What About The Rest Of Us?

Created
Mon, 08/01/2024 - 04:00
Updated
Mon, 08/01/2024 - 04:00
Jamelle Bouie writes in his newsletter about the shock of 2016 and how it led to the media obsessing over “the Trump voter” and what they were thinking: One inadvertent consequence of this understandable bout of introspection was, I think, to validate Trump’s claim that he spoke for a silent majority of forgotten Americans. It was easy enough to look at the new president’s political coalition — disproportionately blue-collar and drawn almost entirely from the demographic majority of the country — and conclude that this was basically correct. And even if it wasn’t, the image of the blue-collar (although not necessarily working-class) white man or white woman has been, for as long as any of us have been alive, a synecdoche for the “ordinary American” or the “Middle American” or the “average American.” You may remember the constant discussion, while Trump was in office, over the effect his chaos and corruption might have on voters. Would they care? Where this “they” often meant the blue-collar voters associated with Trump’s victory. And if they didn’t care, could we say with any confidence that the American people cared? They did! What’s been lost — or if not lost then obscured — in the constant attention to Trump’s voters, supporters and followers is that the overall American electorate is consistently anti-MAGA. Trump lost the popular vote in 2016. The MAGA-fied Republican Party lost the House of Representatives in 2018. Trump lost the White House and the Republican Party lost the Senate in 2020.…