Of course there’s evidence of blatant, systematic voter fraud in state after state. After everything that the media, Democrats, Silicon Valley, and the deep state have done to try to tear down Donald Trump during the past four years, what else should we have expected?
If Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, and company were low enough to try to paint Trump as a Russian agent in order to pull off a coup, it only makes sense that the whole sick crew would pull out all the stops to derail his reelection.
And yet . . .
Even for someone who’s been writing repeatedly about the corrupt shenanigans of Trump’s enemies, the apparent scale and perfidy of this operation are deeply dispiriting. As someone who still likes to think that America is basically a decent country, the blatant partisan efforts of a news media that refused to call Trump states for Trump, officials in various states who stopped counting votes when things were looking good for Trump, and then suddenly located tons of Biden votes when they resumed counting again look beyond suspicious.
Trump himself saw all this coming, warning that the dandy new voting-by-mail system was a recipe for fraud. Democrats and the media, from the New York Times on down, flatly denied this claim, even though Trump had plain common sense on his side, as well as innumerable examples of actual postal voting fraud.
Trump’s enemies took the position that he was out to keep people from voting. As it happens, many Western democracies only allow traditional absentee voting, not this wholesale Democrat-style early postal voting, for good reason. Some Western countries even restrict absentee voting, permitting only citizens living abroad to vote by mail.
Such Odd Support for a “Racist”
Then there are the pollsters, who did their part of the job not on Election Day but during the weeks and months preceding it.
As in 2016, we were told Trump didn’t stand a chance. Despite the extraordinary contrast between the frequent, immense, and enthusiastic Trump rallies and the occasional, tiny, funereal Biden gatherings, the pollsters maintained that old Joe was ahead by big margins in one swing state after another. There was no reason to believe them, given the way they’d missed the boat last time around, but they insisted that this time they were right, and the media treated their prognostications seriously.
Some of us saw through it, recognizing that there was a concerted attempt underway here to try to diminish enthusiasm for Trump and thus lower the turnout of Trump voters on Election Day—and perhaps also, it now seems, to make the fake votes for Biden look legit. In any event, they failed to keep Trump voters home. Even though the vote counts in many states are incomplete and/or disputed, the results show no major dent in the Trump vote.
Indeed, the support for the president from certain demographic groups—particularly blacks and Latinos—has risen dramatically.
For decades, the level of black support for GOP presidential candidates has been minuscule, and among Latinos, only Cubans were a reliable GOP bloc. On Tuesday, Trump was backed by 8 percent of black females, 17 percent of black male voters (up 4 percent from last time), 28 percent of female Latinos, and fully 35 percent of male Latinos. In the heavily Hispanic Miami-Dade County, Trump’s vote tally was 50 percent higher than in 2016.
Historically, these are remarkable numbers. And they must come as a shock to millions of Trump-haters, especially those white suburban women who, if asked why they despise him, will reflexively tell you: “He’s racist! He’s a white supremacist!” Of course, he is nothing of the kind. In fact, these Trump-haters are only parroting what they’ve heard on CNN or MSNBC or wherever. Plus, the idea that Trump is a racist makes sense to them, because they find his personality so off-putting. He’s loud, he’s vulgar, he’s constantly bragging on himself, he has that Queens accent: he must be a racist. He’s not like the quiet, diaper-changing beta men they married.
Well, then, if he’s a racist, then this year millions of black and Latino Americans cast their votes for a racist. Except that they didn’t do anything of the kind.
As Scott Adams asked on his Thursday podcast, “Don’t you think that a black person is good at spotting racism? . . . Don’t you think . . . your average black American can spot real racism faster than somebody else?” If blacks and Latinos can’t hear Trump’s supposedly racist “dog whistle” that his enemies have been claiming to hear for the last four years, said Adams, it’s because the racism accusation against Trump “was bullshit all along.”
What They Really Saw
Anyway, to Americans who’ve been paying attention to Trump’s performance in office, his high level of support among minorities shouldn’t come as a surprise. In 2016, he actively courted black voters, underscoring the fact in speech after speech that the Democratic Party had taken their votes for granted for decades and had done nothing to earn their support. What do you have to lose, he asked black audiences, by voting for me? And before the pandemic hit, he did a great deal to earn black and Latino support, among other things producing record-high employment figures for both groups. By contrast, once the campaign got underway, Biden (to the extent that he campaigned at all) resorted to the usual pandering, famously saying at one point that if blacks didn’t vote for him, they weren’t black. Predictably, this patronizing stuff turned off many self-respecting black voters.
Many black and Latino men, moreover, were impressed not only by Trump’s record but also by the man himself. If suburban white women looked at him and only saw an obnoxious lout, many hard-working black and Latino men looked at him and saw a man in full—a man who’d triumphed in the tough world of New York real estate, a man who refused to be cowed by his multitudinous enemies, a man with admirable pride and self-assurance. A man with cojones. They saw a man who, after a lifetime on construction sites, knew, liked, understood, respected, and felt totally comfortable talking to regular working guys, whatever their background, skin color, or social class.
Then there’s this. Unlike a great many of those Trump-hating white suburban women, Latino voters from countries like Cuba and Venezuela and Nicaragua don’t take their freedom and opportunities in America for granted. Trump’s manifestly sincere rhetoric about liberty, and his warnings about socialism, resonated powerfully with people who’d lived under the likes of Castro and Chávez, whereas Biden’s coziness with the likes of U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortéz (D-N.Y.), and his readiness to support frankly Communist schemes like the Green New Deal, appalled them.
A post-election article at the NBC News website suggested that Trump had done well with anti-Communist Latinos because he “misleadingly cas[t] Biden as a socialist.” But folks who’d actually lived under Latin American socialism didn’t need Trump to connect the dots for them.
The Good News
The great voter shift didn’t just affect Trump’s tally. As NBC News noted, “Trump’s popularity also seems to have affected down-ballot races, with two House Democrats from South Florida losing in early ballot returns to Republican challengers: Rep. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, the first South American-born member of Congress, was trailing Carlos Gimenez, the Miami-Dade County mayor, and Rep. Donna Shalala was trailing TV host and commentator Maria Elvira Salazar.” Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) told Ben Shapiro on Wednesday that the age of courting Latino voters with mariachi bands and such was past: “Hispanic voters want what we want. Freedom, opportunity, border security.”
Rachel Bovard, an American Greatness contributor, made essentially the same point in a Wednesday interview with CBS News. “Race is not determinative of outcome,” she said. “To a great extent, identity politics isn’t working because a lot of racial voters care about bread and butter issues . . . and they will respond favorably to the candidate to talk to those issues.”
In other words, in this strangest of all years, when people pathologically obsessed with identity labels have captured the American media spotlight, more black and Latino voters than ever have walked off the Democratic plantation. They refuse to be viewed any longer as members of a victim group; they insist on seeing themselves, and being seen by others, as individuals who want to think for themselves, thank you very much.
Whoever ends up being declared the winner of this election, that’s terrific news.