While it was not the reason that I voted for former, and now future President Donald Trump, I will admit to hoping for some major schadenfreude concerning the left if Mr Trump won. Well, he did win, winning the popular vote as well as the electoral college vote, and not that narrowly. As of 8:15 AM EST Friday, Mr Trump had 73,407,735 votes (50.7%), while Kamala Harris Emhoff had 69,074,145 votes (47.7%). Twitter — I refuse to call it 𝕏 — is chock-full of people wondering when Steven King and the rest are going to emigrate, and when Rob Reiner, best known as “Meathead” on All in the Family, is going to set himself on fire.
Neoconservative and warmonger Bill Kristol, net worth $5 million, who once founded and later destroyed the conservative magazine The Weekly Standard, because too many conservatives were not on board with his #NeverTrump obsession, apparently believes that free Americans somehow need an “excuse” for voting as they do. He tweeted that there’s “No excuse for the American people voting to make Trump president again.”
While in a free country, you can take your voting decisions any way you choose. The supporters of Mrs Emhoff even pushed the notion that yes, it’s a secret ballot, so women don’t have to tell their husbands or boyfriends how they voted, apparently not realizing that trying to estrange men and women could only push more men to vote against the Vice President.
The New York Times gave us some of those reasons people voted for Mr Trump:
Donald J. Trump’s biggest gains anywhere were along the Texas border, a Democratic stronghold where most voters are Hispanic. He won 12 of the region’s 14 counties, up from five in 2016.
By J. David Goodman, Edgar Sandoval, and Robert Gebeloff Friday, November 8, 2024 | 5:04 AM EST
Nowhere in the United States have historically Democratic counties shifted so far and so fast in the direction of former President Donald J. Trump as they have in the Texas communities along the Rio Grande, where Hispanic residents make up an overwhelming majority.
In recent elections, the region’s mix of sprawling urban centers and rural ranch lands that had been reliable Democratic strongholds for generations were beginning to turn red.
Then on Tuesday, Mr. Trump brought South Texas and the border region firmly into his column, taking 12 of the 14 counties along the border with Mexico, and making significant inroads even in El Paso, the border’s biggest city. In 2016, Mr. Trump carried only five of the counties.
The support for Mr. Trump along the Texas border provided the starkest example of what has been a broad national embrace of the Republican candidate among Hispanic and working-class voters. That shift has taken place in rural communities as well as in large cities, like Miami, and in parts of New York and New Jersey.
A few of the reasons given:
Fabiola Rodriguez, 28, a single mother of two children, said just going to the grocery store had become a painful experience. When Mr. Trump was president, she said, she was able to fill her shopping cart for about $250. Now, she spends $300 for a cart that is less than half full. . . . .
She also feared that Vice President Kamala Harris would be unfriendly to the oil and gas industry, which draws many workers from places like Roma. She blamed the Biden administration’s policies in support of renewable energy for cuts to her father’s and her brother’s working hours in the oil fields.
Here’s what the Democrats missed in their push for the First Woman President: Miss Rodriguez was worried about the jobs held by two men, her father and brother. The left, in their tremendous concern for women’s empowerment can’t quite understand that women and men depend on each other. If you hurt a husband or boyfriend, you also hurt a wife and a girlfriend.
“Honestly, I never heard Kamala say any definitive response to anything,” (Rodrigo Burberg, a 32-year-old software engineer from Brownsville) said. “Democrats are saying the economy is really strong. But really, the metrics are not there to reflect what people are feeling. Who cares about G.D.P. if everything is spent on Ukraine?”
The economy is strong . . . if you happen to already have money. If you have a 401(k) or other retirement plan, the strong increase in stocks has significantly increased your retirement savings. But your retirement savings do not put food on your table now, do they?
“I’m in awe,” said Adrienne Peña-Garza, a former Democrat turned Republican activist in the border city of McAllen. “A lot of those people who used to attack us now say, ‘Y’all were right.’ The price of eggs, border security,” she said. “Hispanics, they’re at their heart conservative.” . . . .
“We were talking about prosperity and hope while the Democrat Party was talking about pronouns,” said Representative Monica De La Cruz, who in 2022 became the first Republican member of Congress elected to a district that stretches from the border to the suburbs of San Antonio. She was re-elected on Tuesday. “The Republican Party has become the party of the blue-collar voter,” she said.
Some have tried to say that Vice President Emhoff was a kind of moderate Democrat, but she never really came across as such.
For decades, the Democrats were the party of the working class, the party of labor, and of labor unions. Now most of the unions, other than those of government workers have dramatically contracted, and the left tout themselves as smarter and more highly educated and basically Our Betters. Republican voters, they tell us, are those who never went beyond high school.
But about 73% of adult Americans don’t have college degrees, and disparaging them doesn’t seem like a mathematically good idea; telling people that they’re stupid if they don’t vote the way the left tell them to vote might not be a winning strategy.
For all of his faults, and they are many, former and future President Trump, though never working class himself, understands the working class in a way that today’s Democrats simply no longer do.
