How significant is the 2024 election?

The 2024 election has already entered the Hall of Fame of truly important elections in our national story. The voters shifted in significant, unexpected, and important ways. President-elect Trump increased his percentage of the vote from 2020 to 2024 in over 90% of the nation’s counties and in all 50 states.

How do you explain the Trump phenomenon? How did he engineer the greatest political comeback in American political history? Mr. Trump and his remarkable rise did not transpire in a vacuum. To a significant degree, the rise of Donald Trump can be attributed to President Barack Obama’s attempt to use his significant victory in the 2008 election to take the country farther to the Left than his electoral mandate justified.

Obama’s efforts produced the “Tea Party Movement” of 2010 and the loss of 53 seats in the House of Representatives. As President Obama and his supporters continued to place their faith in the “emerging Democratic majority” and pushed an increasingly “woke” and “critical race theory” agenda, the wind beneath Donald Trump and the MAGA movement metastasized.

The deciding factor, however, was the brutal inflation of the Biden years. The economic pressure on working class voters of all ethnicities and the Democrat leadership’s failure to acknowledge it proved devastating. According to a New York Times/Siena College poll “Two-thirds of Trump voters said they had to cut back on groceries this year, compared with only a third of Harris voters.” 

As she sifted through the masses of post-election data, NYT’s Jennifer Medina concluded:

“Even as they held onto their faith in the American dream, many non-white working-class voters said they had come to see the Democratic Party as condescending, overly focused on issues irrelevant to their day-to-day lives. They bristled over social issues like the concerns of transgender children or the party’s focus on abortion rights. They felt scolded by liberals on Covid precautions — and crushed by the pandemic’s economic fallout.” 

Consequently, Trump became “the first Republican nominee on record to win low-income voters … carrying them by three points,” wrote Michael Baharaeen for The Liberal Patriot.

As The Wall Street Journal's Jason L. Riley noted:

“According to NBC News, since 2012 there has been a 15-point shift toward Republicans among black voters, a 32-point shift among Asians, and a 38-point shift among Latinos. That this trend continued in a presidential election with a woman of black and Indian heritage at the top of the Democratic ticket is even more remarkable. Mr. Trump won more than 20% of black men and more than half of Hispanic men, according to exit polls.

“If this wasn’t the country’s first postracial election, voters took a big step in that direction.”

As David Brooks noted in his truly remarkable NYT column, the main argument of the “identitarian mind-set is that all politics and all history can be seen through the lens of liberation movements.” Brooks acknowledges that group identity is insufficient to explain human individuality.

When I was a boy back in the 1950s, my father always told me, “The Democrats are for the working man!” Historically, from FDR’s New Deal onward, that certainly appeared to be the case. President-elect Trump’s 44% support among union members certainly challenges my father’s assertion as the present-day reality.

Bill Maher shared some startling poll results with his audience in an election post-mortem titled “Stupid Dems Need to Ditch Identity Politics!” When asked if America was “the greatest country in the world,” 75% of Hispanics said “Yes,” 58% of blacks said “Yes,” and 31% of “white progressives” said “Yes.”

When people were asked if “racism is built into our society,” 38% of Hispanics said “Yes,” 62% of blacks said “Yes,” and 75% of white progressives said “Yes.” When asked if the government should increase border security and enforcement, 49% of Hispanics said “Yes” and 15% of white progressives said “Yes!”

And by the way, 65% of Native Americans (undoubtedly the most sacrosanct of the “woke” victims) voted for President-elect Trump.

All this remarkable data caused Victor Davis Hanson, a well-respected American classicist scholar, historian and political commentator to observe that “this is the greatest cultural, political, social revolution of my lifetime.” (He was born in 1953.) He concluded that “what we are watching is the slow disintegration of identity politics, racial tribalism, democratic demagoguery, and it’s insidious.”

I pray that Dr. Hanson is correct and the woke nightmare is on life support.