National Post (National Edition)
The GOP's rainbow coalition
You could say Kanye West didn't have a great night on Tuesday. His presidential campaign came to an expected, anticlimactic end. As a presidential candidate, he was mostly irrelevant. But, as an artist and activist, West may have had the best night of his career.
Tuesday's election affirmed the very crusade that brought him into politics, donning a red hat. West aspired to prove minority communities are not a monolith. The Chicago rapper was willing to take the hits to prove his point. As West told Jimmy Kimmel, “Liberals can't bully me, news can't bully me, the hip-hop community, they can't bully me.”
A surprisingly large number of voters from Black and Hispanic communities proved on Tuesday night that West was not alone. Few actually voted for him, but they did vote for Republicans. In casting a vote for a political party with Donald Trump's name at the top of the ballot, this fraction of Black and Hispanic voters have delivered the same message to liberals, journalists and entertainers: respect our individuality.
Let's not overstate what has transpired. The vast majority of Black and Hispanic voters across the United States still voted for Democrats. But Republicans dramatically increased their support among Hispanic voters, leading to Trump's victory in Florida, his biggest win on election night. Early CNN exit polls showed that Hispanic support for Democrats in Florida fell by 19 points, as compared with 2016.
Similar drops occurred in Georgia and Ohio. Republicans also won the majority-Hispanic Zapata county in Texas, which they lost to Democrats 65-32 in 2016. A national exit poll from Edison also showed Republicans are up by four points with both Black men and Black women, compared with 2016.
Such increases in Black and Hispanic support may have tipped the scales for Trump in several states. This must be a shocking development for anyone who overly relies on dominant media narratives in order to make sense of the world.
Dominant media narratives suggest a high level of uniformity within minority communities. Purveyors of these narratives mislead their audiences to believe people of colour primarily view the world through a prism of race, and so whoever talks about racism most frequently can take our votes for granted. Adherents then assume that people of colour will take as gospel the political opinions of whoever is presented as “one of us” — whether it be
Sen. Kamala Harris, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, LeBron James or Jay-Z.
But if you see minority communities as the truly diverse groups that they are, and you respect the individuality of Black and Hispanic citizens as you do other voters, then you really shouldn't be surprised by Tuesday night.
The New York Times recently reported that racial polarization is decreasing in American society, at least when it comes to voting preferences, with a 16-percent decrease in racial voting gaps since 2016. Thankfully, that means all voters are increasingly thinking about issues other than racial solidarity.
And guess what? Individuals from the same or different minority communities can disagree with each other on important subjects.
For example, Politico's Marc Caputo reported on Tuesday night that a “top Miami Dem(ocrat)” cited backlash against Black Lives Matter to explain Hispanic voters turning away from Democrats, who embraced both the slogan and political movement.
It turns out that “defunding the police” isn't very popular offline. Caputo's source also noted that Democrats upset Cuban-American voters by embracing protesters who waved Che Guevara flags. Importantly, these Florida voters can't be dismissed as being traditional Republicans. A number of these same Floridians also voted in favour of an amendment to raise the state minimum wage to $15. That amendment passed on Tuesday night.
Surely, Hispanic voters in other parts of the country didn't have the same negative response to the Democrats. Republicans weren't nearly as competitive with Hispanic voters in California or New York as they were in Florida. Because individuals who share an identity don't all think, act or vote the same way.
And that's the very point Kanye West sought to make.