“They are so sick and tired of being sick and tired of Trump, there’s this almost unconscious feeling they’re going to go with the candidate that is more likely to beat him,” said Ron Lester, a Washington pollster who has spent decades surveying the attitudes of black voters.
For many, Lester said, “that is probably a white male,” given their deep-seated belief “that America is still a very racist place and a very misogynistic place and that a candidate who doesn’t get any white votes is probably going to lose.”
What’s weird about this framing is that it refers to a hypothetical black or female candidate “who doesn’t get any white votes”. A candidate who doesn’t exist. It’s not clear to me whether this is Lester’s framing or that of voters he’s spoken to or polled. Hyperbole to underscore the point, I guess?
It’s not that I don’t understand the trepidation and conservative (not in the political sense) instincts for self-preservation women and especially people of color are communicating in this article. There’s nothing surprising about it, which makes me sad, and angry. But if all we get out of the next presidential election is a return to the pre-Trump status quo, it will be a colossal failure and wasted opportunity. That previous status quo literally is the source of all our problems–of which Trump is but one.
Biden represents nothing more than that status quo, as provocatively-stated by Christina Greer on MSNBC yesterday, and the degree to which polite, white American media doesn’t understand the point can be seen in the sort of stymied paralysis exhibited by host Nicolle Wallace.
The next election resulting in a President Biden would be a win in the technical sense, and surely less of an overt national disappointment (or, you know, threat) than is a President Trump, but a disappointment all the same.