The Left Shifts the Blame to America Itself

E ddie Glaude, the prolific author and Princeton University professor (and my old sparring partner at MSNBC) recently sparked a conversation on the left over the degree to which Donald Trump’s reelection reflects poorly on the voters who restored him to power.

“There’s this sense that whiteness is under threat,” he said in a recent appearance that has generated much attention. The country’s changing demography — as represented by “racially ambiguous children on Cheerio’s commercials” that he imagines confound a particular sort of voter — has, he says, condemned a critical mass of Americans to paranoia and chronic self-doubt. That’s his explanation for the Trump phenomenon.

MSNBC host Stephanie Ruhle proposed an alternative theory: Voters’ lives are “just too damn expensive.” Glaude was quick to reject the premise:

You are telling me, Stephanie, that all of these people who believe that bread is too high, and eggs are too high, that they voted for a convicted felon? . . . I do not believe that! I cannot believe that! And the reason I think you believe it is because you don’t want to be believe that that’s what’s really motivating them. It’s always the case. People don’t want to believe what the country actually is. Because, if they believe it, they’re going to have to confront what’s in them.

The hosts of MSNBC’s Morning Joe didn’t seem to buy Glaude’s premise. On Monday, the team spent several minutes dwelling on New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd’s latest op-ed, which blames Democrats’ political woes on their embrace of boutique “identity politics” issues of little relevance to the broader public. “Sigh,” the professor remarked on X. “Trumpism IS identity politics.”

Glaude’s theory of the electorate has the epistemological advantage of being unfalsifiable. Voters can say their vote has been heavily influenced by their individual economic circumstances all they want. They can insist that inflation has been personally taxing, cite their positive view of the Trump administration’s record in office, and tell pollsters that “people will continue to pay more money on everyday expenses unless the government becomes more fiscally responsible.” But we should know that none of it is true. In Glaude’s telling, voters are instead rationalizing, consciously or otherwise, their antisocial pathologies.

Glaude didn’t invent this theory of the electorate. In the fall of 2021, New York magazine published a similarly uncharitable piece of revisionist history by Rick Perlstein. In it, the author maintained that public anxiety over inflation in the late 1970s was not a response to inflation at all. Instead, Perlstein said, the public’s apprehension over their declining purchasing power was just the socially acceptable expression of voters’ discomfort with a variety of overlapping cultural conditions. Destabilizing societal shifts in that decade had disrupted American politics, and the issue of inflation allowed voters to smuggle their irrational animus into the national conversation under a more legitimate guise.

It’s easy to see the appeal in this argument from the perspective of a jilted left-of-center political commentator eager to displace the blame for what just befell his coalition. But the theory is impoverished by its lack of empirical support. Indeed, the data we do have suggests that Glaude, Perlstein, and those who are receptive to this line of argumentation are misleading themselves.

The exit polling produced on Election Day will take weeks to refine, but the preliminary data do not suggest that voters were ensorcelled by Trumpian appeals to white identity politics. Black men have drifted away from the Democratic column at a steady pace since 2016. So, too, did Hispanics of both genders. By contrast, the number of white men who supported Trump in 2024 is comparable to the 2020 number, and Democrats closed the gap that opened up in 2020 among white women.

“You would have to go back to before the Civil Rights Act to see a more diverse Republican coalition,” Newsweek’s Darvio Morrow conceded. And there is reason to believe that Trump’s surprising strength outside the seven highly contested swing states will beget a healthier civic status quo. “In a world where New York and New Jersey can swing by double digits in a single election, neither party can take any voter for granted, nor treat them as impossibly out of reach,” Semafor’s Benjy Sarlin observed.

Still, evaluating the electorate by race alone conveys perhaps the least information about the dynamics that produced a landslide Trump victory on Tuesday. It’s more instructive — and, more important, prescriptive — to look at the breakdown among voters by their level of educational attainment, their age cohort, their geographic location, and, of course, how they feel about the economy.

The exit polling does not indicate that Donald Trump has been transformed into a beloved figure; he is more unpopular than the Democratic nominee he defeated. But the public’s economic outlook is still the most straightforward explanation for voters’ rejection of the incumbent party. “In 2020, Biden won voters with a negative view of the economy by 63 points,” Fortune’s reporters observed. “Harris lost them by 40.”

When all you have is a hammer, you can convince yourself that everyone is at least a little racist. But that conclusion is not well supported, and it can prove psychologically debilitating if it leads its adherents to presume that most voters are fueled by irrational hatred and therefore unpersuadable. If they didn’t rationalize themselves into voting for Trump, they can’t be rationalized out of it.

Not only is this outlook unconvincing, it also provides the pro-Trump Right with unearned license to overread its mandate. If voters aren’t really looking to the GOP to deliver them from Joe Biden’s economic doldrums, maybe Republicans can and should commit to wholesale cultural warfare with the Left, embark on the sloppiest of mass-deportation programs, and staff the executive branch with entirely unqualified lickspittles. If Glaude’s theory is operative, none of this would beget an anti-Trump backlash — it’s what the voters really want.

America’s merit and virtue are not contingent on election results. Voters hired Trump to do a job to their satisfaction — a job they thought Biden failed at. And if Trump doesn’t deliver, they’ll give Democrats another shot in 2028. That exceedingly banal explanation for voters’ behavior in 2024 leaves a lot of theatrics on the table, but it has more explanatory power than the notion that Trump’s victory is attributable to the irredeemable bigots who secretly surround us.