Orville Taylor | Trumped!

He played within the rules and won fair and square. Politics and democracy are about what or whom the people want. As with the talent shows, like our Digicel Rising Stars, it is not what the judges, commentators or experts think. Only votes count.

Winning an election is pretty simple. Get the majority of registered electors to vote for you. While it might be of some significance if one is competent, talented or the best person for the ultimate prize; elections are popularity contests and for all the talk about ‘rationality’, what matters is what people feel.

Donald Trump pulled off a decisive victory. Without groping for votes, he trounced Democratic challenger, Vice President Kamala Harris, as he did Hillary Clinton in 2016. He can comfortably say that he beats women.

Here is the reality check. The majority of Americans voted for him. Human behaviour is always rational. Voting included; a person can always give a reason for any course of action.

To be fair to Harris, she always had an uphill task, because she simply was the default candidate after President Joe Biden, the incumbent, delayed in making the decision to not seek re-election. With more ample time, the Democratic Party would have probably chosen another candidate, whose simple purpose would be to win the election. With less than a year to prepare, she had to play defence and keep the constituents who voted for her predecessor.

In 2020, Biden eked out a victory over Trump, with 51.3 per cent of the popular vote, and strong support from black Americans, who shifted towards Democrats in the 1960s, after the support of John F Kennedy, who paid the ultimate price, and the full enfranchisement of black Americans after the Supreme Court decision in 1966.

Supported mostly by white voters in the same election, Trump’s still impressive numbers were 74,224,319, just 7,060,347 fewer than Biden. Trump polled 55 per cent of whites in 2020. The majority of the demographic majority favoured Trump.

Black votes matter. Some 92 per cent voted for Biden, including 87 per cent of black men and 95 per cent of black women.

DAUNTING TASK

Having become the 11th hour candidate, Harris’ daunting task was to hold court and, importantly, not score own goals. She then had to contend with an opponent, whom just under half of the electorate like and would always vote for him. Despite whatever people think or say publicly, Trump, who beat an elite white woman with better credentials than Harris, is a representative sample of a significant percentage of the American population. America likes straight, male, ‘Christian’ presidents despite the nominal commitment to gender equality.

True, Barack Obama was the first openly biracial president. His mother was white and he did not attend an historically black college or university (HBCU). In any event, he is a married man, in a nuclear family, declared Christian, and therefore fulfils much of what the American people want to see in their white house, period.

Moreover, both he and his wife Michelle attended white dominated colleges, including the prestigious Harvard Law School. On the other hand, despite attended an HBCU, Harris’ perceived black identity is still a work in progress. Further, she has said very little about her black Jamaican father.

Obama’s father, also an expatriate black PhD economist, died when junior was 21. However, there is no impression of any antipathy towards him. In fact, he wrote a book, whose title honours him.

Up from eight in 2020, Trump won 14 per cent of the black vote. Without a star forward on the attack line, Harris simply scored too many own goals. Her figures for black voters were down to the 70s. At 74,503,761, his figures are almost identical to his 2020 votes. He held serve; Harris got broken. Around 10 million fewer Americans cast for her.

LOSE POTENTIAL SUPPORT

Perhaps, the marginalisation of her father in her profile made her lose a lot of potential support from the most influential black culture outside of the United States, the Jamaican. And while it might have been too late for her to change course, she as a prosecutor, has an image of being the great incarcerator of black men. Despite Trump’s ‘stop and frisk’ advocacy, she never exorcised the ghost of her prosecutorial past.

Somehow also, perhaps being misled by the caricatures of Tyler Perry and others, who consistently presents negative images of black men, she somehow assumed that black men and women on the whole consider the right to abortion as something that they critically desire. Despite the fact that black Americans have high incidences of unplanned and single parenthood; there is a high value among post-slavery populations of fertility. Another major misconception, is how central matters relating to sexual minorities is to the black community on the whole.

Contrary to the conversations about male marginality and irresponsibility, regarding their children, even ‘deadbeat’ black fathers have strong norms of protection regarding their female children. Only a small minority of black people, not just men, can even tolerate the idea of a male, with fully functional genitalia, walking into a bathroom dressed like or identifying as a woman, and occupying the same space as their seven-year-old daughter. While these centralising of sexual minority practices might be important to vocal powerbrokers, this does not necessarily translate to black votes.

And not necessarily approving of Trump’s behavioural travesties; a large percentage of men, black and white do not think that it is such a big deal that he paid a willing participant for transactional sex, to do the opposite of Monica Lewinsky; keep her mouth shut. Indeed, his loose comments regarding palpating the feline might not offend black or white males enough to vote ‘no.’

The long and short of it, is that Trump represents the core of his constituents, while Harris does not quite.

That is why, like economists, we do mathematics and statistics in sociology and measure people’s attitudes; not grand narratives.

Numbers win elections.

Dr Orville Taylor is senior lecturer at the Department of Sociology at The University of the West Indies, a radio talk-show host, and author of ‘Broken Promises, Hearts and Pockets’. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and tayloronblackline@hotmail.com