How Donald Trump built a rainbow coalition

Now that the electoral dust has settled in America, it is unambiguously obvious that Donald Trump pulled out an across-the-map landslide victory last week. With essentially all electoral votes in, Trump won 312 to vice-president Kamala Harris’s 226. Big Orange also won the popular vote, a rare-ish thing for a Republican candidate, taking 75million overall votes to Harris’s 72million, according to the latest figures from the Associated Press.

Perhaps most notably, the Trump coalition was astonishingly diverse. Trump easily won among the oldest and longest-settled Americans, taking 65 per cent of Native Americans (a still-sizeable population that makes up more than one per cent of the electorate). He also performed well among some of the very newest Yanks, winning Arab American voters surveyed in heavily immigrant cities like Dearborn, Michigan, with 42 per cent to Harris’s 36 per cent, according to Politico. Nationally, according to the Council on American-Islamic Relations, Trump also beat Harris slightly among Muslim Americans (although the Green Party’s Jill Stein, who campaigned heavily against the war in Gaza, came out on top).

Hispanics also turned out for El Donaldo Trumpo, lover of the taco bowl. Per exit-polling figures shared by economics blogger Noah Smith, Trump took 46 per cent of Hispanics overall, while garnering 54 per cent of all Hispanic male votes. The ‘other race’ category (where I fit in) also broke red – 52 per cent for D-Treezy and 43 per cent for Harris. Only black women proved a true outlier, with a remarkable 93 per cent per cent backing Harris. Meanwhile, at least a quarter of black men supported Trump, no doubt causing some household clashes.

White women chose Trump by a solid 53 per cent, leading to constant online abuse and demands to have their voting rights taken away. Perhaps less surprisingly, 60 per cent of white American men swung behind Trump.

Although it has surprised many in the media, you could see this unusual coalition forming during the election campaign, with the emergence of pro-Trump ‘MAGA rap’ songs and a primetime slot at the Republican National Convention given to SlutWalk founder Amber Rose.

Unsurprisingly, the American left has one primary explanation for this multiethnic red wave. Apparently, what drove all those non-white voters into Trump’s camp was ‘racism’. Or, perhaps, sexism. Both have since been repeatedly invoked by the smart set, although often with sexism reduced to a sort of secondary status, like a remora riding on a shark.

In some detail, across a multi-minute segment, Joe Scarborough of MSNBC claimed that the ‘impeccably qualified’ Harris lost to Trump because Latinos have ‘race issues’ against black people, while black men apparently suffer from ‘misogyny’. On the same channel, Joy Reid took a few shots at men across the board, but primarily blamed the bigotry of white women for the VP’s defeat. Over on X, left-wing pundit Mehdi Hasan launched into a tiresome critique of various groups, including his fellow Muslims, declaiming: ‘The Democrats’ most loyal voters, as ever, were black voters and Jewish voters, both of whom are under no illusions about the GOP and both of whom know the historic threat of racism and fascism. Other minority communities would do well to learn from them.’

Importantly, however, all of this all-too-familiar yapping is directly contradicted by what 2024 voters have actually told pollsters (even in large-scale anonymous surveys where almost no one bothers to lie). According to polling by Blueprint, conducted days after the election, the top reason given by voters of all races for not choosing the incumbent vice-president was ‘Inflation is too high under [her] administration’. This option received a +24 score, reflecting the percentage of voters who agreed, minus those who disagreed.

The second-most important factor across the voter pool was: ‘Too many immigrants illegally crossed the border under the Biden-Harris administration.’ This received a +23 score from all voters and a solid +19 from Hispanics and blacks. The third-most important for all voters was ‘Kamala Harris is focussed… on cultural issues like transgender issues rather than helping the middle class.’ (In fact, for swing voters, this was the most important factor.)

Explanations that you could potentially link to the VP’s race or sex, such as ‘Kamala Harris was not a serious candidate for president’ and ‘Kamala Harris could not stand up to America’s enemies’, polled around zero. They were among the least-important factors to voters.

This extraordinary disconnect between reality and The Narrative – where almost every single pundit on a mainstream TV station felt compelled to say things that are provably false – reveals a major problem for the Democrats in the US, and for left-bloc parties across the West. The wokist theories that psychologist Gad Saad describes as a ‘mind virus’ or ‘brain parasite’ have genuinely poisoned a very large chunk of people. At least in public, many members of our elite classes really do now see human life primarily in terms of different races and genders vying for power. When a black (or in this case, mixed-race) woman runs against a white man and gets her ass kicked, the very first questions asked by Good People must be: ‘How did power manifest here? How did racism manifest here?’

Of course, almost all of this woke stuff is nonsense. Empirically speaking, most modern Westerners – across
whites, blacks and pretty much everyone else – are barely racist at all. In the United States, roughly 95 per cent of all citizens now support inter-racial marriage, and would be fine with it for someone they personally know.

Further, even if we do insist on yammering on about ‘group power dynamics’, it is fairly obviously the case that every single individual person belongs to at least 30 to 40 different recognisable groups (a social class, a faith, a sex, a school-boy or -girl ‘tribe’, an IQ clade, a generation, etc). Some of these bring social advantages and some do not. There is no reason to think Mr Trump’s age or status as a ‘felon’ would hamper him less than having a fine natural tan like Ms Harris or myself might.

Finally, there is no objective reason to assume what drives human societies is actually the group-level pursuit of power. Theories based on wokist assumptions predict little better than random chance. It remains hard not to notice that the correlation between historical racist oppression and group income in the United States seems to be quite low. The top-performing groups currently include Indians, Jews, some black immigrants and the Chinese.

We who are non-racist and anti-woke understand what America is really like far better than the identitarian left does.

Wilfred Reilly is a spiked columnist.