Vidya Sethuraman
India Post News Service
The highest turnout election in 120 years in the United States showed a clear race gap: The majority of people of color voted for Biden, while three out of five whites preferred Donald Trump. White women moved slightly towards the President, according to exit polling, while women of color turned out in high numbers to reject the incumbent.
EMS called on experts who have looked into voter ́s motivations to understand this gap and its implications for the future in their call on Dec 11.
Arlie Russell Hochschild is Professor Emerita at U.C. Berkeley’s Department of Sociology said that the women she talked to stood by their men and voted for Trump. “They aren’t as firm in their support of Trump as their husbands and brothers and uncles are,” Hochschild said. These women are Christians and feel like a minority group and that life is rigged against them. And watching television reinforces that feeling. They feel left out and hence thought voting for the incumbent will help them.
They feel people of color are raising and they are declining. Exit polls showed 3 out of 5 white voters picked Trump in the 2020 Election. Voters were disproportionately white and older. “Life isn’t better for them four years later but they are still voting for him,” Hochschild said. If you add the 85 million Americans who did not cast a ballot to the total vote count, it turns out Biden got 33% of the eligible voters and Trump got 31%. These numbers show how deeply polarized American politics has become.
Davin Phoenix, a political scientist at the University of California at Irvine said that the media and public officials treat different groups inequitably based on the airing of their grievances. His research showed not only are people of color expressing less anger but also that anger is not motivating their political behavior as much as it is for white Americans. Whites vote more, donate to candidates, canvas for candidates, and contact elected officials more. Phoenix said that Blacks, Latin and Asian Americans are more likely to protest and boycott. He said whites that didn’t vote or may have been sitting on the fence in 2016, were angry enough in 2020 to vote for Trump.
