Democrats, a majority of white women just aren’t into you.
I know this is painful to hear, and I hate to break the news, but a sincere friend who loves you tells harsh truths, while others write articles about “economic anxiety” and hillbilly elegies.
You have spent so much time and energy over the past several years chasing Amy and Karen. You’ve squatted in Rust Belt coffee shops and visited Midwestern suburban Paneras, talking to “real Americans.” You held numerous focus groups and interviewed hundreds of “undecided voters” desperately trying to understand why they would continue to support a failed businessman and crude misogynist who brags about grabbing women and faces nearly two dozen sexual assault allegations, and how you could get them to support you instead. Despite all that, they don’t.
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Democrats, you went with Hillary Clinton in 2016, a qualified candidate with baggage who still won the popular vote and could have been our first female president. To assuage the cultural anxieties of white voters traumatized by the Blackness of the Obamas, she passed on picking as a running mate a Latino man like Julian Castro or Tom Perez, a Black man like Senator Cory Booker, or even a woman like Senator Elizabeth Warren—and she’s white! Instead, she picked the most anodyne white man available, Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia, whose nomination didn’t excite anyone outside of his own family members. (My wife completely forgot he was the 2016 Democratic VP candidate.)
A majority of Amys and Karens didn’t care. They went for the guy who brags about grabbing women and who told Howard Stern it’s fine to refer to his daughter as a “piece of ass.”
Four years later, if anything, white women as a group cared even less. Thanks to even a larger majority of white voters, 73.6 million people voted for Donald Trump, nearly 10 million more than in 2016. Fifty-five percent of white women voted for Trump, according to exit polls, up 2 points from his 2016 share.
Whiteness is a hell of a drug. It’s a system and state of mind that has always centered and elevated white pain, white bodies, white rage, and white anxiety, real or manufactured, above everyone else’s suffering and victimhood. Even now, after 80 million Americans voted for Biden, we are still told we need to understand Trump supporters and “reach” out to them to understand their pains and fears.
How come no one is calling on them to understand the pains and fears of the majority that suffered under Trump and came out in record numbers during a pandemic to make sure he’d remain a one-term president?
Whiteness makes those who are in power believe they are victims. It makes equality look like oppression. It makes murderers like Kyle Rittenhouse into heroes and losers like Donald Trump into Chosen Ones. It also protects white women, transforming their tears into weapons that have targeted men from Emmitt Till to Chris Cooper.
Black tears still flow for Breonna Taylor and George Floyd. Muslim tears for lives disrupted by Trump’s Muslim ban. Latino tears for his policies that locked up kids and separated children from their parents. Where are the conservatives calling on Trump supporters to reach out and understand our pain?
Still, those tears weren’t wasted or forgotten. They were fuel for communities of color, led by women, to organize, mobilize and vote for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in record numbers. More than 90 percent of Black women voted for the former vice president, along with nearly 70 percent of Latinas, and 63 percent of Asian American women.
A network of organizers including Stacey Abrams helped register more than 800,000 voters in Georgia alone, and the state went blue in a presidential election for the first time since 1992. Black voters in big Rust Belt cities helped Biden flip Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Latino women pounded the pavement, knocked on doors, organized and got out the vote to help Biden win in Nevada and Arizona. Native women helped mobilize voters in Navajo and Hopi reservations in northeastern Arizona to cast 60,000 votes in a state that Biden carried by barely 10,000 votes and that went blue for only the second time since 1948.
People of color did not play “identity politics,” but instead voted for Biden as a pragmatic choice, realizing he would garner the most votes to help defeat Trump. We came out to save the nation from itself, yet again.
The question now for Democrats is if you will, once again, take our votes for granted to cater to white fragility and anxiety, or if you will finally center our votes and concerns. You can make the right choice by first saying “thank you,” and then “what can I do for you?”
President-elect Biden has already promised Black voters that “You’ve always had my back, and I’ll have yours.” That’s a start, Democrats.
You learned the hard way in 2020, voters of color can’t be taken for granted or lumped into some undefined monolithic mass. We are diverse and complex, and need to be courted as such. A one-size-fits-all message won’t work moving forward. Substantive representation in the Biden cabinet would also signal that women and people of color can emerge as leaders and not just “the help.” So far, the initial signs are promising.
If you can spend years in Rust Belt diners, you can spend some time in border towns in Texas, Cuban, and Venezuelan communities in Florida, Native communities living on reservations, Muslim mosques in the Rust Belt, and Asian American communities in the Midwest to increase their numbers against an increasingly extremist and counter-majoritarian Republican Party.
You can stop chasing Amy and start chasing Stacey (Abrams) and her friends. You know, the voters who are actually into you.
