York, and Tucker reported from Washington.

Commentary: Democrats keep expecting white women to save them, and they keep getting burned

Commentary: Democrats keep expecting white women to save them, and they keep getting burned



(Stephanie Scarbrough / Associated Press)

“I’d like to speak to the manager.

The election did not go the way I wanted it to go. I’m angry. I demand a redo.

Except that’s already Karen’s line, and the election did go her way.

A quick refresher on Karen: The name, which became a widespread meme around 2019, has been used to describe a certain type of middle- or upper-middle-class white woman who overexerts her privilege in situations she finds to be unfair. Her angst is often aimed at service workers and people of color.

Karen’s viral acts include calling the police on a young Black girl selling water on her block, throwing her grocery basket at Trader Joe’s employees when asked to wear a mask during the pandemic and calling the police on a Black family who dared to barbecue in the park.

Karen’s latest act of aggression in service of protecting her own self-interest? Voting for Donald Trump.

National exit polls show that 53% of white women voted for an adjudicated rapistwhose previous actions in office laid waste to Roe vs. Wade. So much for Democrats tapping into the hidden power of a “silent majority” of women who were thought to be hiding their political views from their husbands. They were in step with white men, 59% of whom voted for the former president.

Remember way back to, say, three weeks ago, when the media and pollsters were prognosticating that Black men were leaving Harris for the other side? They were going to throw the election to the Republicans, many worried. But the very same exit polls show that just 20% of those men voted for Trump, and Black women’s support for him was barely at 7%. Both were nearly identical to 2020 levels, according to exit polls.

As disappointed Harris supporters perform a postmortem on the vice president’s candidacy in an effort to root out America’s entrenched misogyny, they need to look in an entirely different direction — toward (white) women themselves. 

More than 150 years after Susan B. Anthony was arrested for the crime of voting while female, we’ve still had just two female contenders who’ve made it to the top of the presidential ticket. Both lost to the same candidate, a man with less experience in lawmaking and public service but more disdain for women and their rights than any nominee in modern memory. 

For many, it’s hard to imagine a mother or auntie who thinks it preferable to vote for a man who paid hush money to a porn star and bragged about groping women than for a scandal-free female candidate with more experience in politics. Or that such a large swath of women were unmoved to change their vote despite rape victims forced to give birth to their attacker’s child for lack of abortion access, or by deaths due to pregnancy complications in states where the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision has led to restrictions on doctors.

But these weak sisters exist — and persist. The same share of white women that voted for Trump over Harris, based on exit polls, supported Trump over Biden in 2020, which followed the plurality of white women who supported Trump over Clinton in 2016.

The question is, why does this keep happening? And is there any hope of the left changing the grim pattern? Democratic “campaign experts” apparently think so. They keep giving Karen four more years to see the light. By gum, the old girl will get it soon!

I don’t buy the argument that Clinton and Harris weren’t strong candidates, especially considering who they were up against. Trump had no experience in governance going into the 2016 election, and 34 felony convictions headed into 2024, with a questionable track record on everything from pandemic deaths to the economy

Yes, that’s right, the economy, which the media now point to en masse as a driving factor in Trump’s victory. Let’s get real. Trump was the first president since Herbert Hoover to depart office with fewer jobs in the country than when he entered. To paraphrase Democratic operative James Carville, it’s about identity, stupid. In our uniquely fractured times, Trump and his allies like Joe Rogan and Elon Musk have weaponized racism and misogyny, including of the self-inflicted variety, to create their winning coalition.

They are building on a long tradition, of course. For a country that loves to shout, “We’re No. 1!” we’re woefully behind the rest of the world when it comes to electing female leaders.

Mexico elected a female president. Pakistan chose a female prime minister — in 1988. There are, or have been, women elected as heads of state and government in Honduras, Turkey, India, Bangladesh, the Philippines, Guyana, Ireland, Britain, Israel and Germany. Throw a dart anywhere on a world map and she’s there, or has been there, leading nations and governments that Americans often label as inferior or intolerant. 

From the perspective of those who see Trump as a danger to democracy, this election marks an incredibly dark turn for our nation. I won’t cry “fraud” or “vote-rigging” — that’s a MAGA thing. But I will blame some of my sorrow over the outcome of this election on Karens. These women weren’t hiding their vote for Harris from their Trump-loving husbands. They were hiring a supervisor who understands entitlement. 

Now we’ll see how quickly he responds when they demand to speak to the manager.“

Friday, November 08, 2024

Opinion What should the Democrats do now?


The math is dispositive about what the Democratic Party needs to do. A bit more than 60 percent of U.S. adults do not have a college degree. According to exit polls, 56 percent of these noncollege voters chose Donald Trump over Kamala Harris. So if Democrats want to build a durable majority, they have to find a way to reconnect with blue-collar Americans — not just White voters but also Hispanic, who fled to the GOP on Tuesday in numbers Democrats should find alarming.”



Perry Bacon Jr.: Protect immigrants and trans people

People attend an event for LGBTQ+ voters in Tampa, Florida, on Nov. 1. (Cristobal Herrera-Ulashkevich/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock) 

I’m already seeing comments from Democratic members of Congress saying the party needs to distance itself from transgender Americans. I’m very worried the second Trump administration is going to demonize college professors and students, transgender people and undocumented immigrants in particular — and that Democratic politicians are going to go along with it (or not object much), thinking it will electorally help the party.

That’s not the right moral stance. And I don’t think it’s politically savvy either. The Democrats had some of their best recent electoral performances in 2018 and 2020, when they consistently attacked former president Donald Trump for being anti-immigrant and embraced the protest movement after George Floyd was killed. The governors who won in 2022 and 2023 in purple and red states, such as Kentucky’s Andy Beshear, opposed anti-trans legislation pushed by Republicans.

In contrast, look at what Vice President Kamala Harris did in this campaign. She walked away from many of her pro-immigrant stances, bragged about owning a gun and refused to attack Trump’s mass deportation plans. She lost resoundingly — while also saying a bunch of things I doubt she really believes.

Democrats are never going to outdo the Republicans in terms of being mean to minorities. Rather than moving to the right on social issues, they should focus on economic ideas that actually resonate with people. Most people don’t run or aspire to run a small business. So it was strange that one of the few economic ideas that Harris harped on was a small-business tax deduction.

Trump is telling a compelling story with a clear villain — essentially, “Hardworking Americans are paying taxes and having that money go to services for illegal immigrants.” Democrats need their own story — something like, “You can have good health care and a steady job and not pay exorbitant prices for groceries and child care if we start making the billionaires pay their fair share and stop allowing them to take all of the profits from your hard work.”







Black people across US receive racist text messages after Trump’s win | US elections 2024 | The Guardian

Black people across US receive racist text messages after Trump’s win

"FBI investigating after people report texts saying they were selected to pick cotton and go to nearest plantation

a women voting
A woman casts her ballot during the Democratic primary on 3 February 2024 in Ladson, South Carolina.Photograph: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images

Just hours after Donald Trump’s election win on Tuesday, Black people across the US reported receiving racist text messages telling them that they had been “selected” to pick cotton and needed to report to “the nearest plantation”. While the texts, some of which were signed “a Trump supporter”, varied in detail, they all conveyed the same essential message about being selected to pick cotton. Some of the messages refer to the recipients by name.

A spokesperson for the president-elect told CNN that his “campaign has absolutely nothing to do with these text messages”. It is not yet clear who is behind the messages, nor is there a comprehensive list of the people to whom the messages were sent, but social media posts indicate that the messages are widespread.

Black people in states including Alabama, South Carolina, Georgia, New York, New Jersey, Nevada, the DC area and elsewhere reported receiving the messages. The messages were sent to Black adults and students, including to high schoolers in Massachusetts and New York, and students at historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), such as Alabama State University and other schools, including ones across Ohio, Clemson University, the University of Alabama and Missouri State. At least six middle school students in Pennsylvania received the messages, according to the AP.

a text message
‘These messages represent an alarming increase in vile and abhorrent rhetoric from racist groups across the country.’ Photograph: Instagram

Authorities including the FBI and attorneys general are investigating the messages.

“The FBI is aware of the offensive and racist text messages sent to individuals around the country and is in contact with the Justice Department and other federal authorities on the matter,” the FBI said on Thursday.

On Thursday, the NAACP condemned the messages.

“The unfortunate reality of electing a President who historically has embraced, and at times encouraged hate, is unfolding before our eyes. These messages represent an alarming increase in vile and abhorrent rhetoric from racist groups across the country, who now feel emboldened to spread hate and stoke the flames of fear that many of us are feeling after Tuesday’s election results,” the NAACP president and CEO, Derrick Johnson, said in a statement.

“We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again – there is no place for hate in a democracy. The threat – and the mention of slavery in 2024 – is not only deeply disturbing, but perpetuates a legacy of evil that dates back to before the Jim Crow era, and now seeks to prevent Black Americans from enjoying the same freedom to pursue life, liberty, and happiness.

Brian Hughes, of the Trump campaign, told NBC that they would take legal action “if we can find the origin of these messages which promote this kind of ugliness in our name.

“President Trump built a diverse and broad coalition of support, with voters of all races and backgrounds,” he said in a statement to NBC. “The result was a landslide victory for his commonsense mandate for change. This will result in a second term that is beneficial to every working man and woman in our nation.”

Black people across US receive racist text messages after Trump’s win | US elections 2024 | The Guardian

Opinion | How Trump Upended the Gender Dynamics of American Politics - The New York Times

Opinion | How Trump Upended the Gender Dynamics of American Politics - The New York Times

A photograph of men wearing red Trump hats at a campaign event.
Damon Winter/The New York Times

"On the long road to Election Day, no group of voters was more loyal to Donald Trump than young white men. One early theory was that his success with this demographic was a result of male isolation and loneliness. But that showed a fundamental misunderstanding of Mr. Trump’s appeal. He did so well with male voters because he is a walking avatar of a kind of masculinity that Democrats could never embrace, and its appeal transcends this electoral cycle.

Mr. Trump offered a regressive idea of masculinity in which power over women is a birthright. That this appealed in particular to white men was not a coincidence — it intersects with other types of entitlement, including the idea that white people are superior to other races and more qualified to hold positions of power, and that any success that women and minorities have has been unfairly conferred to them by D.E.I. programs, affirmative action and government set-asides. For men unhappy with their status, this view offers a group of people to blame, which feels more tangible than blaming systemic problems like rising economic inequality and the difficulty of adapting to technological and cultural changes.

The Trump campaign was channeling what psychologists call “hegemonic masculinity,” the belief that “good” men are dominant in hierarchies of power and status, that they are mentally and physically tough, that they must embody the opposite of anything feminine — and that this dominance over not just women but all less powerful groups is the natural order and what’s best for everyone.

A 2021 study by the psychologists Theresa Vescio and Nathaniel Schermerhorn found that hegemonic masculinity was a better predictor of whether people saw Mr. Trump as a good leader in 2016 and 2020 than sexism or racism alone. It was a better predictor than trust in government or even party affiliation.

Mr. Trump’s rally speeches were rambling, but they expressed this worldview consistently and constantly. I don’t believe it was strategic; Mr. Trump himself has always venerated power and status for their own sake, dominance over women and hostility toward minorities. He has always referred to himself as the toughest, the best, the strongest, the most, the winner. He was just being himself.

When he wanted to insult his enemies he identified them by qualities that the rules of hegemonic masculinity code as feminine: less intelligent (“low-I.Q.” Robert DeNiro), feminized (“Tampon Tim” Walz), weak (“sleepy Joe”). If the enemy was a woman, he described her through a lens of sexuality or motherhood, because for him that’s a woman’s primary value to men. So it’s no surprise that he painted Ms. Harris as “low-I.Q.” and “lazy” and gleefully suggested that she slept her way to the top.

You could hear it all when Tucker Carlson invited a crowd to imagine how preposterous it would be for Ms. Harris to claim victory. “She got 85 million votes,” he said sarcastically, “because she’s just so impressive as the first Samoan-Malaysian, low-I.Q., former California prosecutor ever to be elected president.” Mr. Trump has made this kind of open bigotry acceptable for Republicans, and it’s not going to just disappear before the next election cycle.

Professionally successful, non-childbearing women can look like a threat, both to the men who adhere to these ideals and to the hierarchy that enables the men to justify their status and power. For men who feel displaced, accusing women and minorities of benefiting from an unfair advantage, demanding that their supposedly ill-gotten gains be rolled back and their subordinate position restored, might be an appealing option. It’s one that the Trump campaign encouraged at every turn.

There’s an irony to this, in that actual systems of advantage — inherited wealth, legacy admissions to elite colleges, nepotistic professional advancement — were all designed to benefit white men. Perhaps no one embodies this unearned privilege better than Mr. Trump, but the ideological framework he operates in does not allow for acknowledging it. Instead, its beneficiaries insist that the rest of the world contort itself into a reactionary power structure.

Connect the dots — the snide insults and the brotastic podcasts and the attack on reproductive rights and the emphasis on natalism — and you get a world in which women are told to drop out of the labor force and attend to domestic matters, making themselves sexually available (but only to their husbands), producing children and supporting their husband’s career, regardless of the effect on their work, time and happiness.

Some observers faulted Ms. Harris for not doing enough to accommodate a regressive view of masculinity, suggesting that she could have picked up some votes by, say, proposing military service as a cure for male alienation, or by avoiding reasonable critiques of sexism because they might make some men feel like they’re being attacked. But prescriptions like these only reinforce hegemonic masculinity, and that is incompatible with a vision for America where the needs and interests of women and minorities are not valued less than those of white men.

It is not the responsibility of women to convince men of our humanity, abilities and potential. But the view of masculinity that Mr. Trump appeals to harms men, too, offering appealingly simple answers that ultimately leave their adherents that much more isolated."

Opinion | How Trump Upended the Gender Dynamics of American Politics - The New York Times