The Way It Is?

Election Reflections #2: The Heart of America (or, How to Outrun a Bear)

They say, “That’s just the way it is. Some things will never change. That’s just the way it is.” Ah, but don’t you believe them. — Bruce Hornsby & the Range

We’re being told that this election was a referendum on the heart of America. But it wasn’t. “America has spoken,” someone recently said, expressing their disappointment in us as a people. But that’s not where I stand.

That’s because, for all the commentary about why people voted the way they did, and our tendencies to scapegoat people – white people who voted for Trump, non-white people who switched from Biden to Trump, women who sided with him against another woman, etc., that Kamala wasn’t compelling enough, that the Democrats weren’t “speaking to the needs of the people,” and on and on and on, the facts tell a different story. They tell us that Trump backers secured him the White House not by getting out more votes but by ensuring that his opponent got less. And while those two strategies might sound similar, they’re anything but.

What the tallies tell us is that Trump got essentially the same number of actual votes in 2024 (74.7 million) as he did in 2020 (74.3 million). That’s an increase of less than 500,000 votes, not even a 1% bump, and that’s with a voting age population that increased by 12.5 million over that same four-year period. If you take into account America’s entire voting age population (every citizen old enough to vote), Trump’s percentages actually went down. He secured 29.4% of the voting age population in 2020 and 28.2% in 2024. Yet, his percentage of eligible voters remained essentially the same.

So, there wasn’t this huge uptick in votes for Trump. His vote count is essentially the same, and percentage-wise, compared to population growth, he even lost ground. Nor was there this huge defection of people who voted Democrat in 2020 and who then voted Republican in 2024. Again, if that was the case, there would have been significant movement in Trump’s tallies. But there wasn’t. So, how can this be?

I’ve been explaining for some time now that due to the massive population shifts we’re undergoing, the Trump base, whether they’re committed to him for religious, racial or political reasons, has reached its limit. His base got out pretty much every vote they could in 2020, and it was impressive – resulting in 74 million votes.

And in 2024, they did something even harder to do; they got those voters out again. (Ask any team that’s won back-to-back World Cups or Super Bowls how tough this is.) But for all their efforts, all the claims that this was our racial/religious Armageddon, their last stand, voter turnout for their chosen candidate hardly budged. And again, if you take into account relative population growth, it went down.

This means – and I’m not sure it’s possible to overstate this – that these 2024 numbers are no more of a referendum on the heart of America now than comparable numbers were in 2020. Both times, this shrinking faction got out every vote they could, but there were simply no more votes to get out. People keep talking about how the election results show that Trump’s message resonated more strongly with the American people. But it shows no such thing.

“But wait a minute,” you’re probably thinking, “If that’s the case, how did he win?” That’s also the question I’ve been trying to answer. So, I did the same thing I’ve been doing since I started noticing 20 years ago that we were on track to become a minority-majority nation by 2050 and when I started working on the ideas that would become This Land Is Your Land (TLIYL).

I came up with the subtitle — How the Greatest Sociological Shift in United States History is Changing Everything. And What that Change Requires of us. (Or, How Each of Us Shapes the Fate of All of Us) first. That summed up what I saw happening. It was Pete Seeger, someone I consider a mentor, who, upon hearing what the book was about, suggested Woody Guthrie’s This Land Is Your Land as the title.

Back then, 2050 seemed like a lifetime away. But no longer. I started tracking how in 2012, for the first time in American history, non-Anglo births surpassed Anglo births. And that wasn’t a blip. That was the beginning of a sea change. Because in 2013, there were now more non-Anglo one-year-olds AND more non-Anglo births than their Anglo counterparts. In 2014, there were more non-Anglo two-year-olds, one-year-olds and births than their Anglo counterparts. And so forth. You get the idea. And in 2030, 18 years after 2012, that non-Anglo majority starts reaching voting age.

In TLIYL, I describe how this birth cohort, Generation Alpha, is the first minority-majority, non-racialized, non-genderized, non-heteronormative, non-religionized, fully diversity-embracing generation in human history. And that’s not just here. Britain is on track to become non-majority by 2055, and others soon thereafter.

All this is happening as the Baby Boom generation, on the other end, shrinks, as people all along the pipeline are self-identifying as non-straight in increasing numbers and are leaving organized religion behind. As such, for the first time in our history, we’re a nation with more non-churchgoers than churchgoers and where a strong supermajority recognizes same-sex marriage as a right – ideas that conflict with the core planks of the pro-Trump platform.

This was just as true in 2024 as it was in 2020, and will be an even greater factor in 2, 4 and 8 years. So, how did he win? It reminds me of that joke where a hungry bear is eyeing these two guys. One tightens up his running shoes and the other says, “Wait, are you crazy? You can’t outrun a bear!” “I know that,” replies the other, “All I have to do is outrun you.” In the case of the Trump base, the key to winning was not getting out more votes but making sure Kamala (or whoever was running against their candidate) got less. And that’s exactly what happened.

Because if we look at those same numbers, it’s clear something strange is happening. Take the size of the voting age population (VAP). It grew from 252.3 million in 2020 to 264.8 million in 2024, an increase of 12.5 million, or 5%. But the number of citizens who were actually eligible to vote, who hadn’t been disqualified due to convictions, imprisonment, etc., grew only by 4 million, an increase of only 1.6%. There are no good reasons why there should be so many more disenfranchised people just four years later.

Very few of those newly disqualified citizens were Trump voters, which is why Trump’s vote count stayed essentially the same. He didn’t get lots of new votes, but he also didn’t lose votes to disqualifications. This means that virtually all of those disqualifications were on Kamala’s (or whoever would have been opposing Trump’s) side. In fact, had voter eligibility rates remained constant from 2020 to 2024, there would have been an estimated 12.6 million additional eligible voters, most of whom would have been in the Kamala camp.

“Maybe there was a lack of confidence in Kamala Harris,” we then think. And maybe there was. But Kamala, at 71 million votes, got 8 million more votes than Trump did in 2016 (63 million), and 5 million more than Hillary (66 million). Nor did votes Biden got in 2020 go to Trump in 2024. Even among eligible voters, his percentage dropped slightly from 30.8% in 2020 to 30.5% in 2024. In the end, Kamala simply couldn’t close the 3.5 million voter gap between her and Trump, incidentally, the same voter deficit Trump had against Hillary in 2016 when he was declared the winner.

Why couldn’t she close this gap? I’m not sure.

Some of it, I’m certain, is because that sense of impending doom we were living under when Trump was in the White House condemning protests, sending in federal troops to face off against citizens, etc. -- all while we were contending with the devastating effects of COVID -- has lessened. And that likely had at least a small effect on voters getting out on Kamala’s behalf. But it can’t account for a loss of 10 million votes compared to what Biden got in 2020. What can? The significant uptick in people who are of voting age but who are disqualified from voting, another consequence of a Supreme Court that’s no longer committed to protecting the minority.

In 2014, SCOTUS overturned key aspects of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the same one enacted after the march from Selma to Montgomery. That change released states with a history of discriminating against minority voters from federal oversight. The case was brought by Shelby County, Alabama, the next-door neighbor of Birmingham’s Jefferson County, and where, as of 2010, 83% of the population identified as white. (In an article titled, The Goodbye Girl: What Redlining Did to My Hometown, I explained how white flight gutted Birmingham. Shelby is one of the places that wealth fled to.)

The same day of the 5-4 Supreme Court ruling in Shelby’s favor, Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott advanced a voter identification law that had previously been blocked by federal court for creating a discriminatory barrier to a fundamental right, and Alabama Attorney General Luther Strange immediately instated a similar law for the entire state.

A month later, the North Carolina legislature approved a package of voting restrictions; including ending same-day registration, shortening early voting by a week, requiring government-issued ID, and ending a program that encouraged high schoolers to sign up to vote when they turn 18; all statutes that would have been illegal under previous provisions.

The Brennan Center for Social Justice reported that between January and July 2021, in the wake of the failed January 6 effort to reverse the outcome of the 2020 election, eighteen states enacted laws that made it harder for certain Americans to vote. And the people behind those laws were just getting started. Since that election, 30+ states have enacted restrictive voting laws, at least 63 of which were in effect in 29 states when we voted last week.

Which leads us to where we are today.

“I don't want everybody to vote, said Paul Weyrich, the mastermind behind the strategy that allowed religious nationalists to assume outsized power. “Elections,” he declared at a 1980 training session for 15,000 Christian preachers, “Are not won by a majority of the people. They never have been from the beginning of our country and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”

I don’t need to outrun the bear. I just need to outrun you.

Make no mistake – things are dire. We’ve got a group that’s not only a minority but a shrinking one holding all seats of power at the federal level, and most notably, the Supreme Court. We’ve got an incoming president who has made all kinds of promises to them, many of which would be catastrophic for vast segments of our increasingly diverse population. But with all that said, the greatest danger we’re facing is the narrative that they won and that this is what we, the American people chose. That they have a mandate. They didn’t, we didn’t, and they don’t.

But by wresting control of the narrative; crafting stories that depict them as the saviors of America and the vote as proof that God is indeed on their side, they can sow hopelessness when we have every reason to be hopeful. The stories they’re telling are myths, and if there’s one thing supremacists have mastered, it’s mythmaking.

Because the right myths can win a war.  They can infuse the basest of efforts with nobility, salve our conscience, immortalize our fallen and venerate our cause. And the more horrific the task, the more essential they become. Anyone charged with leading people to kill and to die will tell you that potent mythology is just as important as troops or guns. We’re no stranger to this. American mythology is woven throughout our history, from slavery to our spread across the continent.

Using both guile and force to get what we wanted, we found ourselves in dire need of a myth that could give us moral absolution. For us, it was manifest destiny, the belief that this land was always meant to be our land. But the worst thing about these stories is that they pretend to tell us how to change things when they do the opposite; reinforcing the idea that things can’t be changed. They leave us saying, like Bruce Hornsby sang, “That’s just the way it is...” Ah,” he then says, “But don’t you believe it.”

They’ll tell you that, if anything, this election proves that there’s no hope, that we should pack it in, and that this outcome was inevitable. Don’t you believe that either. “If you lose hope,” Martin said in the last Christmas sermon ever give:

“Somehow you lose the vitality that keeps moving, you lose that courage to be, that quality that helps you go on in spite of it all. And so today I still have a dream… that one day the idle industries of Appalachia will be revitalized, and the empty stomachs of Mississippi will be filled, and brotherhood will be more than a few words at the end of a prayer, but rather the first order of business on every legislative agenda.”

And finally, they’ll tell you that all has been set right, that they’ve finally “taken America back” (or, as Alabama State Senator Sam Engelhardt put it, “Have no fear, the Right and the White will win”) and that they’re the Great and Powerful Oz. But they’re not. They’re a shrinking minority, the men behind the curtain turning dials and speaking into microphones. But the curtain can’t keep them hidden. As Martin said, on the steps of the Alabama state capitol after the Selma to Montgomery march and after all it took for them to get there, “No lie can live forever.”

Everyone’s asking what Kamala did wrong when in actuality, the answer is “very little”. Her message was exactly the one we needed to hear, and if I’m right about the mechanisms that suppressed the vote, it wouldn’t have mattered who was running against Trump – the people who were going to vote for him were going to vote for him, and the state laws skewing who could or could not vote were already in effect.

But if there’s one thing we should have realized, it’s that the strategies Weyrich created were still being utilized, including how, nearly fifty years ago, this small faction began strategically shaping the composition of the Supreme Court. “I don’t want everyone to vote,” Weyrich said. And that’s essentially where we’ve landed.

In This Land Is Your Land, I call this period we’re in, from 2012 (when our shift toward minority-majority began) to 2030 (when that minority-majority starts reaching voting age) as our “Time of Turmoil”. That feels even more accurate now than when I wrote it. But I also know that this election notwithstanding, this isn’t the end. Not even close. Because if there’s one thing the formerly oppressed know how to do, it’s stay in the fight. Those who’ve come before us did it with so much less than we have, and certainly without the numbers we have.

So, let’s roll up our sleeves, make sure that the vulnerable are protected and engage in the work of un-breaking our democracy. Let’s not “take America back”. Let’s take it forward. Let’s elect people committed to liberty and justice for all to every public office in our country, from the local level on up. Let’s envision a society that works for all of us, even those whose actions led us here, and let’s build safeguards so that we never end up here again.

We can do this. Despite this election, we can get to a better place. They’ll try to tell you that we can’t.

Ah, but don’t you believe them.