How significant is the 2024 election?

Of Richard D. LandChristian Post Executive Editor Friday, November 22, 2024

The 2024 election has already entered the Hall of Fame of truly important elections in our national story. Voters have changed in significant, unexpected, and important ways. President-elect Trump increased his share of the vote from 2020 to 2024 in more than 90 percent of the nation’s counties and in all 50 states.

How do you explain the Trump phenomenon? How did he pull off the greatest political comeback in American political history? Mr. Trump and his remarkable rise did not occur in a vacuum. To a significant extent, the rise of Donald Trump can be attributed to President Barack Obama’s attempt to use his landslide victory in the 2008 election to move the country further to the left than his electoral mandate warranted.

Obama’s efforts produced the “Tea Party Movement” of 2010 and the loss of 53 seats in the House of Representatives. As President Obama and his supporters continued to place their trust in the “emerging Democratic majority” and promoted an increasingly “woke” and “critical race theory” agenda, the wind beneath Donald Trump and the MAGA movement metastasized.

Get the latest news for FREE

Subscribe to receive daily/weekly emails of the best articles (plus special offers!) from The Christian Post. Be the first to know.

The deciding factor, however, was the brutal inflation of the Biden years. The economic pressure on working-class voters of all ethnicities, and the failure of the Democratic leadership to recognize it, has proven devastating. According to a New York Times/Siena College poll, “Two-thirds of Trump voters said they should reduce food consumption this year, compared to only a third of Harris’ voters.”

As she sifted through the masses of post-election data, the NYT Jennifer Medina concluded:

“Even as they retained faith in the American Dream, many nonwhite working-class voters said they came to see the Democratic Party as condescending, overly focused on issues irrelevant to their everyday lives. They have rallied around social issues, such as the concerns of transgender children or the party’s focus on abortion rights. They felt scolded by liberals about Covid precautions – and crushed by the economic consequences of the pandemic.”

Consequently, Trump became “the the first Republican candidate registered to win over low-income voters … leading them by three points,” Michael Baharaeen wrote for The Liberal Patriot.

That The Wall Street Journal Jason L. Riley noted:

“According to NBC News, since 2012 there has been a 15-point shift toward Republicans among black voters, a 32-point shift among Asians, and a 38-point shift among Latinos. It is even more remarkable that this trend continued in the presidential election with a woman of black and Indian descent at the head of the Democratic ticket. Mr. Trump won more than 20 percent of black men and more than half of Hispanic men, according to exit polls.

“If this wasn’t the first post-racial election in the country, voters took a big step in that direction.”

As David Brooks noted in the truly remarkable NYT columnthe main argument of the “identity modality is that all politics and all history can be seen through the prism of liberation movements.” Brooks recognizes that group identity is insufficient to explain human individuality.

When I was a boy in the 1950s, my father always told me, “Democrats are for the working man!” Historically, from FDR’s New Deal onward, this certainly seemed to be the case. President-elect Trump’s 44% support among union members certainly challenges my father’s claim as the current reality.

Bill Maher shared some surprising poll results with his audience in an election postmortem titled “Stupid bastards need to give up identity politics!” When asked if America is the “greatest country in the world,” 75 percent of Hispanics said “Yes,” 58 percent of blacks said “Yes,” and 31 percent of “white progressives” said “Yes.”

When people were asked if “racism is embedded in our society,” 38 percent of Hispanics said “Yes,” 62 percent of blacks said “Yes,” and 75 percent of white progressives said “Yes.” When asked if the government should increase border security and enforcement, 49 percent of Hispanics said “Yes” and 15 percent of white progressives said “Yes!”

And by the way, 65% of Native Americans (arguably the most sacrosanct of “woke” victims) voted for President-elect Trump.

All this remarkable data led Victor Davis Hanson, a well-respected American classicist scholar, historian and political commentator, to observe that “this is the greatest cultural, political and social revolution of my lifetime”. (He was born in 1953.) He concluded that “what we’re watching is the slow disintegration of identity politics, racial tribalism, democratic demagoguery, and it’s insidious.”

I pray that Dr. May Hanson be right, and may the waking nightmare be on life support.