That Joe Biden was elected the 46th president of the United States should hardly come as a surprise. To say that the incumbent has done nothing over the past four years to merit reelection would be grossly misleading in its understatement. So, why is there such a pervasive feeling of cognitive dissonance among Biden voters? It is almost as if the election outcome itself were an afterthought, even if an immense relief.
Quite simply, the fact that Trump garnered over 70 million votes, the second most in the history of this country, is appalling and almost unbelievable. Fifty-five percent of white women went for Trump nationwide, more even than in the 2016 election, when 52 percent did. The fact that 91 percent of black women went for Biden might lead some to blithely conclude that the election was all about racism. But the real story is far more complex.
Make no mistake: Racism was an overt and significant factor in the race, probably more so than in decades. But unconcealed racism afflicts only a very small minority of the U.S. population, small enough that it would not have forestalled a Biden landslide (I am not going to try to substantiate this assertion, but I welcome any comments you might have to the contrary). It would also be easy to dismiss the results as a product of stupidity, effective media indoctrination, or some combination of the two. Again, both are factors, but only among several others. And Biden followers, while on average more educated in a formal sense, are anyway hardly immune to confirmation bias and other cognitive lapses.
To me, the most interesting fact gleaned from exit polls is that all income strata below $100,000 per year supported Biden, as did families earning $200,000 or more. Only families earning between $100,000 and $200,000 went for Trump (dare I call them the new middle class?). Most would agree that the result calls into question either of the prevailing but simplistic narratives that Trump represents money or that he is supported by the tens of millions of economically marginalized but credulous Americans.
Once more, the narratives are not without a grain of truth. But Trump’s claiming of 70 million “supporters” defies any of the above facile explanations. Millions of those who voted for Trump do indeed despise him. So, what, in addition to racism, stupidity, and media manipulation contributed? It is, alas, a very difficult question to answer, though I imagine that countless pundits and so-called experts will be addressing it in the coming months. I do not pretend to have a definitive answer. But I would venture that too little is said about how the flames of anti-elitism have in recent years been fanned by the continued economic decline of a broad swath of the population. Hillary did not want to go there in 2016, and it is an uncomfortable truth that many Bernie supporters that year would have been ok with Trump, and vice-versa. We need to ask ourselves why.