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Donald Trump knows that he could lose the U.S. election in two weeks’ time, and he thinks that he knows why. “You have one issue, you have the issue of abortion,” he said recently on “Fox and Friends.” “Without abortion, women love me.”
Well, not exactly. In the 2016 election that made him president, white women’s votes split exactly down the middle. It was the pro-Trump majority of white men that outweighed the votes of most nonwhites of all colors and put him in the White House.
In 2020, the white female vote shifted slightly in favor of the Republicans, although it was not enough to save Trump in that election. However, that trend reversed sharply among white women after the Supreme Court’s anti-abortion decision in 2022. It swung the congressional midterm elections of that year over to the Democrats.
Going into the final stretch in 2024 it’s a dead heat between Kamala Harris and Trump, but only because of the abortion issue. Without it, Harris would be the certain loser — and even with it she is seriously at risk because of another gender issue.
The Democrats are losing support among Black men and among young men of all races because they are discouraged, distressed or downright disconsolate at falling behind their female peers. (In a broader sense, women are just catching up, but losing their former advantages feels to many men like falling behind.)
Gender issues matter, of course, but in the context of a national election they serve mainly as a useful distraction for both parties; none of them will be “settled” by the election. Foreign issues like the wars in Gaza and Ukraine are important, and climate is even more so, but not many American voters want to debate those questions at election time either.
What voters really focus on are events like inflation or rising fuel prices that directly impact their lives, but that’s not much use because those issues are usually beyond the control of individual national governments. They don’t understand the deeper issues that hurt them, and neither major party is in a hurry to enlighten them. It’s better that they don’t know.
For example, ask American voters the same question that won the 1980 presidential election for Ronald Reagan — “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” — and the great majority of them, even among those who plan to vote for the Democrats, will answer “No.”
Impartial statisticians (and, of course, Democratic politicians) insist that the U.S. economy is doing brilliantly, and in statistical terms, they are right. Economic growth is up. Jobs are up. Inflation is falling. Interest rates are dropping. Share prices are booming, if you happen to own any. And all of this has been pretty consistent ever since the end of COVID.
However, the statistics don’t convince most people, because their lived experience is that things are not going well. They will tell you that they still can’t make ends meet no matter what the statistics say, and nothing changes no matter how they vote. How can we make sense of this?
The difference is that the statisticians are generally just talking about the past four years (the Biden administration), whereas the American voters they are trying to convince are really thinking about their whole lives.
They have, in many cases, been lives of quiet desperation, because if you strip out the inflation then real wages for most American workers, white or Black, blue collar or white collar, have flatlined for half a century. Average wages stalled in 1973, and never exceeded that level again until 2020.
This applies not just to the United States. With only minor differences this is what has happened to working people in almost every developed economy in Europe, North America and (with some delays) East Asia. Productivity improved greatly, the economy “grew” and the top 2 or 3 percent got a lot richer, but almost everybody else marked time.
It’s so obvious everywhere you look that it’s almost embarrassing to have to mention it. I don’t even see myself as being on the left (though of course people to the right of me do), and I have no comprehensive solution to peddle. But I do know why people like Trump and his ilk are doing so well in politics.
They draw a curtain across the unhappy realities and give angry and desperate people other targets to blame. But the Democrats will not discuss the real U.S. economy either, and no political cataclysm awaits even if Trump wins. He will not bite off the hands of his donors, who are cynical and greedy but not stupid.
The status quo will get elected in the U.S. in two weeks’ time, no matter who wins.
