The 2020 Election Showed That Many Minority Americans Aren’t Voting By Identity Politics

Millions came out in droves to exercise their democratic rights, and included in those rights is their right to have a voice — but not a monolithic voice or that of a massive coalition of voters from the same identity group, but the voice of an individual. 

Our right to vote is intrinsically tied to our rights as an individual. The fact that we don't have to vote the same as those of the same religion, sex, creed, sexual orientation, or race speaks to this. Rather, we have the right to vote as we see fit, to promote our own best interests, to vote from our own lived experiences as individuals, rather than a collective. This is freedom. This is the American Dream. This is the cornerstone of the American Experiment. 

What the 2020 Election Shows Us about Identity Politics

As the 2020 election draws to a close, Trump increased his share of the black vote by 4 percentage points and nearly doubled his 8% of 2016 in some areas. Trump also grew his share of the Latino vote to 32% compared with 28% in 2016. Asian voters also increased their backing of Trump by 2%. About 55% of Cuban expats in Florida voted for Trump. Likewise 30% of Puerto Ricans and 48% of "other" Latinos also went for Trump in Florida, contributing to his winning the state. 

Trump increased his share of white women by 3 percentage points. The GOP elected a record number of women to Congress. Trump even gained with college-educated white women, typically the most liberal demographic. Trump also doubled his share of the LGBTQ vote since 2016, to nearly 28%.  

The only group Trump decreased his share of was, ironically, white men. 

The only group Trump decreased his share of was, ironically, white men. I say ironically because for nearly four years the media has told us that Trump is the party of white male supremacy, that white, heterosexual, cis-gender men are the face of Trump's coalition. And yet every exit poll turned this narrative on its head. 

For four years we have been told that Trump is a racist and a bigot, and whether that’s true or not is beside the point, because after four years of nonstop accusations of racism, he achieved more of the minority vote than any Republican since 1960. The same goes for women, with whom he also increased his share of votes, in spite of a deluge of rhetoric claiming Trump to be a misogynist actively trying to oppress women. The point for each of these claims is clear: Telling people Trump was a bigot didn't make it true, and it certainly wasn't as convincing of a tactic as the media anticipated. 

The Left Can’t Understand Not Voting by Skin Color

In fact, the liberal media's direct outrage and excuse-making for such historic voting shifts proves just this. The Democrats thought they owned minority voters, that their intersectional narrative of oppressed minority groups banning together to take down the bad orange man was enough to earn their votes — but it wasn’t. In fact, it turns out that, contrary to intersectionality, minorities don’t vote as a monolith. In fact, your skin color doesn’t inform your voter preferences, your worldview, or whether you must pledge allegiance to a specific party or not. We can see that voters prefer to be spoken to, not as members of an identity group, but as Americans. 

Democrats were furious with these results and went about making excuses that were in fact more polarizing, more divisive, and more infantilizing. The New York Times doubled down on the fact that increased, historic minority votes for a Republican president were just more evidence of internalized white supremacy, rather than pausing to reflect on the fact that perhaps they just don't understand half the country. Or that perhaps it wasn’t actually a good idea to call everyone who disagreed with them a racist for four years. But they have the next four years to ponder such a question. 

The NYT said that historic minority votes for a Republican president was evidence of internalized white supremacy.

Nikole Hannah Jones, Pulitzer Prize winning writer of the New York Times 1619 Project, tweeted out that Cuban and Venezuelan voters were actually not Latino at all, but were in fact white and shouldn't be counted as Latino. Hannah Jones seems to be entirely oblivious to her own obvious bigotry in suggesting that one's identity presupposes their political alignment, or that the Democratic party is entitled to the minority vote. This also of course refuses to acknowledge that Cuban and Venezuelan expats have had direct experiences with Socialism and are inclined to vote against anything resembling Socialism as per their lived experiences. But activists have no concern for such inconvenient facts when in the midst of promulgating a narrative. 

Such an attitude towards Latino Trump supporters is much the same as Biden's "You ain't black" comment aimed at black conservatives. That black and Latino voters must vote Democrat by virtue of their ethnic heritage is nothing short of racism. Such comment comes in the vein of Chelsea Handler having to "remind 50 Cent that he is black and cannot vote for Trump," and Joy Reid referring to Justice Clarence Thomas as "Uncle Clarence" in reference to calling him an "Uncle Tom." Such comments are gross, overt acts of racism masquerading as social justice. 

It turns out that, contrary to intersectionality, minorities don’t vote as a monolith. 

Yet according to the exit polls, a historic number of people were disillusioned by the Left's oppression narrative, condescending ownership of minority voters, and downright bigotry. In essence, the election was a referendum on intersectionality, and the Left is pissed that its coalition is disintegrating. 

This isn’t to say that more minorities voted for Trump than Biden, but that there’s a clear shift in voting demographics as we see voters responding to the game of identity politics that has plagued most of political life for the past decade. 

The Left Promoted Policies That Didn’t Align with Many Minority Voters

Likewise, the Left made the mistake of calling for policies that don’t align with many minority voters, while anticipating that their victimology narrative would be enough to hold them captive.

For example, the Left promulgated the "defund the police" narrative in the name of social justice while ignoring that more than 80% of the black community wanted the same amount or more of policing. Another example was pushing a Socialist agenda and calling themselves progressives, when in fact "progressive" in Spanish translates to Socialism, which isn't a good look when Cuban and Venezuelan expats came to America to escape the perils of Socialism. The same goes for Vietnamese voters who went wild for Trump, considering most had fled Communism in Vietnam. 

The Left pushed to "defund the police," even though more than 80% of the black community wanted the same amount or more policing.

Likewise, the left congratulated itself on the self-righteous usage of "Latinx" while more than 95% of the Latino community don’t prefer the term. In essence, the same political party that saw themselves as the champions of the oppressed were in fact increasingly out of touch with minority voters.

Candace Owen's landmark Blexit Movement likely had a historic impact on black voters, encouraging blacks that they don’t have to vote as a monolith and that the Democratic Party doesn't own them. In her New York Times Bestseller, Blackout, Candace urges black Americans to get off the Democratic Plantation, think for themselves, and reconsider all the unkept promises of the Democratic Party. 

Whatever the reason more minorities voted for Trump than any Republican President since 1960, I think it’s fair to say that more minorities didn’t resonate with or appreciate being told they were oppressed for the last decade, and this election saw the culmination of such sentiments. Such a historic outcome should draw our attention to the fact that the 1960 election was the last election before the 1964 Civil Rights Act in which LBJ famously declared that he would have blacks voting Democrat for the next 200 years. Not so fast LBJ.

Closing Thoughts

The idea that the Left would be backed by a coalition of women, gays, and minorities marching arm and arm, banded together by rainbows and social justice to defeat the evil GOP is simply false, and we’re on the precipice of a reconfiguration of the GOP as a hipper, fresher, more diverse party including the voices of all those disillusioned and disaffected by the Democrats.