The legacy press explains reality away. Matthew Continetti on the right. Freddie deBoer on the left. Marianne Williamson on Democratic elites. Plus: Olivia Reingold, Frannie Block, and more.
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No, the Problem Isn’t the Voters
The legacy press explains reality away.
Ever since Donald J. Trump arrived on the political scene in 2015, elites have claimed his rise signals the last gasp of a dying white-majority America alarmed by cultural and demographic shifts. This was always a kind of security blanket—an excuse to ignore uncomfortable truths.
If Tuesday’s election results do not demolish that cope once and for all, we’re not sure what will. Because look at the results: Trump made
big gains among almost every demographic group: Latinos (45 percent went for Trump—
a history-making number for a Republican presidential candidate), African Americans (13 percent
voted Trump compared to 8 percent in 2020), Asians (
39 percent), women (
46 percent), the young (
46 percent).
The only group Kamala Harris made gains with was white college-educated women and those over 65.
Just look at this graph
from the Financial Times:
But if the media meltdown that followed Trump’s extraordinary comeback is anything to go by, there is no end to that fever dream. Just take a look at what has transpired over the last 36 hours:
- On MSNBC, Joy Ann Reid said, “anyone who has experienced this country’s history. . . and knows it, cannot have believed that it would be easy to elect a woman president, let alone a woman of color.” Of Harris’s election effort, she added: “I mean, this really was a historic, flawlessly run campaign.”
- On The View, Sunny Hostin said: “I was so hopeful that a mixed-race woman married to a Jewish guy could be elected president of this country. And I think that it had nothing to do with policy. I think this was a referendum of cultural resentment in this country.”
- On Morning Joe, Joe Scarborough said to a nodding Al Sharpton that “It’s not just misogyny from white men; it’s misogyny from Hispanic men, it’s misogyny from black men—things we’ve all been talking about—who do not want a woman leading them.” He added that it “might be race issues with Hispanics. They don’t want a black woman as president.” (He left out the fact that Trump performed nine points better with Hispanic women this year compared to 2020.)
- Laura Helmuth, the editor in chief of Scientific American, chimed in with a now-deleted tweet: “I apologize to younger voters that my Gen X is so full of ****ing fascists.” (Fifty-four percent of Gen X voted Trump.)
- The pastor and activist John Pavlovitz, who has 400,000 followers on X, declared: “Kamala Harris was the perfect candidate and she ran a beautiful campaign of joy, empathy, and unity. She just happened to run in a nation that is addicted to nihilism, cruelty, and division.”
- Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of The 1619 Project at The New York Times, warned that: “We must not delude ourselves in this moment.” Among “shifting demographics where white Americans will lose their numeric majority,” she added, there is “a growing embrace of autocracy to keep the ‘legitimate’ rulers of this country in power.”
We could go on, but you get the point. And their point is: Don’t blame Harris, blame the voters.
On one level, that’s true. In a democracy, the electorate is responsible for the results—for better or for worse. H.L. Mencken nailed it when he called democracy “the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”
But you don’t succeed in an election by calling the common people
racist or
sexist or
stupid. You win by
listening to them.
And our media elite have put their heads in the sand. Again. They seem to think that if they keep calling Americans knuckle-dragging bigots, one day they’ll get the message.