2024 Election: Racism, sexism real

 

My letter in today's Trib Star, Saturday, Dec. 14, 2024.

Letter: Racism, sexism real

Reading the press and listening to TV commentators you would think Trump’s 2024 win was a landslide in its outcome. It wasn’t. Far from it.

So Donald Trump did win the 2024 election. Harris isn’t calling any secretaries of state asking them to “just find 11,780 votes” or else. That didn’t work for Trump in 2020. And the Democratic Party will not be sending out a legal hunting party to overturn valid vote counts in states around the country. Another Trump bad faith tactic — 60 tries and 60 failures.

Trump 2.0 is heading into office with a thin win in the popular vote (77 to 75 million in rounded off figures). It was a win that did not net him a majority of the votes cast. His total vote was up from the 2020 defeat he challenged, legally and extra-legally. But in 2024 he was four million short of the 81 million the white male Biden garnered in his 2020 win.

Trump won handily in the Electoral College. That artifact of a long ago day did its usual job of detouring democracy. One electoral vote accounts for 195,000 people in Wyoming and over 700,000 people in Texas, Florida or California. And so it goes … until a disaster even greater than Trump’s election reforms Article II, Section 1, Clause 3 of the U.S. Constitution. It’s also worth pondering that in this important election close to 90 million eligible voters chose to take a pass.

Harris’s close popular vote loss was clearly due to the fact she was a woman and Black.

Most pollsters and pundits will not say this, or even examine this ugly truth. They are more than ready to examine the votes of Blacks and women who chose not to vote for her. Try finding a pollster or commentator who straight out asks voters: Will you vote for a Black woman? Pollsters, the press and pundits say that if you ask this question directly no one will give you an honest answer. Probably true in most cases. But if only 5% of Trump’s voters had the race and gender of Harris primarily in mind when they voted (and Trump and Vance never tired of putting it there) those votes would account for nearly four million of his total vote.

Four million racist and sexist voters. As mentioned above, the popular vote was Trump, 77 million, Harris, 75 million. You do the math. This may all appear speculative, too simplistic. The continuing existence of racism and sexism in this country is neither speculative nor simplistic. It’s real. And so were the votes cast for Trump and against Kamala Harris, a Black woman. And now we all will suffer the result.

— Gary Daily