We need to have an uncomfortable conversation about America
OPINION: What if all the pundits, exit polls and election takes are wrong? What if the truth is even more uncomfortable?
Editor’s note: The following article is an op-ed, and the views expressed are the author’s own. Read more opinions on theGrio.
We need to talk about roaches.
According to noted entomologist Karlous Miller and John Whitfield Jr. (famous for his groundbreaking research on the Young Fly), everybody has them. While mosquitoes may have killed more humans throughout history than all of the wars, open borders and Black Lives Matter protests combined, humans are biologically programmed to hate cockroaches more than any other insect. A housefly is far filthier, but roaches represent uncleanliness and squalor. For many, a single dead roach on the living room floor is more embarrassing than having a fly in the kitchen, a mosquito on their actual skin or a dead body in the basement.
Not me.
It’s not that I like roaches, I’m just not embarrassed by them. I understand there is absolutely nothing I can do to erase the most successful survivors from the face of the planet. All I can do is address the problem and prevent it from becoming worse. No one actually exterminates roaches, you just have to fight them every day. But apparently, there’s only one thing that is more embarrassing than being a roach-baiter:
Being part of a uniracial coalition.
According to pundits, political analysts and people who just say things, the 2024 election was the result of a number of factors. For some, Trump’s genius was a matter of faith – the evidence of things not seen. The bags of wind filled by political opposites Joe Scarborough and James Carville blamed Kamala Harris’ loss on “the woke era.” Others blamed the Democrats’ loss on the party’s inability to attract white women, Hispanic men switching sides and the party’s lack of messaging. These may sound like different political theories, but they are all based on the same unspoken hypothesis. It is an unkillable pest that crawls out from its hiding spot every election season. Even the most progressive outspoken pundits are reluctant to address it. It is not a theory. It is a fact hiding in the deepest darkest crevices of every election post-mortem. But somehow, it is never discussed.
You can’t beat white people …
Why Kamala Harris lost, explained
The unspoken notion of an invincible coalition of white voters is the breeding ground from which all political takes are hatched. Not only do pundits base their analysis on the premise of this hidden nest of Caucasian voters, but they assume its inevitability … unless. Progressive candidates will lose unless Black turnout is high. A Black woman can’t be president … unless she can attract white voters … unless she doesn’t focus on race … unless she doesn’t acknowledge that trans people exist. It’s as if white people are biologically programmed to vote against everyone else. And apparently, the only way to defeat the great white roach of electoral politics is for Black, indigenous, people of color who wash their legs and eat spicy food and play tambourines at church to combine our voting powers like BIPOCLGBTQIAvengers trying to stop the Thanos of white supremacy from simply snapping its fingers.
The silent acceptance of white invincibility is why the phrase “multiracial coalition” exists and why race is a better predictor of electoral politics than gender, education or even religion. It’s the only reason why the data showing Hispanic male voters siding with Trump is even noteworthy. White invincibility explains why 53% of white women voted for the white woman’s opponent in 2016 and why 19% of Black men cast ballots for a white supremacist in 2020.
But what if they’re wrong?
What if you found out that most white women didn’t vote for Trump in 2016 and he has never received anywhere near 20% of the Black male vote? What if Hispanic men didn’t shift toward Trump? What if Black voters didn’t stay home? What if all those exit polls are as incorrect as they always are? What if there was no “unless”? What if, sometimes, in some elections, you just can’t beat white people?
Does that make you uncomfortable?
Take Georgia, for instance, one of the states where we can see the unfiltered racial voter turnout data. In the 2024 election, Georgia’s turnout rate for Black voters was 65% while the white turnout rate was an astounding 81%. According to theGrio’s complex proprietary computational algorithm, the 2,548,017 voters who voted for Harris is more than the 2,474,507 who voted in for Biden 2020. And because we know the secretary of state’s data is likely accurate, the exit polls showing 71% of white voters voted for Trump reveal an uncomfortable truth.
When 8 out of 10 white Georgians crawled out from their hiding spots to vote, a Trump victory was inevitable. The rappers who showed up to twerk at Harris’ rallies didn’t matter. Trump’s pantomiming microphone fellatio was insignificant. The discussion of Black male voters was rendered moot. Again, more Black people voted. Harris got more votes than Biden. But, even if every single non-white voter in Georgia cast a ballot for Kamala Harris, she still would have lost the state.
It was mathematically impossible for Harris to win in Georgia.
Another example comes from the much-discussed Berks County, Pa. Everyone was shocked to learn that Trump won the most Hispanic county in the state of Pennsylvania. However, comparing the 2024 precinct-by-precinct vote tallies to the 2020 election results and the U.S. Census shows that Harris’ campaign won more votes than Biden in every single majority-Hispanic census tract in the county. Harris lost because Trump simply piled up votes and increased turnout in the whitest areas and of a county that is 74% white.
Because few states release this kind of data, we won’t have a fuller picture of what happened nationwide until we see more accurate data from studies like Pew Verified Voters or the Cooperative Election Study. However, the best explanation for the 2024 election is uncomfortable to admit. It’s more likely that 2020 was the anomaly. It’s entirely possible that the man who won the second most votes in the history of American presidential politics can only be beaten by a national pandemic that gave voters unfettered access to the ballot. It may simply be that more Americans want a lying, corrupt white supremacist as its leader and there is nothing democracy can do to stop it.
As uncomfortable as it may be to admit, maybe this is what America wants and democracy actually won. Maybe white supremacy is like roaches. You can’t actually exterminate it …
You have to fight it every day.
Michael Harriot is an economist, cultural critic and championship-level Spades player. His New York Times bestseller Black AF History: The Unwhitewashed Story of America is available everywhere books are sold.
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