[OPINION] The demographic candidate

If we were to analyze the manner and content by which perhaps a third of the vocal American public, plus over a quarter of the western world exposed, educated and influenced by mainstream American media collectively grapple with the loss of liberal control over all three departments of the US government, the emergent picture we see is not the triumph of populism but ironically and quite profoundly that of deep democratic ideals. 

Admittedly that is a minority opinion in our neck of the woods. That is understandable. The reasons range across the still-widening spectrum of faults most of the American mainstream or legacy media and the outgoing ruling party have affixed to the President-elect, now both the 45^th and the elected 47^th president of the United States.

A major factor is our alienation and ignorance of the economic pressures burdened on the American electorate, something we experience third hand through media and other sources. Naturally, we are not among the “forgotten men” whose ranks have increased severalfold since 2020. 

The hues are dark and far from joyous on the side of the losers of 2024, in direct contrast to the jubilation among the American electorate who have chosen via the Electoral College System and the simple arithmetic of the popular vote.

The hues are made even darker by false expectations created by pre-election polling that reflects a mandate that is not necessarily the determining count under a system that prioritizes the balancing algorithm of the Electoral College on one end and on the other, the political biases of the American mainstream liberal media. 

It is important to note that the American mainstream media aggressively and dominantly exports both its domestic news, culture, and entertainment to the rest of the world. This helps us understand why those darker hues extend to our shores and similarly influence our perspective. Ours is fertile compost. In an environment where education is not inclusive, where academicians are deemed elitists and social media has empowered discourses beyond the sari-sari store (neighborhood variety store) gossip bench, the captive audiences draped under a barbershop chair or the beautician’s domed hairdryer, information can be as distorted as ours already is even without the imported bias.

In between, like incessant unflossed food stuck between teeth, as a recent phenomenon of our times, there is ambivalent wokeism that started as a benign concept and later degraded into a dirty word as this liberal concept of engaging issues is taken to often fanatical extremes.

The toxic albeit diverse arenas of personality politics and spectra include the multiple convictions of felony in the exercise of lawfare by formerly pure Blue State prosecutors, the still on-going charges of other criminal acts pending in lower courts, to the sticky tag of being the January 6th insurrectionist, to the misogynist stickers and its variations, including the ad hominem labelsm — from rapist, racist, white supremacist, narcissist, trash talker and elitist.

Mainstream American media argued that these trump issues — like border security that increased crimes and has led to drug-infested tent cities and the deterioration of quality of life. They argued that these enter the priority talking points trumping inflation, unemployment and increasing poverty. 

From the momentous ride down the Trump Tower escalator in 2016, nearly a decade hence to the historic re-election last November, all these labels in various combinations have been applied ever-so strategically, managed, and parceled. These efforts include two assassination attempts separated simply by weeks under a presidency and a political party that claims it is anti-fascist and anti-war despite its funding of both sides of conflicts, shooting wars and violent territorial intrusions and deep invasionary beachheads in Europe, the Middle East and Asia.

Going forward, there will be analysis ad nauseam from the midnight of November 5, 2024, to perhaps when the 48^th US president is inaugurated. The manic-depressive pendulum of politics guarantees that. But allow us to add two footnotes to the increasingly tangled web of Monday morning quarterbacking and postmortem autopsies. We do not have a monopoly on these but as the new year approaches and calm takes over, these move up from the bottom margin of the page.

The liberal’s choice

The first is that wokeism and the liberal’s choice was a demographic candidate from the very start to the very end. For the 2016 presidential elections, Kamala Harris ran in the DNC primaries but had backed off early before any voting had taken place. When Joe Biden eventually won the DNC nomination, he picked Harris as his running mate not because she had shown any strength of numbers behind her to attest to her innate ability to gather votes on her own as a presidential candidate but as a representative of demographic niches he needed to run as president.

Harris was a far-Left San Francisco Liberal, a female and a woman of mixed races. For Biden’s mandate in 2020, women voters outnumbered men by as much as 10%. Between 2010 and 2018, the percentage of white voters decreased by 5% while there were notable increases in both Hispanic and Black voters with the former recording as much as a 3% differential. The number of Hispanic voters nearly doubled from 2000, and as most of these voted Democrat, the numbers supported an increasingly open southern border strategy. As a demographic candidate representing the changes in the Democratic electorate, Harris fits the bill.

In 2024, when it had become painfully apparent that Biden would not be a viable candidate for re-election, to preserve the amount of campaign donations pledged to a Biden-Harris re-election tandem, Harris simply took the presidential candidacy from Biden. The stronger impetus was demographics. A viable candidate from Pennsylvania, a key state, was Jewish and the Liberals were then pandering to rising antisemitic sentiments. Moreover, all other choices were neither female nor Black.

There were no major platform changes and Harris’s demographic advantages were expected to carry the vote. Thus, surrogates focused on her being not simply mixed-race but Black. And to capitalize on gender disparities, the issue of women’s rights to their bodies was elevated to primary platform levels.

The second footnote has to do with the disparity between a demographic candidate against the issues that the electorate raise and deem critical arrayed against what candidates offer.

Surveys showed that concerns about the economy, high food prices, unaffordable groceries and gas prices and underemployment characterized the Biden-Harris years. So did border security, law and order and the threat of escalating global conflict enter the set of critical issues that need to be addressed.

These overwhelmed gender and racism issues knocking them off the critical list demanded by an electorate seeking changes. The broad strokes, motherhood statements and platitudinal palliatives offered by a candidate initially chosen by simple demographics would be inadequate sans real and detailed answers to the electorate’s immediate and gnawing priorities.

By focusing on demographics, we subconsciously focus on diversity and division. But shared hardships can be unifying and in an election Vox Populi is important. The American electorate is not stupid. They are not deplorables. And they are not garbage. The candidate that offers solutions and not mere demographic platitudes wins. – Rappler.com