Trump Got Elected in 2016 Because So Many Black People Weren’t Allowed to Vote
Our Right Wing Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013. This meant that Black people weren’t allowed to vote — at least not all of them — at least not vote and have their votes counted.
Donald Trump won the electoral college in 2016 by a small number of votes in a small number of states. Because he won so narrowly, there are many factors, such as Comey’s letter, that likely would have resulted in a loss for Trump, had those factors been different. One factor that could easily have made the difference is the disenfranchising of Black voting rights. 57% of White voters voted for Trump. 89% of Black voters, and 74% of nonwhite voters, voted for Hillary Clinton. If a substantial number of Black and minority votes were suppressed — Well, you do the math.
The Right Wing was shocked to see the election of a Black president in 2008. In reaction to this, they intensified their bashing and lying about Obama’s birthplace, religion and alliances. They kept suppressing votes and manipulating the voting system.
They GOP started to feel more enlivened in 2010, when they won back the House of Representatives. That feat was made possible partly by the Democratic National Committee. Obama trusted the DNC too much, giving them his online data base of donors, voters and activists. The DNC leadership in Congress is a couple of decades older than the Republican leadership. On the whole, they’re not tech savvy in the least. Perhaps this is why they cluelessly threw away the online data base Obama gave them, thinking they didn’t need it.
Another factor that contributed to Democrats’ landslide loss of Congressional seats in 2010, was the fact that white Democrats are too nice. Black Lives Matter goes around toppling statues of Confederate Generals and makes their point well. Groups of predominantly white Democrats on the whole are not so bold.
Were white people even putting their available energy into get out the vote efforts in 2010? No. Instead, white Democrats were more concerned about wanting everybody to act nice. Here is where their focus was:
The “fear” part of this was a joke. It was a rally to restore niceness. Most Americans are fairly blind to power issues, which makes us easy prey for con artists, such as those who have currently taken over the Republican party. But this is not Eisenhower’s GOP any more.
White Democrats failed to notice that being mean is a way that con artists and propagandists attain power. No rally, whether Democratic or bipartisan, was going to make them give up that meanness and that power. Being nice is not how con artists operate.
I’ve described the Democratic leadership’s problem with ingrained habits of niceness and of over-compromise with Republicans here:
After their 2010 landslide win in Congress, the GOP must have thought the Black president would be gone soon. However, he was re-elected. The GOP even lost some of their seats in the House, although they maintained their majority there.
Obama was re-elected, despite anti-Obama propaganda, despite gerrymandering and other methods used to keep blacks’ and their Democratic allies’ votes from counting, and despite other methods used to keep some Black voters and Democrats from voting at all. That shocked the Right Wing con artists. They started thinking of how they could have free reign to carry out even more voter suppression and voting system manipulation.
That’s why they had the Right Wing Supreme Court gut the Voting Rights Act in 2013. In the 2014 election, the GOP increased the majority they already held in the House and took back control of the Senate. After that, why wouldn’t they be all set to top off their substantial control of government with the winning of the presidency in 2016?
Of course, since Trump won narrowly, many factors could have made the difference, but a lot of Black people not being able to vote, or not having their votes count, was a big one.
Another factor in the 2016 win for Trump was Democrats being science deniers in the area of political messaging. That is, instead of doing thorough expensive research on messaging, Democrats generally just have their highly paid consultants take a wild guess at what might be good public messages.
The Democratic leadership has also been very ignorant of technology and social media campaign strategies such as the ones used by Cambridge Analytica and described in famed whistle blower Christopher Wylie’s book Mindf*k: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America.
I have described the Democratic messaging problem with regard to both traditional and social media here:
It’s no wonder Black people are brutalized by police so much more frequently than white people. It’s no wonder mass incarceration of black people is a problem. Black people don’t really have the right to vote — at least not in their full numbers, at least not to vote and have all their votes count. Highly hackable voting machine systems make this problem even worse.
Hotard’s Law of Systems says: Systems expand to absorb the power available. For example, if a substantial number of Black people have their power cancelled (Now this is the REAL “Cancel Culture”), the police and other systems in government and elsewhere will expand to grab that power.
It’s easy when Black people are blocked from voting — and so don’t have much of a voice in government — for corrupt police to get away with bias and even to get away with unjustified violence against blacks. Who’s going to object? Black people who didn’t get elected because black people can’t vote? Or white Democratic allies to black people who didn’t get elected because black people can’t vote?
So what can we do? Here are some actions we can take.
— Financially support voting rights groups and Black voting rights groups in particular and/or volunteer to work for them. A new one just started this month https://www.morethanavote.org/ . Follow them on Twitter and other social media.
— Get to know the work of people who have extensively studied voting manipulation — people like Jonathan Simon, author of CODE RED: Computerized Elections and The War on American Democracy,
and Jennifer Cohn. Follow them on social media. Invite them to speak to political or community groups — which are mostly having meetings on Zoom for now, due to COVID. So invite them to speak to groups on Zoom. Have your local Zoom book group read Jonathan Simon’s book Code Red, cited above.
— Write or phone your Democratic Congress members, state or local officials and let them know you want them to prioritize voting rights as an issue. Please don’t just contact them on social media. People with hundreds of thousands of followers on social media rarely read their social media messages. Black Lives Matter is paving the way here. We have to get beyond the social media universe, in order to make a difference.
— Write or phone mainstream media companies like New York Times and Washington Post, and associated columnists, speakers, editors, TV hosts, pundits etc. Again, please don’t contact them through social media, because they probably don’t read their social media messages. Ask them to do less coverage of Trump supporters and campus free speech issues (e.g. situations where sometimes college students get so fed up enough with white supremacists invited to speak at their college, that they shout them down.) Ask them to instead prioritize coverage of suppression of Black and minority votes and of voting suppression and voting manipulation in general, because these issues are far more important for the survival of democracy.
— Demand that corporate advertisers stop supporting racist media by removing their ads from them. A number of people and groups are working on this, and have successfully gotten many corporations who claim they support BLM to start walking their talk.
Judd Legum is one. Follow him on Twitter and subscribe to his newsletter. Media Matters — at mediamatters.org and at @mmfa on Twitter — has been working on this for a long time.
That’s enough for now. I may add more groups to this list or add more info to this article later.
