New Jersey’s Election Day Lessons
Graphic by Habib Salami.
OPINION
BY RANN MILLER | For AC JosepH Media
What lessons has Election Night taught us?
First, it should teach us that New Jersey is redder than we believed it to be. As I have said previously, New Jersey is actually a red state, no matter what establishment Democrats would have you believe. The color of the election map should make that clear. Nevertheless, Mikie Sherrill came out on top Tuesday night, relatively easily in fact.
So, what did we learn? Quite a few things.
We learned that this election was a referendum on the Trump presidency, and since the Republican candidate chose to align himself with Donald Trump, he died with Donald Trump Tuesday night. We also learned about the sweeping nature of the Governor-Elect’s victory. Sherrill won by 13 percent, securing victories in 14 of 21 counties.
Additionally, Sherrill won the female vote and the non-white vote. She received 68% of the Latino vote, 83% of the Asian vote, and 94% of the Black vote. She swept voters of all age groups and any voter who had at least taken some college courses.
What’s also true is that the Republican candidate won the white vote, specifically the white male vote, the white vote over the age of 45, and the non-college attending white vote —except among white male college graduates. He won them too. Thus, the lesson, or maybe the reminder, is that as a whole, white voters continue to vote against their own interests because the Republican candidate intended to bring harm and chaos to New Jersey.
The irony, of course, is that white voters who came out for Sherrill (and other Democrats this election cycle) are taking a victory lap for their choices, when they’re responsible for the chaos and harm that is a second Trump term in the first place. But I digress.
Why is it that white voters, in New Jersey and nationwide, continue to vote against their own interests in the name of protecting their whiteness? It’s because many believe—intentionally or by default—that their whiteness can and will protect them. The truth is that it will not. White voters must understand that racism—namely, anti-Black racism—harms them.
People often compare European nations to the U.S. to illustrate how universal healthcare, education, and income can work in Western Nations. But many of the nations that do that are largely racially homogenized. In other words, because the citizens of those nations are racially identified as white, it’s easy to enact laws to benefit everyone.
Civil rights legislation in the United States is targeted to secure the rights and privileges of the body politic for a heterogeneous (multiracial) society. This is precisely why the Trump Administration is deconstructing the administrative state, because as the leader of a fascist regime, enacting policies that benefit Americans would benefit non-white people.
So, for the Trump Administration, it’s not enough to discontinue policies that inadvertently benefit non-white people—particularly Black people. They must discontinue any program that inadvertently and/or directly supports non-white people—particularly Black people—even at the expense of their own constituency: white nationalists and white enablers. It’s all easy for the Trump Administration to do.
And because capitalism exploits workers of every race, ethnicity, and hue, when you gut policies and federal agencies that help the indigent and working class and even some middle-class folks, you harm white people of those classes, along with the people of color you sought to harm in the first place.
So many white voters, particularly those who went blue last night, have been left dumbfounded by Trump’s decisions—including withholding funds for the Gateway Tunnel project or refusing to pay SNAP benefits. They largely assumed that the work of the Trump Administration would only harm those they believed were grifting the system—Blacks and Latinos, namely, because Trump told them so.
Sadly, as has been the case in the past, those voters have had their pockets picked. They’re easily fooled.
They believe that the propaganda of Republicans paints a picture of entitlement programs with Black and brown faces. The news media can hardly be trusted because they assist.
Rather than look for diverse representations of entitlement beneficiaries, they only seek out Black faces to convince white people that these programs only benefit Black folks, ignorant of the truth that more white people receive SNAP benefits. In fact, more white people receive SNAP funds, TANF, and WIC funds, as well as free or reduced lunch for students.
Conservatives utilize this bait-and-switch tactic because they don’t care about the poor, whether Black or white… or Latino, or whoever. They desire to eliminate social programs so that they can retain the money…
This is the “beauty” of the ugly bill: it redistributes wealth from poor to rich in the form of stripping money from entitlements and providing tax breaks to the rich. But working-class whites wouldn’t just go for that… unless you can convince them that only Black and brown people are the beneficiaries, and that white people, by and large, do not.
So again, the work of the Trump Administration closing federal agencies or at the very least the functions of those agencies, like the Department of Education, cutting programs like SNAP, easing regulatory checks on corporations, and imperialist aims like military operations in Latin America and Gaza by way of Israel and launching war on Venezuela is a complete redistribution of wealth and power to sustain the white power structure in a changing world where they were never the majority.
That’s the benefit of conditioning the white non-elite working classes with racism since this country’s inception. It continues paying dividends for the power structure.
Maybe white voters are “hip” to what’s happening. We won’t really know until the next time republicans are without power and they attempt to manipulate white voters into voting against their interests.
Then, we’ll see if they’ve learned from their mistakes of the past, or if the racism is just so deep in their blood that they cannot help but blame Black and brown people for the issues the white power structure created by way of their greed.
So, to those white voters… don’t take your victory lap yet. As to whether you learned your lesson… It’s too early to call.
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