By Jack Bernard, contributing columnist
PEACHTREE CITY, Ga. | Now we learn that Trump did slightly better than he did in 2020, winning 49 percent of the popular vote. He got 76 million votes, two million more than in 2020. And Kamala Harris got 74 million votes. But Trump’s victory was not a “landslide” or “mandate” as FOX hosts would have you believe. He triumphed in the entire south and almost every state in middle America.
The “why” is both simple and complex. It boils down to four key elements:
- President Biden’s unpopularity;
- Machismo;
- Harris inadequately addressing the economy and
- The failure of the Biden administration and candidate Harris to address illegalimmigration.
First and foremost, there is the problem of Joe Biden’s failure to withdraw early in the race. In 2024, Trump was ahead of Biden all year long. And Biden was deteriorating mentally and physically before our eyes. Yet, he stayed in the race until very close to election day. This fact was…and still is…hard to understand.
In late 2023, Biden had a dismal favorability rating of 39 percent versus 53 percent in 2020. That year Democratic strategist James Carville stated: “There are huge majorities of people in this country who think that the president is too old, and I don’t know if they are able to look beyond that…”
As the first in my extended family to go to college, I liked “Blue collar Joe”. But in 2023, I also thought that if things did not change, Trump would be elected for a second term. If I could see it, then so could Biden’s advisers. But they did not want to bruise an old man’s ego. So, he hung around until after his disastrous debate with Trump when Pelosi and other big wigs finally gave him an overdue push.
Even then, diminished as he obviously was and is, he did not resign the presidency and hand the reins over to Harris, as he could have. If he had done so, she would have had a chance to enact her own unique new policy proposals, though for a short while, rather than being stuck with his failing record on inflation and immigration. Plus, if she had been president in 2024, she could loudly claim that she was somehow responsible for lowering inflation (it is now down to 2.6 percent annually).
Machismo (strong or aggressive masculine pride) is another key reason Kamala Harris lost ground with two groups, the Hispanics and black men. Since Harris is black, the feeling was that Harris would gain a larger percentage of black men versus Biden in 2020. But she did not, losing 22 percent to Trump versus only 19 percent for Trump in 2020. However, she did much worse with Latino men, especially those under 40. One poll indicated that 55 percent of Latino men voted for Trump.
Brookings analyzed why the Hispanic male numbers were so high. Based on polling, it concluded it was because of blue collar economics versus sexism. However, as with all polls, the results are only as accurate as the veracity of those polls. In other words, there is no guarantee that black and Latino men would be open about their feelings about some women being more successful than them.
In the next column, I will deal directly with economics and immigration.
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