Monday Miscellany, 11/18/24

Money had little impact.   Kamala Harris raised $997.2 million, whereas Donald Trump raised $388 million.  Trump had far less than half as much to spend (39%) as Harris, and yet he won.  In the words of a former Biden staffer, deleting the expletive, complaining about Harris’s campaign, “How did you spend $1 billion and not win?”  Money and contributions from big donors are evidently not the factor they are cracked up to be.

The major news media propagandized in vain.  Journalists in big media were unashamedly biased against Trump.  Some of them openly called for pausing the usual objective standards of their profession and giving both sides of controversial issues in covering Trump, such was his “existential threat” to America.  Their water carrying for Kamala Harris was almost embarrassing.  Nevertheless, despite all of this free political advertisement, to add to what the Democrats paid a billion-dollars for, most of the public was seemingly unfazed, electing Trump anyway.

Demonizing Trump had little effect.  The Democrats’ main strategy was to demonize Trump.  Instead of offering distinctly Democratic solutions to the electorates’ problem, they tried to co-opt the Republican positions (we’re for lower taxes too!  we also  support fracking!  we’ll build a wall!).  Instead, they tried to scare voters with claims that Trump is an “existential threat” (there is that term again) to Democracy, that he will take away your freedoms, that he will impose a dictatorship, that he is a Fascist!

Trump has a lot of baggage, but most of the voting public is not afraid of him.  After all, we survived his first term quite well.  What’s more scary to most Americans is the spectacle of federal agents descending on your home and trying to put you in jail for bogus crimes.  And people ginning up such hostility against you that you become the target of assassination attempts.  Demonizing Trump to such an extent may have had the effect of making him sympathetic.

Abortion didn’t mobilize women to vote for Harris.  The other issue the Democrats were counting on was promoting abortion at the top of their lungs, which was thought would turn out legions of women to vote for Harris.  But Trump ended up winning 45% of the women’s vote, and more than half of white women (53%) voted for him.  It turns out, not all women are in favor of abortion.  And though it looks like most Americans are, overall, they did not believe that Trump would take that “right” away from them, since he himself was the one who sidelined pro-lifers.  But if abortion is not the issue that both sides assumed that it would be, that should give pro-lifers some hope.

The Most Pro-Trump Racial Group

Progressives have put great store by identity politics, working hard to mobilize victim groups against their oppressors.  Their attention has been primarily focused on sex (women oppressed by men), sexual orientation (LGBTQs oppressed by heterosexuals), and race (racial minorities oppressed by whites).

Imagine the shock on the part of racial reductionists to learn that the racial group most supportive of Donald Trump was American Indians!  Nearly two-thirds of Native Americans (65%) voted for Trump.  That is a bigger percentage than that of white people who voted for him (57%).

How could that be? If any group has a right to complain about oppression at the hands of white people, indigenous people being driven out by colonization, environmental degradation, poverty, and other tenets of progressive grievances, it would surely be Native Americans.  And yet, they overwhelmingly voted for the nemesis of progressives.

Tribal people do complain about all of those things.  But their need to hold onto their cultural heritage is the very definition of conservatism.  And they chafe against the government bureaucracies that control what they are allowed to do on their own lands, despite the legal “sovereignty” that the government supposedly recognizes.  The tribes are also trying to work their way out of crushing poverty, but the federal government often thwarts that.  Yes, tribes sometimes object to industrial development of their sacred sites, but probably more often they want to take advantage of the mineral wealth their lands could produce, but the government doesn’t let them.  Jim Geraghty explains:

Why did American Indians break so heavily in favor of Trump? Democrats may begin a lot of events and statements with “land acknowledgements,” but they’re not so supportive of letting America Indians do what they want on their own land. The Biden administration repeatedly put up regulatory roadblocks to American Indian tribes that rely on fossil-fuel production for revenues. Tribes facing some of the worst poverty in the country — lacking indoor plumbing and electricity — are residing on land with fortunes worth of oil and natural gas, coal reserves, uranium, as well as solar and wind. Not only is the Biden administration blocking development of fossil fuels on Indian land, it’s ironically trying to ram through wind and solar projects over some objections from the American Indian community.

I can confirm this from my experience in my home state of Oklahoma, which has the second highest percentage of Native Americans (13.37%) after Alaska (20.29%) and the second highest number (546,565) after California (1,009,450).  A good number of the cars with tribal license plates, which registered members can have because of their tribe’s legal sovereignty, will have Trump bumper stickers.

Native Americans also tend to oppose illegal immigration.  Raise the issue with them and you will often get a bitter comment about the problems Indians have had with immigrants pouring into America ever since 1492.

Catholics Elected Trump

In 2016, about 80% of evangelicals voted for Donald Trump, which was highly instrumental in the close election that put him in office.  In 2020, about the same number voted for him again, but that was not enough to elect him.  This time, once again, 8 in 10 evangelicals voted for Trump.  No more than in 2020.

The big change, which may have produced Trump’s margin of victory, was the Catholic vote.  In 2020, 52% of Catholics voted for their co-religionist Joe Biden, with Trump getting 47%.  In 2024, 58% of Catholics voted for Trump, an 11% improvement, with only 40% voting for Kamala Harris.  Among white Catholics, the difference was even greater:  61% for Trump and 35% for Harris.  A good number of these Catholics who voted for Trump live in the crucial swing states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Philadelphia.

So notes Newsweek.  Paul Kengor of the National Catholic Register delves into the election and concludes in his article with this title, Donald Trump Can Thank Catholics for His Big Win.  See also Mary Eberstadt’s First Things article Why Catholics Voted for Trump.

Commentators cite what comes across as Harris’s overt anti-Catholicism, as in her inquisition of a judicial nominee for belonging to the Knights of Columbus and her snub of the traditional bi-partisan Al Smith dinner, a benefit for Catholic charities.

More deeply, though, was her extreme advocacy and even celebration of abortion.  I don’t think it puts it too strongly to say that Harris persecuted pro-life activists when she was the Attorney General of California, requiring pro-life pregnancy clinics to post advertisements for abortion providers and prosecuting the undercover journalist who recorded Planned Parenthood employees discussing their illegal sale of body parts from unborn children they killed.  And as Senator and Vice-President she has been advocating removing the conscience clause that allows pro-life medical professionals to opt out of performing abortions on the basis of their religion or moral convictions.  She wants to force pro-lifers to perform abortions!

I know that a majority of American Catholics (56%) believe that abortion should be legal in all or most cases, in flat out contradiction to what their church teaches.  That’s not much different from the 63% of all Americans who believe that.

I would argue, though, that many of these Catholics–as well as many other Americans who support legal abortion–feel a certain cognitive dissonance on the issue.  The supposedly devout Catholic Joe Biden has probably done more to promote abortion than any other president, but it is said that he hates to hear the word “abortion,” which is why he insists on framing it as “women’s reproductive health care.”  Biden used to be pro-life, as most Catholic Democrats were, until his party turned in the other direction and began to ban dissenters on the issue.  I am sure that his having sold out his beliefs troubles his conscience when he considers meeting his Maker.  But Harris’s pro-abortion extremism, I suspect, made even pro-abortion Catholics uneasy.

Mary Eberhardt, who also cites other factors in what she sees as a growing Catholic self-confidence , concludes with this:

In the end, the 2024 election just might mark a turning point not only in national politics, but in the energy and self-understanding that Catholics bring to the public square. Given the Democratic party’s fierce rejection of certain bedrock teachings, the wonder isn’t that more American Catholics lined up for Trump-Vance. It’s that so many have tolerated being called haters and bigots, with little pushback, for so long. Religious voters are not a monolith, in the booth or anywhere else. And politicians, like princes, can and will break hearts. But in the historically wide margin handed to Trump-Vance, a phoenix of newly formed conviction seems to be rising.