How history was made and Trump was carried to victory.
Go on, admit it. Don’t be shy. Did you feel the joy in the late evening and early hours of 5–6 November? How about the vibe? Democrats failed to feel either as the garbage deplorables took out the trash and made a bonfire of the dumpster bin. The diversity hire can now retire and feel the sadness of adversity instead.
Donald Trump’s victory is not a repudiation of democracy but a triumphant affirmation of its liberating power. He lost in 2016 by three million votes (two per cent) and in 2020 by 13 million (four per cent). This time he won by 69.2 to 73.5 million votes (three per cent) – his first victory in the vote count and his first absolute majority. He won in 2016 with a winning coalition of disaffected working class whites. He consolidated their support and broadened it to embrace additional demographics and create a diverse and inclusive coalition that he called a ‘beautiful’, ‘historical realignment’ in his victory speech. About 90 per cent of over 3,000 counties across the nation shifted some way to the right. Trump won back the White House and delivered the Senate and House on his coat tails by chipping away at the Democratic cohorts of ethnic and religious minorities, the youth and even women. Turns out the trans threats to women’s spaces in sports and washrooms is more potent in mobilising the female vote than disinformation about Trump’s threat on abortion rights. There are important lessons for centre-right parties across the West: authentic conservatism attracts more voters than it repels.
Trump was authentic and Harris inauthentic, intellectually shallow, morally vacuous and prone to platitudes as policy. Harris held a celebrity-studded rally in Philadelphia on 4 November. Speaking at his own overlapping rally in Pittsburgh, Trump said, ‘We don’t need a star because we have policy.’ Harris recruited Republican reject Liz Cheney, whose surname remains toxic among true-blue Democrats. Trump won over disillusioned Democrats Robert F. Kennedy Jr and Tulsi Gabbard along with Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. He dodged bullets, she dodged questions. He had a record to defend, she had one to airbrush. Democrats voted for the party, not Harris. Maga people voted for Trump more than party. Harris neither explained and defended the last four years nor articulated a vision for the next four. All she did was to attack Trump and declare she was neither Trump nor Biden. He closed with the simple yet powerful question: are you better off now than then?
Trump won, Harris lost and the progressive governance elite was humiliated, but the biggest losers of the night were A-list celebrities and the legacy media. Taylor Swift’s hometown of Reading PA went with Trump. The centreground of the political-information complex has shifted from legacy to online alternative and podcast media. Echoing the ‘quadfecta’ of the GOP capture of the presidency, Senate, House and popular vote, the mainstream media too suffered a quadruple calamity. Their preferred candidate lost. Their already dented credibility was torn to shreds. Some voters did the opposite of what the media hacks told them, echoing last year’s Voice referendum. Ironically, the media helped shrink-wrap the Democrats in the DC bubble so they never woke up to just how cut off they’d become from the concerns, fears, hopes and aspirations of everyday Americans. Reduced to a party of, by and for the elites, they mistook the noise of shouty inner-city activists for the voice of Middle America. The voters gave the tiresome scolds and sneers a big ‘F.U.’ in return, just like with the Voice.
When the machine came after Trump in a scorched earth campaign of total lawfare, blacks related to him as the victim of targeted administrative harassment. Black support for Trump doubled to 16 per cent. Asian-Americans saw a five-point swing to Trump at 39 per cent. Latinos are a faster-growing demographic than blacks and Asians. Their votes for Trump jumped from 28 and 35 per cent in 2016 and 2020 to 42 per cent in 2024. Culture warriors have captured and occupy the commanding heights of state and public institutions from which to coerce and harass critics and dissenters into compliance through an expansive abuse of administrative power: think Australia’s own eSafety Commissioner. All this is disturbingly reminiscent to many immigrants, including Indians, of the VIP culture in their home countries which they fled in search of a better future for themselves and their descendants in the land of opportunity and the free.
Unlike the low depression hanging over many Western capitals led by people yet to outgrow student politics, in heavily polluted Delhi the Modi government will be pleased at the restoration of the House of Orange. The nearly five million Indo-Americans, half of voting age, have been a historically solid Democratic voting cohort. In 2016 84 per cent voted for Clinton, falling to 68 per cent for Biden in 2020. Harris’s share fell again to 60 per cent, despite an Indian mother. Support for Trump was 31 per cent, up from 22 in 2020. The reasons why offer important clues on Trump’s appeal to other Asian-Americans, Latinos, blacks and even Arab-Americans. The progressive cultural crusade is quintessentially Western, both irrelevant and repugnant to most non-Western immigrants. They are strongly pro-traditional families, don’t subscribe to white privilege and guilt, don’t believe masculinity is toxic and all women should be automatically believed when making serious allegations of sexual assault that devastate not just the man but his whole family, don’t support affirmative action for blacks, women and transgender, don’t obsess over personal pronouns and don’t lie in bed terrified of being cooked alive by global boiling. Trump’s disdain for these progressive pieties quite appeals to them.
Many Indo-Americans had to wait years for a green card while working in tech, building companies, paying taxes and unable to access social security benefits until they became citizens. Immigration as a fairness issue has turned many into Trump voters, especially when they see undocumented immigrants committing crimes and accessing social benefits funded in part by their taxes. They resent Democrats pandering to grifters who contribute little to society or the economy and forgive debts incurred by graduates of victimhood and grievance degrees. They are bewildered at being maligned as ‘white adjacent’ for their community’s success through education and the work ethic that contradicts the narrative of oppressed minorities. They fought all the way to the Supreme Court against discriminatory admissions by the nation’s elite universities. They have lived experience of the heavy burden of the regulatory state which, having greatly expanded during Covid, is refocusing on net zero.
Trump’s successful courtship of blacks, Latinos, Asians and Indo-Americans should attract the interest of campaign strategists of centre-right parties across Western democracies, including Australia, on how to fight culture wars in order to win elections in a rapidly evolving political landscape where traditional partisanship is in free fall and new alignments are coalescing around class- and family-based values and concerns.
The substantially longer original version is here at Brownstone.
Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
Original here: https://brownstone.org/articles/trumps-multiethnic-winning-coalition/
Author
- Ramesh Thakur, a Brownstone Institute Senior Scholar, is a former United Nations Assistant Secretary-General, and emeritus professor in the Crawford School of Public Policy, The Australian National University. View all posts
