Trump voters can be safely ignored as a political force. This is to say that insomuch as people are hand wringing over coming to terms with what this revealed about the American soul, there isn't really much to reveal that wasn't already clear to a person of color or anyone with sufficient knowledge of our country's history. The racist and sexist policies and ideologies that created Donald Trump are the same ones that GOP voters voted for consistently over the last forty years. The only difference is that the dog whistle is gone, and now we have a President George Wallace emboldening racists and retrograde human beings across the nation.
Trump voters need to be worried about in the sense that one needs to worried about the intellectually impaired or inherently prejudiced causing havoc in the streets and against innocent people, and we are already hearing of such tragic incidents. People need to be vigilant and ready to defend the prone groups, the most likely to be victimized under a Trump administration.
But we don't need to worry about Trump voters as a political force at the ballot box going into the future. This election was a historical aberration by every statistical trend. I'm pretty sure Martin O'Malley would have beaten Donald Trump. I'm actually pretty sure freaking Lincoln Chafee might have. We all know either of the Obamas would have handled him handily, and neither of them are actually as politically divergent from or particularly more progressive than Hillary as some Democrats like to tell themselves. Clinton perhaps may have been more hawkish, and is perhaps the least able to smoothtalk progressive voters, but I don't think she was politically speaking offering anything too radically different than the Obamas or any of the other establishment centrist Democrats. Can people really point at a lot of things that make her more neoliberal or imperialistic than Barack Obama? A few, perhaps, but the point being that the difference between Hillary and her typical Democratic peers is rather tiny, particularly when compared between the difference between her and more progressive Democrats such as Sanders or Warren.
This was the political perfect storm of terrible timing, the most establishment Democrat possible with the most baggage finally getting her "turn", the symbol of political complacency, versus a radical inflammatory demagogue who "wasn't a politician".
Circumstances are dire to be sure, and they did manage to get a government into power that could do immeasurable damage to the state. One can also assume that the Republican Party when in such absolute power will do what the Democratic Party failed so consistently to do when in power: pass laws that ensure the continuation of such power, gerrymandering, voter ID laws, there is little doubt they will do everything in their power in the next four years to continue subverting the democratic processes. They will appoint a supreme court justice. They may soon have the majority necessary to begin directly subverting the Constitution with god knows what sort of heinous amendments.
We need to maintain political resistance, we need to keep fighting the culture war for the values we believe in, we need to take back the Democratic Party from the Clintonian and center/right Democrats who got their chance and so spectacularly failed, we need to be vigilant, but we do not need to respect or heed the opinions or grievances of Trump voters.
Period. People are now writing plenty of articles opining on how the American people were suffering and looking for other options and so on, and all this is true, but that's not why Donald Trump won. Those people didn't vote for Donald Trump, most of those people didn't vote at all. Not many people, in fact, did vote for Donald Trump. Not too many voted for Hillary either, but more did to be sure.
Trump voters remain insignificant, a radical emboldened racist minority that had the enthusiasm and drive to take the nation hostage. We've seen this sort of thing play out throughout history, with dangerous effects, but the fact remains that an enthusiastic racist minority voting for someone obviously channel more enthusiasm than a campaign based around voting AGAINST someone. The man underperformed by Romney and McCain's standards and looking at our electoral history wouldn't have had the votes to win under any other circumstances or likely against any other Democrat.
Donald Trump won Michigan with maybe ten thousand votes. Over ninety thousand ballots were cast in Michigan with the presidential vote left blank. How can anyone say that Bernie Sanders or even a run of the mill less progressive Democrat who just didn't Clinton's baggage (justified or not) wouldn't have delivered better on such underwhelming results? We will have to deal with the repercussions of this election and of GOP policies, but Donald Trump and his politics did not in fact win this election. To a certain degree Hillary Clinton and her politics lost it, but perhaps more compelling Hillary Clinton and her campaign lost it. I am interested in using this as an opportunity for Democrats to reject Clintonian politics, of course, but I did touch earlier on the fact that there are plenty more charming or less "baggaged" Democrats not too far from her politically that probably would have beaten Trump.
Trump didn't mobilize some new voting coalition that has applicability in the political future, Clinton demobilized typical Democratic voters with a naive play at the mystical prize of "Republican moderates"...people who, predictably, voted by party lines anyway. Trump didn't bring out a vote, Clinton's campaign priorities, politics, and strategies (alongside, admittedly, the long history of Republican measures to keep down the vote and make it more difficult for people to vote) collectively tamped down a vote that would have historically and typically been sufficient to end a candidate like Trump.
Trump didn't bring out more Republican voters, if anything he lost them, but he was still offering them a vision, an ideology. A toxic, utterly un-Christian, and illusory one, to be sure, but still something to be focused on, something to drive them, the faux-hare with faux-hair for them to chase around the track.
There are more of us than there are of them, thank god, and there always have been. Sadly and predictably there were just also a lot of people who didn't vote or didn't care to vote because they weren't being provided with politics or goals to actually aim and aspire for, just the urge to vote against. This was, admittedly a valid urge considering how completely screwed this nation now is, but I can empathize with the millions of people who aren't enthused or inspired by fear/guilt/whatever. They were, I think, short-sighted, and I think it goes without saying that much like Brexit if this election got a do-ever it'd probably go the other way, but I can comprehend the forces and politics that delivered them to such political apathy and non-cooperation.
Now is the time to make sure that Trump's ideas and ideologies are not further normalized, that they do not start bleeding into the body politic. People will continue promoting the false narrative that he has earned some mandate and that Trump's politics have sustained some sort of majority when both these things are patently false. He has a mandate in the sense that his party managed to win control of all branches of government, but the margins were slim and the voters completely outnumbered. There is nothing to learn from either the abashedly bigoted voter or the one that went, "Gosh, I know this guy might have some choice words about Mexicans/Chinese/Women/etc. and has a vice president into electrocuting gays, but I looove his tax code!", their culpability and depravity is about the same where it really matters.
More revealing for me, personally, are the people who weren't (as far as I can tell) Trump voters but now believe the priority right now is to concern troll and tone police the horrified reactions and protests people are undertaking post-election.
The voting bloc that actually elected Donald Trump can be, god willing, safely set aside alongside Hillary Clinton as dinosaurs.
