Divided America: Why it might not be as bad as you think
Anyone with a functioning frontal lobe and an active Twitter account can tell you the United States doesn’t seem all that united these days. Consider, for a moment, the steel-cage death match also known as America’s inauguration weekend. On one side, protesters gathered by the thousands to declare that Donald Trump’s first day in office was proof enough he’s a Neanderthal who might blow up the world. On the other, Trump delivered a bleak inaugural address blaming his predecessors for turning America into a post-apocalyptic hellscape worthy of the Hunger Games.
I’m pretty sure the theme of the inaugural ball was “The End Is Near.”
At the risk of sounding delusional or naïve, I’d suggest that maybe, possibly, the nation isn’t as hopelessly divided as it seems. You’ll have to bear with me on this. As an Irish Catholic journalist raised in Greater Cleveland, optimism doesn’t come easy to me. But I can’t help thinking November’s election results contain at least a little good news. I don’t mean the outcome — I’m not jumping into that debate — but rather the voters themselves. Here’s why: Thousands upon thousands of people who voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 also voted for Trump in November.
This is hardly a news flash, but I think it’s worth remembering now because there’s been a tendency since the election for those who find Trump repulsive to demonize anyone who voted for him, just as so many Trump fans demonized Hillary Clinton supporters during the campaign. Their logic is that if Trump demeans women, speaks harshly about immigrants and retweets a white supremacist, then his voters also must embrace those views. As satisfying as that narrative might be to people still furious about Trump’s victory, it strikes me as simplistic. Not to mention unfair.
To be sure, some Trump supporters are every bit as deplorable as Clinton said they are. These are the folks who shouted ethnic slurs during some of Trump’s rallies, bought T-shirts urging their candidate to “Trump That Bitch” and defended Trump’s ugly words on the Access Hollywood tape as a case of boys being boys. Those voters supported Trump, no doubt about it. But they aren’t the reason Trump is redecorating the Oval Office today.
Trump won because enough of the same people who twice voted Democratic for America’s first black president also voted Republican for a billionaire real estate mogul. This happened even though Obama’s approval ratings were hovering around 55 percent at the time, suggesting all those votes for Trump weren’t exactly a repudiation of Obama. I wrote about the results the day after the election with my colleague, Jeremy Fugleberg, and the numbers are as stunning today as they were then.
Trump won 11 counties in Ohio that went to Obama in 2012, and he closed the gap dramatically in some traditional Democratic strongholds. Lorain County, where I grew up, was a case in point. Located next door to Cleveland, it’s the kind of place people think of when they talk about the Rust Belt. It was built on steel and manufacturing, and it’s still defined by a blue collar ethos today. Obama won Lorain County in 2012 with 57 percent of the vote. Trump narrowly won it with 48 percent in November.
Similar scenarios played out across Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, where Trump flipped several counties Obama won just four years earlier. Yes, Trump brought out voters who’d skipped previous elections and, yes, Clinton suffered from an enthusiasm gap that caused some Democrats to stay home or vote for third party candidates. But the Obama voters who went for Trump were, as Trump might say, huge.
So why does this matter now, with the election behind us? Because it undermines the storyline that Trump voters are a monolithic voting block willing to back the new president’s agenda and rhetoric unequivocally. And it suggests that the divisions we see so often among our politicians may not run as deep among our people, despite the protests and counter-protests we saw this past weekend.
What happened on Election Day is similar to what’s been happening on election days in this country since the founding of the republic. Most voters made a calculation based on what they believed was best for them and their families. Some may have been single-issue voters swayed by abortion, immigration or free trade. Some may have responded to Trump’s outsider message, just as voters responded in 2008 to Obama’s very different call for change. Some may have simply disliked Clinton more than they disliked Trump. Regardless, they did the math and made their choice.
You can argue, as Trump’s many critics do, that they made the wrong choice. You can argue, as many do, they got bamboozled by Trump and conned by the GOP into voting against their own interests. And you can argue they shouldn’t have been willing to look past Trump’s harsh words about women and immigrants. But it’s hard to make the case those former Obama voters went for Trump this time because they suddenly became racists and misogynists on Election Day 2016. We all have biases, be they political, cultural or racial, but it’s unreasonable to say those biases alone are why some 63 million people voted for Trump. It’s more complicated than that.
Which is why I think these numbers should be encouraging to everyone worried about the future of Divided America, no matter what you think of the election’s outcome. I’m not saying the next four years will be rosy. They won’t be. This nation is divided — sometimes in ugly, cruel ways — and our politicians too often have been willing to exploit those divisions. What I’m saying is that for many Americans those divisions may not be as personal, or as tribal, as they sometimes seem.
If thousands of Obama voters can also vote for Trump, and if the same American electorate that put Trump in the White House can also give Obama an approval rating now approaching 60 percent, then maybe the loudest voices on the right and the left don’t accurately reflect the views of the entire population.
Maybe, if enough Americans come to believe this, we could have conversations again in this country about health care or the economy or foreign policy without devolving into an End of Days battle between the forces of good and evil. Maybe compromise would stop being a dirty word and presidents would get more than one day to prove their worth. And maybe we’d have fewer weekends like this past weekend, when Americans spent more time shouting about their differences than talking about what they have in common.
