A US immigrant on racism and shame
December 1, 2020 4:47 AM   Subscribe

One of the surprises of the 2020 Presidential election was that Trump’s percentage of immigrant votes grew. By this I mean that my white friends were surprised. I was not surprised. Let’s talk about immigrant racism. To look at me, I am white. I have certainly benefited from my skin color throughout my life, but that whiteness was a suit I had to learn to wear. When my family moved to Philadelphia in 1970, they were moving into one of the most racist cities in America at the time, presided over by racist mayor Frank Rizzo. Mike Monteiro on Medium: My People Were In Shipping.

We moved into a small Portuguese community in a majority-Black neighborhood. We moved into homes and businesses recently vacated by white flight. We came in as Portuguese, and we needed America to make us white, because that is how America defines success, and we were here for success. (The irony of having to find our place in a caste system we helped to create is a cursed monkey’s paw implementation of John Rawls’ veil of ignorance, but I’ll save that argument for someone who didn’t go to a state school.) We hung the Rizzo re-election signs in our storefronts, later we would hang the Reagan signs too. We crossed the street when Black people came our way. We hired our own. And we adopted all the slurs. Our goal was to achieve whiteness, which meant hating blackness and hating immigrants.

Every immigrant group that comes into America wants to be the last group through the door. Trust me, immigrants would rip the plaque off the Statue of Liberty faster than a Proud Boy at a tiki torch Black Friday sale. And every immigrant group knows the secret to achieving whiteness — patiently wait in the wings until the current whites believe Black people are catching up, at which point, the books are open, and the Irish are let in, or the Ukrainians, or the Czech, or the Cubans. In America, whiteness is a reward for stepping on others’ necks.
posted by Bella Donna (41 comments total) 59 users marked this as a favorite
 
Metafilter's own?
posted by terrapin at 4:52 AM on December 1, 2020 [1 favorite]


Thanks, terrapin! Apparently so. No comments since 2010 so it had not occurred to me he might be a fan of the blue. Perhaps he'll drop by for a visit eventually.
posted by Bella Donna at 5:04 AM on December 1, 2020


I started to pull quotes, but I realized I was basically pulling the whole article. I've had a lot of these same thoughts, but never put together with such eloquence and eye for the big picture.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 5:12 AM on December 1, 2020 [3 favorites]


A fair amount of Trump's gain depended on the demographic. Trump and the Republicans trotted out the "Democrats want Socialism!" boogieman hard. This gained him votes in communities from socialist nations like Cuba and Venezuela.
posted by Badgermann at 5:44 AM on December 1, 2020 [7 favorites]


I live in southern Arizona, and the population is heavily Mexican-American here. And... I’m not shocked about this. Seeing people I know, people who I’ve seen get pestered by Border Patrol because of the color of their skin, going off on immigrants... it’s definitely something that throws you for a loop.
posted by azpenguin at 6:16 AM on December 1, 2020 [9 favorites]


This dynamic was, to me, best highlighted by the family of the surviving infant of the El Paso Walmart massacre posing with a grinning trump giving a thumbs up.
posted by Exceptional_Hubris at 6:19 AM on December 1, 2020 [5 favorites]


Bella Donna, thank you for linking to this. My parents immigrated from India to the US and I am in the long slow reckoning of how I fit into dynamics of immigrants, whiteness, and adjacency to whiteness.
posted by brainwane at 6:24 AM on December 1, 2020 [8 favorites]


Yeah, I'm Anglo, but I lived in Laredo for five years. Laredo is America's least ethnically diverse city, with a population of over 98% Mexican ancestry. One of the first things that surprised me as a newcomer to Laredo was the extreme antipathy I sometimes saw radiating from someone whose great-grandparents came from Mexico toward someone whose parents did. (Of course, the winners in any legitimacy contest are the people whose families had been in Laredo since Laredo first became Texas, not Mexico.) I was always an outsider--a unique experience for a white dude in the United States--so I'm not going to pretend to speak with much authority here, but it was at least clear to me that immigration politics on the border was a lot different than I had thought, and I was repeatedly shocked to hear young Mexican-Americans echo the same Fox News talking points that my older relatives annoyed me with. This in a town where almost everyone speaks Spanish and less than half the population is completely fluent in English!
posted by Pater Aletheias at 6:27 AM on December 1, 2020 [14 favorites]


"violence workers"
posted by hypnogogue at 6:56 AM on December 1, 2020 [8 favorites]


My experience is at a bit of an angle to this essay's target since my heritage is Filipino, and we have our own mixed feelings of America's colonial legacy and our own colorized caste system (which, to be fair, was imposed on us by the Spanish centuries before America took over, but the source is still very much wrapped up in the slave trade) but certainly for my family, the idea of America was of a place where you could live the life that you deserved to live. There was a common joke within my parent's social circle that "every Filipino wants to grow up to be American" which is to say that we wanted to grow up to be white. My mom's family is mestizo and has traced its European roots with a deep desire to use it to claim whiteness. My dad's family were engineers who studied in America to help modernize the homeland. Growing up, my parents often talked of Manila and the Philippines with contempt. It's so dirty. So corrupt. So smelly. So filled with poor, brown people and greedy Chinese descended clans. Their children deserved more. Their children deserved better.

I don't blame my parents for their choices. I am grateful for the life that they've given me, but yeah, the sense that we abandoned our country with a bit of a "fuck you, got mine, gonna get more of mine somewhere else" weighs on me often. It's also hard to get my dad to acknowledge his privilege, because he isn't and will never be automatically white passing. He's often accepted into whiteness, but it's a constant and continuous struggle. So long as there's a price he thinks of himself as marginalized, but he sees value in the fact that other minorities have to pay a higher price and at least he's better than them.

When I told my parents that I started working for the DNC last year, they weren't exactly thrilled. Like many entrepreneurs who believed that socialism ruined their country, my dad's always felt more comfortable talking to Republicans, though he was more of a Kasich voter than anything else. My mom admired Obama, but also long believed that politics were a waste of time and talent, because she grew up in a country where politics were about generational accumulations of wealth, power and relationships, and outsiders like us had no place in it. They both disliked Trump, but they were skeptical that anything could make a difference. We'd seen people like him wreck institutions before and they didn't see a lot that would change that.

Still it's been fascinating seeing their relationship with me change over my time at the job, and as they saw the swell of resistance in this last year. They called me the very moment that CNN called the race for Biden, and I could hear joy and pride through the phone line. But that's more because they were happy to see Trump go than seeing Democrats succeed.

Government fails people. Many of the democracies in our world are dysfunctional and broken. The caste system that the article describes exists in every country with a European colonial history. It's not America's alone, but America is no exception and a lot of the people who come to America, like my parents, were very good at playing that game in their home country and they came here because they knew that they could win bigger prizes.
posted by bl1nk at 7:39 AM on December 1, 2020 [45 favorites]


My family was not only in shipping but also sales and ownership beginning in the late 18th century. Myself, I grew up in a totally segregated former Confederate state on the right side of the tracks. I was in high school when the Civil Rights Act was signed into law and my corner of the world exploded in hate. My alma mater produced the last Division I all-white national championship football team while I was attending. I was never an immigrant, the wrong hue nor an outsider. I was born into a white Boomer Paradise that I had done nothing to earn or deserve. Apparently the chink in this immersive cultural armor was that I was also raised a Unitarian, for which I will be eternally grateful...
posted by jim in austin at 8:01 AM on December 1, 2020


Thanks for articulating a lot of how I feel better than I could, bl1nk. My mom's side of the family is Filipino, a big mestizo mix, an Old Family. The ones here in the United States like my mom, and many of the ones the ones still in the Philippines do prayer chains for Trump, follow Fox News incessantly, etc etc etc. Because even the family in the Philippines is very invested in America, their idea of it, the fact that when they come visit they are perceived as white, the idea that when they go to America to study or to live, they aren't immigrants but far-flung members of the family coming by. They're perfectly happy for those other people to be kept out, the ones that do it wrong.
posted by PussKillian at 8:02 AM on December 1, 2020 [5 favorites]


I'm not a fan of these takes, because it feels like it exists as an excuse. As if, it's okay that some immigrants voted for Trump because they don't care about anyone besides themselves anyway.

I do think that people underestimate how patriotic immigrants are. At the very least, there was something that brought them to this country, otherwise, they never would have come. My mom is an immigrant, and will always vote for Democrats. But she also will always talk about America in a way that would be really unpopular in places like Metafilter, because she feels like she had opportunities here that she didn't have in her country of origin. So I can see that being a factor in some people's voting patterns.
posted by chernoffhoeffding at 8:07 AM on December 1, 2020 [12 favorites]


I feel like the trope. That only white people are surprised by things is beginning to hide more than it reveals, though no doubt that’s quite white of me.
posted by Going To Maine at 8:28 AM on December 1, 2020


^ really glad you made this comment. There's a sort of privilege in being hyper-critical all the time.. Yes, things can and must be getting better all the time and we all need to strive for that, but for people who leave terrible circumstances, or even less-than-ideal circumstances, to rebuild a new life for themselves, their families.. I can see how that awareness might not be shared by someone who doesn't know any different.
posted by elkevelvet at 8:28 AM on December 1, 2020 [5 favorites]


I'm not a fan of these takes, because it feels like it exists as an excuse. As if, it's okay that some immigrants voted for Trump because they don't care about anyone besides themselves anyway.
I think these takes try to offer an explanation and it's easy to conflate a reasonable explanation of an attitude with it being an excuse. It's a mistake to assume that all immigrant populations are monolithic and that they all hold a negative view of racism, and simply being a party of tolerance will satisfy the needs and invite the support of various immigrant communities. So essays like this are valuable in busting that stereotype because we need to acknowledge that white supremacy holds an allure for immigrants who have grown up in similar caste systems, and if we are to dismantle those castes, we need to do so in a way that presents it as a better alternative to their lives now, especially if they believe that they have benefitted or flourished under that system.
posted by bl1nk at 8:51 AM on December 1, 2020 [16 favorites]


chernoffhoeffding, I definitely did not get the impression that Monteiro was excusing any harmful behavior. Not at all.

What the essay beings to light, though not explicitly, are the assumptions we commonly make about who "immigrants" are. Like the post from the other day about descriptions that people use to de facto refer to white people without actually refering to white people (eg. "working class Americans", "law-abiding citizens", "Midwesterners"), when many people in the US hear "immigrants", they de facto think of non-white people.

(This isn't just the US, of course. Where I'm writing from in Canada, even people who know me will talk about immigrants in a way that makes it clear that they are envisioning brown people, often refugees, and not my highly educated white American self.)

But if you look at the US immigration system, generally one has to be fairly highly educated and/or have above-average financial resources in order to immigrate to the US. (Side note: Immigrate; not be taken in as a refugee. The two categories overlap but are also distinct - some refugees do not end up immigrating permanently, and many immigrants are not refugees. Yet often we conflate the two categories and only think of immigrants as refugees (and, specifically, destitute refugees).)

So who immigrates to the US, in a manner that enables them to become a voting citizen? 1. People whose families or communities gathered sufficient resources to send them to university in the US, and who then were able to find jobs to stay. 2. People who were near the top of the socio-economic status ladder in their home countries and wanted even more opportunities. 3. People who were near the top of the socio-economic status ladder in their home countries and thus were able to leave in a controlled, organized way when major political changes happened. 4. People who were really enamoured with the image or story of America and the American Dream and worked hard to gather the resources to immigrate. 5. Refugees who have decided to settle permanently in the US and have been able to successfully apply for citizenship.

Certainly there are liberal to radically progressive people across all of those categories (especially perhaps category 5 and subsets of categories 1 and 3). And going from near the top of a caste or class system to facing discrimination as an immigrant can push some people farther to the political left. But also some of the categories really select for a more conservative political viewpoint. For example, Cuban or Venezuelan immigrants are more likely to be of European ancestry than of Afro-Caribbean or indigenous ancestry, due to the racial/economic caste/class systems in those countries (eg. likely already thinking of themselves as white); and to have immigrated to the US because they specifically didn't support political change toward more socialist, egalitarian governments in their countries of origin. Monteiro describes how his family supported racist, anti-immigrant politics maybe more than they otherwise would have as an assimilation tactic, but it's clear from his description of his family history that this wasn't a polar change. "My people were in shipping" is not the title of the essay by accident.
posted by eviemath at 9:04 AM on December 1, 2020 [12 favorites]


By excuse, I mean an excuse for progressives to avoid having to reflect on how their own behavior might alienate immigrants.
posted by chernoffhoeffding at 9:26 AM on December 1, 2020 [1 favorite]


Some of the white folks helping to pull down racist statues thought they were clearing space for statues of themselves.
posted by suetanvil at 9:47 AM on December 1, 2020


There's a sort of privilege in being hyper-critical all the time.
I haven’t noticed anyone being hyper critical all the time. Did I miss a memo? Immigrant or not, I don’t see a lot of white Americans publicly acknowledging their failure to fight systemic racism and/or admit that we have failed Blacks and other people of color. Plenty of supposedly progressive organizations haven’t hired even one black person in 20 years. That’s fucked up. That’s only one fucked up thing out of many fucked up things, but I applaud the author’s honesty.

My story is different from his story but like the author, I have also benefited from my white privilege. I don’t believe that things are going to get better until many more white people are willing to become uncomfortable and make other white people uncomfortable so that the imaginary “equal playing field” that so many of us truly want for the US becomes more of a reality.

His story about discovering that Portugal was key to the slave trade resonated with me in part because a friend of mine used to be a competitive swimmer. She explained how her dad had to fight so that she and her siblings could use the local pool. They were biracial family and black kids did not get to use the pool until her dad, who was in the military, made it a campaign. She also explained that slaves were not taught to swim for fear that they would escape. Those who tried were killed. African peoples with cultures around fishing and swimming were kidnapped, forced into slavery, and denied many things including the pleasure of swimming. One tiny aspect of this great American sin has created such generational trauma that “African Americans between the ages of five and fourteen years old are 3.2 times more likely to drown than white children of the same age.

That was all news to me. It shouldn’t have been. Mike wrote publicly about some of the shameful reasons that made me and him and so many other white Americans willing to avert our eyes from the racist system from which we benefit. That this is the reality should not be news and yet, here we are. I’m not an immigrant but plenty of his story applies to my family. This essay is not a fix but it’s a start, and that’s why I wanted to post it here.
posted by Bella Donna at 9:54 AM on December 1, 2020 [9 favorites]


I'll never forget my italian grandfather talking about growing up in 1920s East LA and getting every italian slur thrown at him in school until magically around the 1950s italians were slowly considered white and how in the 70s he and my grandma empty nested into a cheap small condo that eventually became a huge latinx neighborhood and how my grandparents would call their neighbors every anti-mexican slur in the book inside their place. I remember being like 10 years old and visiting and thinking "how can you two even do such a thing, ya big dummies?" I never confronted them on it though, but I constantly called my mom on it.
posted by mathowie at 10:18 AM on December 1, 2020 [15 favorites]


I strongly appreciate everyone in this thread who is sharing their own personal and family stories -- thank you for your vulnerability, your willingness to articulate complicated and painful things, and your insight.
posted by brainwane at 10:24 AM on December 1, 2020 [5 favorites]


I'll never forget my italian grandfather talking about growing up in 1920s East LA and getting every italian slur thrown at him in school until magically around the 1950s italians were slowly considered white

Yes! There was a large Italian-American community where I grew up, and the stories the older folks told made it clear that they had only recently achieved Full White Status, after the Polish and Irish communities. There was a portmanteau of the n-slur and the w-slur that they joked about growing up with.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 11:08 AM on December 1, 2020


@Bella Donna, I didn't express my appreciation for the article very well. My perspective is (male) (in-group) and my circles include people like me, who are very vociferous for the need to address inequity, but who may have a limited perspective on what motivates recent (Canadians in this case) in how they perceive themselves and the political landscape of their new home.

At one time there was an unexamined assumption that immigrants vote Liberal in Canada. Not to unpack how we understand liberal/conservative values in one country or another, but it's very clear that assumptions can be harmful and misleading over time. You take things for granted, you don't try to really understand, and from that vantage you misdirect energies and/or become complacent. I can't speak to the US so much, though the example is much more amplified across the planet for reasons we don't need to get into here. But I do see very similar tensions arising in my province. Thank you for posting the article.
posted by elkevelvet at 11:22 AM on December 1, 2020 [2 favorites]


I know of a number of catholic Mexicans in Mexico who liked trice married Trump better than catholic Joe Biden, because the Democrats are the "pro-abortion" party; you figure that one out.
posted by Omon Ra at 12:44 PM on December 1, 2020 [3 favorites]


My wife (who is a non-white immigrant, although unable to vote as she doesn't want citizenship) was much more surprised/shocked than me at how many other immigrants / people of color voted for Trump this time (well, last time too, but it feels even more egregious after 4 years!). Been trying to summarize/share some of this for her to help her understand. She doesn't know a lot of other immigrants and those she does know tend to be apolitical (and the Japanese immigrant community does not have a lot of the dynamics that lead some other groups to have significant pro-Trump constituencies), so the idea that people would vote for a President who so clearly hates them is hard to get.

Whereas, yeah, if you're very familiar with American history this is not exactly new even if it is disappointing (literally anyone voting for the GOP at this point is disappointing...).

And of course part of the answer is always that no group as large and diverse as "immigrants" has any real single cohesive belief or temperament or ideology. Especially the fairly large group of people who immigrate solely for work or family reasons, who may not have much attachment at all to their new country (not just in the US - in fact I'd say America expects immigrants to be much more "yay America" than many other countries, because part of the story is that "everyone" wants to come here, and that immigrants must view it as an amazing success / achievement rather than just the place their company has an office in --- whereas white people who move to other countries to work get called "expats" and are not expected to be super-patriotic towards that country).
posted by thefoxgod at 12:54 PM on December 1, 2020 [1 favorite]


a President who so clearly hates them

'Course, if you're a white immigrant, this is perhaps not at all clear. Look at Trump's wife, for example. (I mean, Trump hates women, but he doesn't seem to hate Melania particularly more than any other women, and arguably less so.) I imagine a lot of people who are technically immigrants understand the implied "brown" modifier when many people in the US talk about immigrants.

There was an article or essay in 2017, maybe early 2018, about a related phenomenon. It used as an illustrative example the case of a Mexican(?)-American immigrant in some small Midwestern(?), predominantly Trump-voting town who was one of the few non-white people in town, and who owned a business, and overall had been well accepted into the social life of the town. But there was some minor issue or mix-up with his paperwork, and even though he had been there for decades, he ended up getting deported. And many of the other (white) townspeople were really shocked and surprised by this, even though they had attended Trump rallies calling for deportation of immigrants. The article/essay talked about how people who don't know a lot of immigrants overall tend to think of the people they do know as exceptions. Like white people's one Black friend, where the white folks say dumb shit, and then append "of course, you're not like that", or don't even notice in the first place that what they've said could also apply to their friend. Mentally, "immigrants" or "Blacks" are other for them, and they don't categorize anyone they actually know and like in the same group. Anyway, my roundabout point is that everyone picks up on these sort of unspoken connotations of highly charged descriptors like "immigrants", regardless of their national origin, so why should people who also happen to have, themselves, immigrated to the US be any different in this respect?
posted by eviemath at 1:40 PM on December 1, 2020 [9 favorites]


There are multiple Chinese immigrants on my city's city council who openly say they don't want 'density' because they don't want to be like China where they left. They are openly Republican.

My California in-laws are Hispanic (basically 2nd generation Americans) and all speak negatively about people from Mexico and are all Republicans.

Eviemath's descriptions of reasons for moving (even between US cities and states) reads as accurate to me.
posted by The_Vegetables at 3:10 PM on December 1, 2020 [2 favorites]


I'm Indian and I have an embarrassingly high number of relatives that voted for Trump and strongly defend him and his racist policies. Two of my uncles work for USPS and are probably his most ardent defenders in my extended family, even though Trump threatened their livelihoods and tried dismantling the Post Office. It shouldn't surprise me that people will vote against their own self interests as history has shown repeatedly that this something humans excel at, but still I'm dumbfounded.

It's also disheartening to see voters around the world vote for more authoritarian leaders such as seen in Brazil, Hungary, the Philippines, and Poland. Prime Minister Modi of India is also pursuing religious and nationalist policies.

Biden's win is a huge relief in what has been a hard few years for democracy around the world.
posted by mundo at 3:16 PM on December 1, 2020 [3 favorites]


eviemath's comment reminds me of Alexandra Erin's point about the Shirley Exception (Twitter thread).
And if you point out that the rule that they're backing would affect what they call "legitimate cases", the response will be:

"But surely there will be an exception."

.....

All of those studies of people in Trump Country USA who were shocked, shocked, that the kind man next door who is a good father and a great neighbor and a real part of the community was dragged away by ICE?

They all thought that surely he'd be an exception.
posted by brainwane at 3:16 PM on December 1, 2020 [8 favorites]


The fact that immigrant communities are wary of socialism isn't really something new to me. I was surprised a few years ago at how quickly some Americans just started self-identifying as socialists on the Internet and just expected that immigrants, especially those coming from countries that experienced turbulent revolutions and civil war, would just be totally okay with it.

I mean, I remember my dad would call me a "Commie thug" when I got into trouble or was acting like a punk as a child. Just saying that there's still a lot of people carrying around their patriotic education they learned during the Cold War.
posted by FJT at 3:36 PM on December 1, 2020


Maybe this is tangential to immigrants particularly aligning to Trump, but something about Trump is also something about the powers of patriarchy - its value for particular masculinities, its patronage networks, cronyism, its misogyny etc. When you express that eg Catholic immigrants don’t want a catholic Biden because of abortion, to me it’s more about Trump’s overt patriarchal position as rising above that obvious contradiction. The Catholic idea of controlling women’s sexuality, and not men’s is baseline patriarchy and that’s what Trump is all about, from his tape recordings of objectifying adultery to his multiple sexual assault allegations. As controlling as patriarchal ideology is in in the USA (and Australia where I am) it is just as similarly encoded in immigrant-contributing cultures. That is Trump’s power in this world, he stands for something addictive to patriarchal people. Listening to women, applying women’s talents, especially WOC, to powerful positions is just so suspicious to people considering Biden’s leadership against Trump’s.
posted by honey-barbara at 5:07 PM on December 1, 2020 [6 favorites]


This is your reminder that we can talk about racism and white-adjacency/privilege in America without resorting to caste analogies.

Thanks.
posted by basalganglia at 7:23 PM on December 1, 2020 [3 favorites]


A wide majority of Latino people and the majority of recent immigrants appear to have voted for Biden. So what he is describing is just one way immigrants respond to whiteness and to institutional racism, and it's not likely the dominant way across the wide variety of cultures involved.
posted by chaz at 9:10 PM on December 1, 2020 [2 favorites]


A lot of immigrants move to the United States and absorb a lot of anti-black racism, partly because it fits with their origin story ("as an immigrant, I was able to move here 'with nothing' and succeed -- there must be something wrong with these people who can't") and partly as a survival technique (consciously aligning your out-group with the people in power instead of other out-groups). In 2016, it felt like that was finally getting chipped away. The Trump Republican party is so blatantly and widely hostile to anything outside the Fox News base that even lifelong Republicans chose not to support him. It seems like Trump improved his 2020 vote with a lot of these groups, so I don't know. (I mean -- I know of Muslim immigrants who supported Trump, so I do know. It's a lot of leopard-eating-people's-face supporters who don't think they'll get caught in the buffet. It's still shocking.)
posted by grandiloquiet at 8:29 AM on December 2, 2020 [3 favorites]


A wide majority of Latino people and the majority of recent immigrants appear to have voted for Biden. So what he is describing is just one way immigrants respond to whiteness and to institutional racism, and it's not likely the dominant way across the wide variety of cultures involved.

The reason people are having these discussions right now is that Trump gained ground with these demographics. The overall percentage shift wasn’t that big - though it was that big in certain places. Trump 2020 was far behind G. W. Bush in the “Hispanic” vote, but narrowly ahead of any other Republican since. But that’s enough that I wouldn’t feel great about it if I were a Democratic strategist - especially the counties that actually flipped.

Anyway, Mike is right and really it follows from a basic understanding of the social construction of race and its history in America. Without naming names, it is not to some people’s credit that they have probably heard those things described many times and acknowledged them in theory yet continue (even now) to display a basically essentialist understanding of race in their political rhetoric.
posted by atoxyl at 3:32 PM on December 2, 2020 [1 favorite]


The fact that immigrant communities are wary of socialism isn't really something new to me. I was surprised a few years ago at how quickly some Americans just started self-identifying as socialists on the Internet and just expected that immigrants, especially those coming from countries that experienced turbulent revolutions and civil war, would just be totally okay with it.

Also an example of the diversity of “Latinos” though. The two areas that have probably been most discussed in terms of Biden’s underperformance among Latinos are South Florida and the Rio Grande Valley in Texas. Biden won the former handily in the primary, and the idea that Sanders didn’t and couldn’t, because of his identification as a socialist and positive statements about Castro, was discussed heavily as a strike against Sanders’ candidacy. That was almost certainly correct, as far as Florida goes, as even Biden didn’t do well enough to get the Democrats over the top in Florida. However, Sanders won those RGV counties, and consistently outperformed Biden among Latinos in the Southwest and West (a demographic his campaign invested heavily in addressing) in general. How that would have looked in the general of course we have no way of knowing.
posted by atoxyl at 3:49 PM on December 2, 2020 [2 favorites]


"It means you couldn’t score from third on a double."
posted by esoteric things at 6:35 PM on December 3, 2020


I know of a number of catholic Mexicans in Mexico who liked trice married Trump better than catholic Joe Biden, because the Democrats are the "pro-abortion" party; you figure that one out.

What is there to figure out? If a voter wants to reduce the legal access to abortion, voting for Donald Trump is perfectly logical, isn't it? Ultimately he and Mitch delivered for them on federal courts including the Supreme Court. If he'd won again, well Stephen Breyer is 82 now and the next two oldest are conservative stalwarts Thomas and Alito. Had Trump won again and the Republicans maintained senate control (the latter they might manage anyway) then there's a very good chance that Breyer doesn't make it, Thomas or Alito or both could retire and be replaced with someone younger (although neither of them shows sign of wanting this).

The average age of Republicans on the court is now 60, nine years younger than Democrats. In the worst case for Democrats, all three of the oldest judges die or retire over the next four years and are replaced with 50 year olds. That leaves you with not only a 7-2 Republican majority, it lowers average age of Republicans to 54 and Democrats goes up to 67. If we assume that all judges last until they're 85, not an unreasonable assumption, the next retirements are:

Sotomayor and Roberts in the early 2040s.
Kagan in the post 2048 term.

If all three were replaced by Democratic nominees - the best case - that would the tip the court back to 6-3 Republican when Roberts retired and then 5-4 in favour of Democrats in the early 2050s when both Gorsuch and Kavanagh retired.

In other words, if Trump had won, there would have been a good chance of 30 more years of right-wing dominance of the supreme court.

From that point of view, they were doing exactly the right thing to achieve their political objectives. Remember how much we made fun of people for voting for W Bush because he was the kind of guy they might have a beer with? Surely people should vote to achieve their objectives, not vote based on personality, right? Well, that's what these people are doing. Voting for a man that they know is bad, that many of them are sure is going to hell, in order to get their goals achieved.
posted by atrazine at 6:03 AM on December 4, 2020 [1 favorite]


What is there to figure out? If a voter wants to reduce the legal access to abortion, voting for Donald Trump is perfectly logical, isn't it?

Sure, if they care only about that one single issue at the expense of literally everything else. Makes them a bit hypocritical in my book.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 6:34 AM on December 4, 2020


Has anyone seen any research about whether Trump’s ridiculous Goya stunt made any difference? At the time I thought it was stupid and at best harmless, but now I’m not so sure.
posted by Mchelly at 6:36 AM on December 4, 2020


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