Editor’s note: This column was published Nov. 6, but was written before the Nov. 5 election for the print deadline.
By the time you read this column, we will know who won the 2024 presidential election—or not. Why not? The election is too close to call, some states are still counting, or we have a 2000 election-year repeat where ballots in some swing state(s) are being contested.
Several lessons can be learned from this year’s campaign.
The media have a bias toward Donald Trump: This seems obvious. For months before Joe Biden dropped out of the race and passed the torch to his vice president Kamala Harris, Biden’s age and mental capacity were constantly in the news. After the immediate surge in Harris’ popularity died down, the same standard was not passed on to Donald Trump. He is indisputably the oldest presidential candidate in American history. His increasingly obvious mental decline has been clearly displayed by his slurred speech, rambling “word salad” speeches and verbal glitches.
Trump makes racist comments, talks about the “enemy within”, and advocates for killing his political opponents. In any other era, such behavior would have meant the end of a candidate’s chances of winning. In North Carolina, the Republican Party disavowed Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson and erased their endorsements of him as governor over his racist comments about being a black Nazi, expressing his support for the return to slavery, and for making lewd remarks. What happened with Robinson has not been duplicated against Trump. While a hundred or so Republicans have endorsed Harris over Trump, there is no open mass exodus from supporting him.
Media owners like the Washington Post’s Jeff Bezos and L.A. Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong refused to endorse Kamala Harris, undoubtedly fearing for their own lives if Trump were to win reelection.
The Roberts Supreme Court’s conservative majority favors Trump over the Constitution: This has been made very clear by two major decisions:
1) Trump could remain on the ballot even though he tried to overthrow the election on Jan. 6th, 2021
2) He had qualified immunity over his actions while president.
Trump’s threats of deportation of massive numbers of illegal immigrants will likely be supported by the Supreme Court, no matter the damage to the U.S. economy. They’ll be afraid of crossing him and his followers just as those newspaper owners were.
Whoever wins the 2024 presidential election will have to deal with this clearly corrupt and biased Court in the future. If Trump wins the election, then he will likely have the opportunity to appoint two pro-Trump justices during his second term. If Harris wins, then there is hope for Court reform and a code of ethics being instituted to rein in the Court’s excesses.
The conflicts seen in this election cycle reflect the cultural and racial changes occurring in the United States. Within 25 years, whites will likely no longer be in the majority. “The aging white population, alongside a more youthful minority population, especially in the case of Latinos, will result in the U.S. becoming a majority-minority country in around 2044” (theconversation.com).
Vice-President Kamala Harris, with her Black/Asian genetic heritage, represents this changing demographic. Republicans may be able to delay these changes by keeping minorities from gaining political power for a time, but eventually increasing racial diversity will bring about major changes in the voting makeup of the nation. Donald Trump may have enough support to win this election, but this is only the beginning:
“In her research on working-class whites in rural Louisiana, sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild observes that many whites feel frustrated and betrayed, like they are now strangers in their own land. In Trump, they saw a white man who brought them together to take their country back. Hochschild points out that at a Trump campaign rally, whites held signs with slogans such as “TRUMP: MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN” and “SILENT MAJORITY STANDS WITH TRUMP.”
[To combat this] “The decline of the white share of the U.S. population could result in the shifting of racial boundaries to assign whiteness to some people of color so as to bolster the white numbers” (theconversation.com).
Back in the 1800s, Irish and Italian immigrants were not accepted by the racial majority, but eventually, over time, these two groups were incorporated into the nation as whites. This adaptation will likely repeat itself in the future.
“But any future changes cannot override demography. The U.S. will never be a white country again” (the conversation.com).
These are three lessons from this campaign season that will play out into the near future. Chaos will continue. Like a huge oil tanker, it takes a long time for the nation to change course. Expect a bumpy and violent ride over the next few years.
