America’s ‘white-lash’ against a changing country

Baffled observers have been asking, how could voters who supported Democrat Barack Obama turn to the most explicitly racist candidate in modern US history? Taimur Khan explains

A supporter holds a sign as Republican US presidential candidate Donald Trump was speaking at a campaign rally at Living History Farms in Urbandale, Iowa on January 15, 2016. Scott Morgan / Reuters

Abu Dhabi // Four years ago, at a bar in downtown Cincinnati the state Democratic party was holding a raucous viewing party as election results rolled in from across the country. Ambivalence quickly turned to excitement as it became clear crucial swing states such as Ohio had overwhelmingly supported Barack Obama.

The incumbent’s vaunted demographic coalition of the future was on display – young college student campaign volunteers, African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, and, crucially, blue-collar whites, many of whom said they had not supported Mr Obama in 2008, but who had volunteered to canvas for him in the final stretch in their poor and rural communities. Many cited the president’s bailout of the auto industry in Michigan, and their extreme dislike of the Republican challenger, Mitt Romney, who could never shake his elitist image.

When Ohio was called for the Democratic candidate far earlier than expected, the diverse crowd of political revellers at Cincy’s bar erupted into chants and spontaneous hugs. “I don’t know you but congratulations!” a white steelworker said to a black working mother.

As the dust settles on the shock election of Donald Trump, that moment of national unity and the potential for a transformative liberal, progressive political future that it appeared to foretell seems an almost unimaginable aberration.

Mr Trump, a billionaire property developer and television star with no government experience, was able to sweep into the White House on the back of a divisive campaign whose main elements were xenophobia and racism directed at ethnic minorities, and vaguely defined economic populism aimed almost exclusively at anxious white voters. It was the polar opposite of Mr Obama’s campaign formula that kept him in office for eight years.

Baffled observers have been asking, how could voters who supported Mr Obama turn to the most explicitly racist candidate in modern US history?

While it will take time for a complete portrait of the election data to emerge, a number of factors key to Mr Trump’s victory are clear.

This historic election has thrown into graphic relief the political ramifications of the apparently deep polarisation between the shrinking majority of white Americans and the inexorable future majority of non-whites.

“This is a white-lash against a changing country,” Van Jones, a political analyst for CNN, said as Hillary Clinton’s loss became inevitable.

Early exit-poll data can be inexact, but so far they show a white electorate that voted for Mr Trump in larger numbers than they had for Mr Romney four years ago, across a number of segments of the demographic. Even a majority of white women voted for him when many predicted the taped revelations of his bragging about grabbing women’s genitals, and numerous sexual assault accusations, would push them to support Mrs Clinton. A CNN exit poll had 53 per cent of white women voting for Mr Trump.

There were significant increases in rural white voter turnout, and it appeared that working class whites who had voted for Mr Obama in 2012 had largely shifted to the Republican candidate, who outperformed Mr Romney across the post-industrial Rust Belt of the Midwest, where whites with no college education form a majority. Surprisingly, Mr Trump beat Mrs Clinton two-to-one in districts where unemployment had decreased since 2010, exit polls showed.

The pre-election polling appears to have been so off target, at least in part, because a significant proportion of college-educated white voters indicated to pollsters that they would not support Mr Trump, when in fact they did.

During Mr Obama’s tenure, the US economy, which was teetering on the brink of disaster in 2008, was stabilised, and in recent years has grown steadily. But inequality and stagnant wages have persisted, especially for those in the rural areas that opted for Mr Trump. Mr Obama’s healthcare plan has been popular among poorer voters, and Mrs Clinton supported a number of pro-poor policies such as raising the minimum wage. Mr Trump did not support the wage increase, bragged during his campaign about avoiding taxes, and proposed a plan that would reduce taxes on the wealthy.

But despite this, white voters, and poor whites in particular, flocked to Mr Trump. “A lot of pundits want to bash Dems for being out of touch with the WWC [white working class]. But they weren’t out of touch economically; they were culturally,” Michael Cohen, a pro-Clinton columnist and author, tweeted after the election.

Mr Trump brought the language of white grievance and fear from the fringes, where previous Republican candidates would not go, to centre stage. His political career was launched by a campaign calling into question Mr Obama’s religion and citizenship, and during the election cycle Islamophobia, lurid descriptions of Mexicans as rapists, and promises to bring law and order to “black” inner cities – where violent crime is at all-time lows – became the bedrock rhetoric of his large rallies.

He fused this racial anxiety with a populist economic platform that tapped into a mood of anti-establishment resentment prevalent among the base of Republican voters.

A global elite, which included Republican leaders, had allowed multiculturalism and unchecked immigration, causing America to change for the worse, in ways that did not reflect the “silent majority”, Mr Trump argued. This resonated deeply with the Republican base.

In 2012, ISIL had yet to attack western cities and broadcast its propaganda, though Islamophobia was bubbling up in many parts of the country as an outlet for anxiety about the larger changes in American society – especially as demographics changed in the so-called heartland, not just in coastal cities. With terrorist attacks in Europe and the US in the run-up to the election campaign, and a refugee crisis in Europe, Mr Trump shrewdly tapped into this vein of xenophobia.

“Trump ran his campaign sensing the feeling of dispossession and anxiety among millions of voters – white voters, in the main. And many of those voters – not all, but many – followed Trump because they saw that this slick performer ... was more than willing to assume their resentments, their fury, their sense of a new world that conspired against their interests,” the New Yorker editor-in-chief David Remnick wrote on Wednesday.

Mrs Clinton, on the other hand, was incapable of articulating a platform that was able to channel this pervasive feeling of white resentment from the centre-left. And maybe that would only have been possible by resorting to the same kinds of bigotry as Mr Trump. Exit polls also revealed that in dozens of crucial districts across the rust belt, registered Democrats did not come out to vote in the same numbers as they had in 2012. She is still likely to win the popular vote once the final tally is made.

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US ELECTION: The National's full coverage

■ Rob Crilly: Meet America's next president Donald Trump

■ Colin Randall: Can Trump unite a divided nation?

■ Samanth Subramanian: Trump victory triggers bad Brexit memories

■ Opinion: What the first 100 days of Donald Trump will look like

■ In pictures: Election night

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