What once were voting blocs are fragmenting into individuals with agency.

From Anatomy of Trump’s triumph by Ramesh Thakur.  A much more vigorously and empirically argued essay than most of the post-election analyses which are usually either rear-actions for advocacy interests (don't blame my group) or simplistic mono-causal explanations for a multi-causal outcome from a complex multi-system process.  

In an NBC exit poll, Trump won 57 per cent of white and 55 per cent of male voters, retaining his hold on these groups. In an AP exit poll, he won 20 per cent of the black vote, up from 8 in 2016 and 13 in 2020. Harris’s 80 per cent black vote is a ten-point drop from Joe Biden’s four years ago. In addition, he also won the support of 46 per cent of Latinos, 39 per cent of Asian-Americans, 54 per cent of ‘Other,’ 45 per cent of women, and 43 per cent of 18–to-29-year-olds. Hence the prospect of a major new realignment of American politics. There are important lessons in all this for centre-right parties across the West: authentic conservatism attracts more voters than it repels.

Trump’s success in creating a multi-ethnic winning coalition indicates that voting trends may be coalescing, with previously segmented cohorts normalising and starting to vote more as Americans and less as ethnics. Thus in an AP analysis, the economy and jobs rated as the top issues for voters overall, for blacks and Latinos, and for the youth. Phrases such as the Latino, black or Asian-American vote are increasingly meaningless. What once were voting blocs are fragmenting into individuals with agency. This can only be good for the long-term health of American democracy, contrary to the hysterical warnings of its imminent collapse should Trump win.

I will be glad to see the back of crude Marxist race identity as a basis for politics.