The move by many voters of Latino origin away from Democratic candidates and toward Republicans seems to have caught Democratic politicians by surprise. Only in the final month of the Biden campaign did the candidate reach out. in a major way, to Latino voters, and the final month of any campaign is usually much too late. Pollsters, too, appear not to have gauged accurately the sentiments of Latino voters.

None of this is uncommon in a campaign. no matter how much data a campaign has, it is all of it taken rom, previous campaigns, and every new campaign is, well, new. The stability of American voting patterns over 50, 100, even 200 years is palpable; yet within the overall stability, shifts do take place, none more so than among the voting preferences of immigrants. Immigrants are by the very nature of their arrival, not in stability. By coming here from far away and another culture, they are making a complete break with it. How they vote can only be as in flux as their immigration.

Arrival, finding a place to live, then to work, learning the language, becoming a citizen — all of these involve radical changes in an immigrant’s life. What an immigrant feels about American politics comes at her fast. A person born here has twenty-one years, or more, to adjust to voting, usually taken from his parents. For an immigrant, that isn’t the case. She has neither the years nor American parents to learn our politics from. Immigrant voters don’t become Republican or Democrat because their parents were that. All of which makes it no surprise that immigrant voters change their preferences much more likely than voters born here.

The one universal that I can assert about immigrant voters — and their children when they, too, become voters — is that they want to become entirely American. more American, even, than born here Americans. We tend to take being American for granted; after all, what else are we ? For immigrants, however, being American is a goal, a destination to be worked toward. This is likely why so many Americans of Italian, Quebecois, Irish, and Eastern European origin have become rigidly Republican in the age of Trump. He embraces the flag, the patriotic songs, the America first outcry — heady indoctrination for the children and grandchildren of immigrants once despised as alien.

The same social political impulses affect Latino immigrants as well. How not ?

Immigrants also have a very different experience of poverty than those born here. Public assistance has been difficult to get, because of language and of unfamiliarity with our bureaucracy; and of course for immigrants who arrived undocumented, public assistance has been impossible. Thus immigrant voters, once they get past the survival stage, mostly on their own, with help only from within their particular immigrant community, naturally look down upon those who have begged for public assistance. They become easy targets for Republican “bootstrap yourself” arguments against public assistance, COVID-19 relief, and stimulus money. After all, say many, if we made it on our own, so should all of you.

AS for this year’s Latino Republicans, reports have it that many were persuaded away from the Democrats by Republican ads about “socialism” — which most Latino immigrants came here to get away from — and by news coverage of BLM riots, many of them explicitly socialist. A Miami newspaper reports that BLM marches there included posters of brutal Castro sidekick Che Guevara and of Christopher Columbus statues defaced with communist graffiti. To say the obvious ; this was hardly a way to get Miami Hispanics to vote for Joe Biden or for Democratic Congresswomen, two of whom were soundly defeated in Miami-Dade County.

As I mentioned at the outset, the Bien campaign was very late to the Latino voter arena, in Florida and Texas especially. So the question is, are Democrats in general now too late ? Is the Texas and Florida Latino vote destined to split 50 – 50 Republican and Democrat ? What are the prospects for Hispanic voting patterns in Arizona, California, and elsewhere ? My answer is that it’s not so much a matter of being late — it is never too late to reverse the outcome of a future election by campaigning smart — but of ( 1 ) basic Latino voter views on the issue that Democrats are committed to and then ( 2 ) the Democratic command, or not, of a particular State’s politics. In a State like Massachusetts, where Democrats control; almost everything, only Democratic Latino politicians have won — so far — and thus have set the tone for Latino voters. We see this in Boston, Springfield, and Lawrence, where only Democrats win, and almost all of them — but NOT all ! — of a progressive bent.

In less Democratic States, such as Texas and Arizona, however, Latino politician scan be found in both parties, and I suspect this will continue, because most Latino voters are much more socially conservative than the justice warriors who command the Democratic party’s upper reaches (and almost all of its money sources). Here, Latino voters mirror the views of prior immigrant waves. The Irish, Italian, Quebec, Polish and Portuguese immigrants whose sons and daughters became the Kennedy family’s political base were very conservative, virulently so in some cases. By no means were they, nor are their grandchildren, progressive as we now understand the term. (I of course am generalizing. Not all such immigrants end up as social conservatives. Many have led the fight for civil rights for all.)

Yet an easy answer is available to Democrats : economic advancement. Democrats should advocate and enact these : the $ 15/hour minimum wage. Economic stimulus payments. Small business loans and grants. Debt-free college attendance. Apprenticeship programs. Rent subsidies. A new GI Bill to make home buying more affordable.

Economic agendas assured Democrats of a solid majority among prior immigrant voter communities. Why not Latino voters ? If Democrats do not fatten the family budgets of Latino voters, all that’s left is for them to brood about their social values being rejected. That is an open invitation to Republican nativism, as amoral an appeal as any we’ve endured in the entire 230 years of our Federal existence.

—- Mike Freedberg / Here and Sphere

A map of voter shifts, precinct by precinct, in Georgia from the 2016 election to the 2020 tells a lot about how Joe Biden became President-elect. Let’s study the map, pictured above, and make some determinations based on what is shown.

You will notice, of course, the enormous shift of votes in the Atlanta suburbs, all of them, as well as in greater Savannah (the blue precincts on the coast). As happened in suburbs all over America, Joe Biden won tons of votes that Hillary Clinton lost. This part of the Biden win in Georgia is common knowledge. Absent this vast a shift, Biden could not have won Georgia by some 12,880 votes. Everything that follows this shift depended on it, and Biden certainly is aware that he will be the President of suburban America.

The voters who so drastically moved away from, Mr. Trump are middle class, mostly, and overwhelmingly white. Their entrance into the Democratic coalition changes the party — as I have previously written about — from being a mostly working-class party to a party chiefly of educated affluents.

That said, Joe Biden did not carry Georgia by suburban voters only. Two other outcomes played an equally cruicial part :

( 1 ) almost all Black voters chose Biden, but not more than chose Clinton in 2016. His percentage actually dropped by one percent ( 1% ) from Hillary Clinton’s number. As has been noted by others, Mr. Trump had some success, nationwide, winning more Black votes than in 2016 — not many, but some. Black voters in this Georgia election numbered only 27 percent of the total — down from 30 percent in 2012 — yet even that one percent shift to Mr. Trump cost Joe Biden about 16,400 votes, enough to have moved Georgia into Trump’s column despite the suburban landslide for Biden.

( 2 ) that Mr. Trump’s increase of Black votes did not cost Biden this State is due to a shift among voters who nationwide became Mr. Biden’s crucial success : Biden GAINED one percent of rural white voters, over Hillary Clinton’s totals, mostly in very white North Georgia but also throughout the State. Rural white voters have been Mr. Trump’s base, and he won them big in this election as in 2016 : but not quite AS big. Rural white votes totaled about 25 percent of Georgia’s total, and a one percent shift of them from Trump to Biden was just enough to counter Biden’s 16,400 vote shortfall among Black voters.

Many observers have opined that Joe Biden, himself of white working class background, was the only 2020 Democratic candidate whop could have peeled off enough rural white voters to defeat Mr. Trump. Whether that might have been the case, we will never know; but a crucial slice of said voters did switch to Biden, probably on character issues, which still matter to many of us, and in Georgia the character factor was enough to win Biden Georgia’s sixteen electoral votes.

Almost no other Democrat running for office this past election won a similar break. Voters in Republican counties did not switch their Congress votes as they did for President. Georgia, as it happens, finds BOTH of its Senators facing run-off elections on January 5th. Can either of the Democratic candidates, Raphael Warnock (against Kelly Loeffler) and Jon Ossoff (versus David Perdue), repeat Joe Biden’s narrow Georgia win ? It would seem a difficult task — impossible without a profounder shift of voter sentiment than the one which benefitted Biden.

We will find out soon enough whether lasting political change is coming to the South.

—- Mike Freedberg / Here and Sphere

^^ add Georgia to Biden and North Carolina and Alaska to Trump = 306 to 232

—- —- —- —-

Those Confederate flags you have seen at rallies of Trump militia boys ? You have thought them mere performance, a fringe historical fart in the face of us all ? Wrong. They were, in fact, precisely the message being sent by those who brandished them.

We have been living in the afterburn of a Trump Confederacy, nothing less or other.

This is apparent now, as I imagine it wasn’t before. Yes, half of Trump is mere venality — grift and corruption, self-dealing, gangster fraud. But we can’t let the criminality distract us from the politics going on beside. As we watch Trump work to prevent the incoming of our next President, who won a clear and convincing 306 to 232 win last Tuesday, we are seeing what was always there, a rebellion that mirrors the first Confederacy put up 160 years ago.

Yes, the Trump Confederacy speaks different issues than the rebels of 1860. The first Confederacy formed to defend slavery against a nation that wanted it gone and Southern political; power broken. The Trump Confederacy wants much more than that. It wants LGBTQ rights repealed. It rejects the right of women to control their bodies. It wants immigration stopped. It wants the welfare state abolished. It wants fossil fuel sat any cost. It rejects public health. It fears the future the nation augurs. It wants the future to belong entirely to it.

It wants a strong man leader, a caudillo, who tells Congress to go shit in its hat. It wants foreign nations to command its elections if that’s what it takes to rule.

Like the first Confederacy, it views the Constitution as a license to destroy. To prevent which, it will, in the meantime, dishonor the Constitution and violate it at will.

I call it “the Trump Confederacy,” but truth is that he is only its destruction guru. This second Confederacy would be nothing without the millions of adults who shout for it, who demand it, who follow Trump’s rebellious mouth. They are the ones who flesh it out, who make those Confederate battle flags something more dangerous than nostalgia cloth.

These millions of voters concentrate, perhaps not surprisingly, in the States that in 1860 went into rebellion and in the Plains States which, up to 1860, were politically allied with the South. The map I’ve posted shows it. It is, with a couple of exceptions (Virginia and Georgia, now blue) a familiar voting map in American history. It recalls not only that of 1860 but that of 1896 through 1908, when a racist, religiously zealous, rural Democratic party, led often by William Jennings Bryan, challenged the post-Civil War, industrial, immigrant-friendly North and Upper West.

Political and social history does not die in stable America, and universal suffrage guarantees that every family’s history is preserved to vote and vote again. Thus we have to fight a Civil war all over, against a second Confederacy of rebels hell bent on tearing the future of our nation apart. No, it won’t be a killing war — not yet anyway — but a war of powers it will be, and already is. Make no mistake : Trump likely will leave the White House, but he will never admit defeat — because as Confederate leader he isn’t defeated, just lost a battle. He will now beat the drum of rebellion — even sedition — from outside, safe in the angry bosoms of his millions, all the way until 2024, when he, or one of his enablers will seek the Presidency again, this time against a Democratic administration which will have won very few legislative successes, opposed at every turn, fair or foul, by the minions of rebellion. For if you thought that Mitch McConnell’s stonewalling of President Obama was abominable, you ain’t see nothing yet., What is coming will be war — even religious war — by every other means. And let us not overlook the deadly role being played here by right-wing media — rebellion media — which will say anything (has said shit for years, even decades) in order to seduce attention and thus win advertising dollars.

In his First Inaugural address, President Lincoln spoke to the South thus : “we are not enemies but friends. We must not be enemies.” Echoing those words, doubtless on purpose, Joe Biden said “our opponents are not our enemies. we are not enemies.” I think he has as much chance of convincing the Trump Confederates of that as Lincoln had of stopping secession and war.

In all this, much of the Republican party bears the chiefest blame. The Trump rebellion would be a cosplay sideshow if not for the mendacity and cynicism of so many Republican electeds, who care nothing for our democracy and, indeed, depend for their votes upon its enemies; upon a grievance constituency of rebels. Many of these Republicans were just re-elected, some by large margins (I’m thinking of you, Lindsay Graham,). They have burned their bridges to the nation and stand now on the opposite shore of sedition and reaction. Disgusting it was to see two Georgia Senators, David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, call for their State’s Republican Secretary to resign, all because he insisted that his oversight of Georgia’s vote was honest and fair. By this depraved act Loeffler and Perdue have rendered themselves unfit ever to hold an office of trust in our nation; but in the Trump Confederacy, where mendacity is truth and sedition is patriotic, they rise to the top of the slag hill.

—- Mike Freedberg / Here and Sphere

November 3rd’s election confirmed what many polls had told us : that Republican candidates, even the awful Mr. Trump, made significant vote percentage gains among Hispanic voters and Vietnamese voters. The party’s candidates also gained a few more Black voters than in 2016. Even as Joe Biden won back significant millions of white voters who had nixed Hillary Clinton, a million voters of color moved in the opposite direction.

Biden won, by a lot, but his party lost a lot of down-ballot contests.The questions are, first of all, WHY ? Secondly, what does this shift portend ?

I’ll try to answer those questions, but right now I want to talk about these Tuesday results :

( 1 ) Hispanic voter movement caused the defeat of two Democratic Congresspersons in South Florida, the 26th and 27th Districts, heavily Cuban-American. Hispanic voters moved toward the Republicans in other Stares as well. In Florida, many voters of Venezuelan and Nicaraguan immigrant origins appear also to have chosen Republican candidates.

( 2 ) Democrats were unable to flip even one Texas Congressional District.

( 3 ) Democratic vote share in several big cities went down — not much, maybe two or three percent, but down is down — or increased less than expected, given the shift among white voters toward Joe Biden. Boston was one such. In 2016, Trump won 12.7 % of our city’s vote. On Tuesday he won 15.6 percent.

( 4 ) Democrats lost House seats in Iowa, New York, Oklahoma, South Carolina, California ( 3 so far ), New Mexico, Minnesota, and Utah. None of the Republican Congressmen at risk — in Pennsylvania, Virginia, Ohio, New York, California, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, and Minnesota — was defeated.

( 5 ) Hispanic voter movement toward Republican candidates, and even to Trump, appears significantly motivated by the “socialism” and “defund the police” news that were broadcast during the summer of BLM. I will discuss this in another column at a later date.

There is good news here, however. America’s vote is much less racially polarized today than it was four years ago.

The bad news is that a lessening of racial conflict is countered by a sharp increase in economic disparities. And THIS is what I want to discuss now.

Everywhere in America, upper income voters moved sharply toward the Democrat while in most areas., lower income voters either moved only a little bit — with one major exception — toward the Democrats, or move not at all, or even moved away from that party. The exception is, of course, Joe Biden himself : he won back at least one-fifth of the low-income white voters who abandoned Hillary in 2016.

Biden’s success was a purely personal one. In addition to the lost Congress races I have listed, Democrats, as of today, have flipped only one Republican-held Congress seat and only two Democratic Senators (the two Georgia Senate races won’t be decided until January 5th) while losing the seat in Alabama. Biden will find it difficult to get his ambitious legislative agenda through a Congress in which Democratic House members, stunned by losses when they were expecting gains, are wary of 2022 and the Senate is controlled by the Republicans.

Nonetheless, it was, for Biden, a victory, of character and integrity over ugly mendacity, of kindness over the gutter. A majority of American voters are sick to death of Trump and all he says and is.

However, that majority is not sick of the Republican party’s 2020 warning about Democrats’ inclination to defund police forces. Congressman Jim Clyburn, who almost single-handedly won Joe Biden the Democratic nomination, is right when he says that the “defund the police” message cost Democratic House and Senate candidates dearly. “Defund the police” sounded rabidly radical to most voters, and it is.

No important Democrat made “defund the police” her campaign theme, but the damage was all too evident all across the nation during summer protests, even the peaceful ones, at which, occasionally, little children carried “FUCK THE POLICE” placards. This message was all too easy for wealthy, white voters — in few of whose neighborhoods any actual police live — to broadcast. They don’t suffer the consequences of defunded police forces. It’s the inhabitants of low-income, big city neighborhoods in which, as we saw all summer, crime increases when police presence falls back. Young voters, even of color, may have fun calling for “fuck the police,” but the older residents of crimed neighborhoods, most of whom cannot move because they can’t afford to, understandably rejected the entire anti-police them, to the detriment of the incoming Democratic administration.

The Democratic party, despite the best intentions of Joe Biden and his obvious background as a son of the white working class, is rapidly becoming the party of wealth and of white voter, suburban comfort. I don’t see how it can advocate a working-class, economic betterment message when its current voter base relies on — pursues relentlessly — an inequality of wealth and access that has reached crisis proportions. How is a party of meritocrats going to organize a $ 15/hour minimum wage ? A labor union drive ? Housing subsidies like 1946’s GI Bill ? Nor is the Democratic party’s socialist wing — a tiny minority made to seem much larger by Republican ad-makers — any help. Its solution to economic inequality is punitive : tax the rich to extinction, have the Federal government fund and manage health care, transportation, everything. This is unworkable, and, besides, America’s aspiring immigrants and lower-income voters don’t want that. They want opportunity and much better wages. They don’t want buildings named after them at big-name universities, they want their kids to have admission to those universities. Naming a building after a person of color, as my university (Princeton) just did, is flagrant tokenism. Immigrants and voters of color do not, I hope, want tokenism !

Yet if the Democratic party faces a serious reckoning with its upwardly mobile narrowing, the Republican party faces troubles at least as noxious. It is, at present, a party of grievance. It’s all well and good to complain about being screwed by the powerful, but mere complaining doesn’t change anything useful. To do that, you have to have a positive program : OK, we’re being left behind, or losing power to the well off, so what do we do to improve our lot without damaging the entire structure ? And do we trust anybody in power to actually advocate such a program ? Trump’s entire message — assuming that his gutter horking had any — was negative and reactionary : repeal, yes. Replace, no. Even now, with him on his way to well-merited obloquy, his party has nothing to say except NO. NO to “socialism.” NO to “immorality.” NO to anything a Democrat wants to do.

NO is the entire message of Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, Georgia’s two Republican Senate candidates facing runoff elections on January 5th. No, No, and no.

This cannot stand, because a party of “no” is a party responding to what the other party is trying to do. It leaves the initiative entirely to the Democrats, putting the Republican party in the position of waiting to hear what to say NO to. And this Republican NO has an angry tone to it, a sound of vengeance and bitterness. It is Trumpism without Trump, and it depends for its success entirely upon Democratic failure.

The nation deserves better. The nation needs better. Can our politicians do better ? Can Joe Biden get us to be kind again, to work with each other, to trust reform legislation ?

Can he and they inspire us, the voters, to trust them to bring better to us ? These are the questions all of us are asking, I hope, of our next two Federal government years.

—- Mike Freedberg / Here and Sphere

As of this writing, at 1.00 PM on Wednesday morning, Joe Biden looks like the winner — narrowly — of yesterday’s election. I say “looks like” because the final tallies aren’t in yet. Still, Biden has a noticeable advantage in enough States to claim a 270 to 268 electoral vote victory.

This — if it holds up — is not the result most of us we hoping for. Biden would be inaugurated into the office of President, but the Republicans will have a Senate majority well aware of the narrowness of Biden’s win. (As of this writing, it’s 50 percent to 48 percent, a 2,600,000 vote difference.) Mr. Trump will be gone, but the close division of America’s voters remains — indeed, is further confirmed. President Biden — if he does in fact win this — faces an enormous task trying to navigate a government divided and hardened in its division.

But the final composition of Congress isn’t yet known, and I won’t belabor the matter further today. What I would like to do is write some observations about the state of our two political parties.

As i see it, the Democratic party has become too much the party of corporate and banking managers. Millions of highly-paid commercial administrators and directors, and their high-income technical assistants poured almost unlimited millions into Senate campaigns they had scant hope of winning. Cases in point : Jamie Harrison in South Carolina, Sarah Gideon in Maine, Amy McGrath in Kentucky. What purpose was served by throwing millions of dollars on races never to be won ? Even the Senate race in Maine proved out of reach of the millions wasted on Susan Collins’s opponent . It was angry money, all of it, blind anger irrational — but there because the angry are the highly-paid, corporate social justice prophets whose program, for ending anyone who differs politically from them, is to boycott them with a tidal wave of dollars.

If I am a Senate incumbent faced with a tsunami of money coming to my opponent, my message to the voters is a simple one : “they’re trying to buy the race.” It’s a winning response. Voters for some reason do not like having big money folks buying Senate seats, which according to our nation’s rules, belong to the voters.

Might the $ 120 million donated to these losing efforts not have been better spent hiring field operatives for Joe Biden in Georgia, Texas, and Florida ? Spanish-speaking operatives ? Biden lost Florida and Texas because he under-performed Democratic expectations of Hispanic voters there. Most of the Hispanic voters who Biden could not win over are low-paid, two jobs grunts. They want to get ahead, not stage a protest. Yet the Biden message was divided between economic betterment and racial justice issues. Of course racial justice is crucial; it’s written into the Constitution. But Hispanic voters, like  their Anglo working class counterparts, want economic justice first. If you can’t pay the bills, or save go get ahead, you haven’t much time to worry about civil rights, which, among white voters, continue to be the preoccupation of the highly privileged chiefly.

Nothing much changes in America when it comes to society and social custom. Before the Civil War, Abolition was the cause celebre of the Northern, Yankee aristocracy. It took rebellion by the South, and a deadly Civil War to bring most Northern opinion onto the abolition side. Toady we do not have Civil War (despite the fears of many keyboard warriors); and thus the pre-occupation which high-income white activists give to “Black lives matter” seems another universe to the economic aspirations and daily budget challenges that most voters deal with.

The Biden campaign didn’t shun working-class issues, and Joe certainly is every inch the son of the white working class, as Hillary Clinton was absolutely not. Thus Joe did much better than Hillary did with white working class voters — which is why he has probably won the election. Yet his message was seriously diluted by having to confront the summer’s Black Lives matter riots, looting, and highway blockings. I know very few voters who weren’t incensed by these things and the evident inability of Democratic office holders to curb the unrest; and Biden was slow to find his message of denunciation.

It has always, in America, been difficult for politicians to bind a coalition of white working class voters and voters of color. Much more often, its been the white elite who have forged a bond with voters of color. (Drive through the tony town of Carlisle and count all the Black Lives matter lawn signs in this very high income community. then do the same in working class Revere.) Today that elitist mission has the backing of corporate human resource offices and directors, who have imposed “sensitivity training” sessions on their employees, complete with social justice sociology and a duty to feel guilty about vaguely defined “racial bias.” I know very few people who willingly accept being made to feel humiliation. It reeks of Maoist “struggle sessions,” sometimes with career consequences, and it happens on college campuses as well as in the corporate world.

Of course we as a nation must promote first class citizenship for all. That should be a given. But it cannot be a given if it is imposed on people by an upper class, holier than thou elite. America has always rejected such elitism, and certainly a Democratic party cannot co-exist with it. Yet today;s democratic party has given much of its attention to this brand of talking down to people deemed benighted. How is this in any way consistent with the Democratic ideal, in which ordinary people talk UP to those better positioned than they ?

Joe Biden, buffeted by these contradictory movements, found himself trying to be who he is not  — one of our social justice elite — at the same time that he insisted upon he who he in fact is : a son of working class parents who is in every way a traditional Democrat of the sort that has moved heavily to the Trump Republican party because it resents being talked down to and told that it is racist and thus shamed. not many voters take well to being shamed. It isn’t what the Democratic party has ever been about, and its presence in this season’s Democratic party felt as uneasy to you as it did to me.

It compromises a politicia’s moarl force when he lets himslef eb forced tgo say thiongs he doesn’t beleieve. Joe Biden certainly believes deeply in equlaity fort all, but he clearly is not comfortable with diverting to it from, his basic, economic message. His economic message is THE message of the Democratic party and has always been. It was so even in the Jim Crow era, albeit then restricted to whites. We forget that most Jim Crow politicians began their careers as Jennings Bryan economic populists. Today, economic populism has bifurcated : the patriotic, flag waving workingman’s kind that powers Trump’s Republican party, and the economic justice kind — example : Pennsylvania Lieutenant Governor John Fetterman — that Joe Biden grew up in. It has always been a priority of our economic elite to keep the nation’s working class divided. Toady that division mission has succeeded, to our immense debit: because we have always been a nation of people on the bottom aspiring to get ahead. it is who we are. That aspiration should be the sole possession of the Democratic party — its sacred treasure. yet today the party is trying to have it both ways. Against a nasty man like Mr. Trump, it has succeeded — barely. It might not thus succeed again soon.

Last point : I am not advocating any form of socialism. Governments should never, ever own the means of production or handicap the marketplace. I am, however, advocating a participatory capitalism that rewards workers handsomely and understands that the economic prosperity of all is economic prosperity for capitalists as well as employees. In short, the compromises forged  by Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his team. That is the future road a successful Democratic party should pursue, as it eschews the unrest of those who would harm the nation in the name of justice.

—- Mike Freedberg / Here and Sphere