Donald Trump’s Post Racial America
Today marks two weeks since Donald J. Trump's reelection. We’ve had lots of finger-pointing, saber-rattling, and loud rhetoric about how and why Democrats lost the election.
But the path forward for Democrats is simple:
Stop the noise and listen to voters.
Back when Barack Obama was elected in 2008, and there was talk about talk about a post-racial America, as a Black woman, I thought it was nonsensical. But I now think it was spot on.
Twenty-first-century America is a country in which Black and Latino men care less about race and more about class. Women care less about gender than their pocketbooks.
The fast and steady march to the 2026 midterm elections begins now. But it won’t be about race, gender, or LGBTQ rights. We are in a class war.
To win it, Democrats need to stop scolding voters for choosing Trump.
Stop calling them bigots and misogynists. It's time to get to work solving real problems of real people.
While Democrats have been poorly navigating Palestinian protests on campus and engaging in battles around pronouns, Trump has been stealing our base out from under us.
We don’t have to let go of our identity, but it’s time to let go of identity politics.
The American Dream is slipping through the fingers of hard-working Americans — black and white, men and women. Chiding Americans to say “Latinx” is senseless if middle-class Latinos are struggling to make their car payments. Squaring off over which kids can play on which sports teams at school is absurd when our public schools are failing our kids.
Here in New York, “the greatest city in the world,” one in eight public school children is homeless. Curriculum battles do not serve a child with no home and an empty belly. And they don’t serve overworked, under-resourced teachers, either.
After Trump’s win, AOC checked in with her Instagram followers to ask split-ticket voters why they “supported Trump & me OR voted Trump/Dem.” She discovered the plain truth:
“You are focused on the real issues people care about,” a voter posted on AOC’s story. “Similar to Trump populism in some ways.”
In fact, no place has seen a more significant increase in Trump support than this deep blue city I love — New York.
On the hyper-local Community Board where I serve, my district is the flipside-of-the-AOC-coin in terms of median income and education. But, time and again, our constituents come before us with the same concerns as our neighbors in the Bronx and Queens: affordable housing, public safety, and the crumbling New York City infrastructure. These are simple messages for a one-party city and state run by Democrats to digest.
Yet, the message is not getting through.
In the thirty years since I worked in the Clinton White House, the base has been ravaged by an opioid crisis partly fueled by the jobs we shipped overseas. The American working- and middle class are increasingly obese, fed on processed and fast foods, and often unable to find healthy options in food deserts or to find time to prepare them after working two jobs to make ends meet. Too many Americans die off too young from stress-related illnesses. Increasingly, this cuts across racial lines.
Bill Clinton said, “I feel your pain,” to these Americans. But along the way to global free trade and the shift from a manufacturing to an information economy, it seems we stopped listening.
Into the void stepped Donald Trump.
To save this country from the scourge of a man who cares not about the people but only about himself, we must stop blaming Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, and most especially Trump voters. Democrats need to look inward and make a cold, brutal assessment of why we lost. We must begin to address the fundamental issues people care about—the cost of food on the table and gas in the tank.
The Democratic Party must move away from identity politics and embrace the seismic political shift across demographic groups, cities, states, and regions. We must embrace a new post-racial America aligned along class lines.
It's time to get with the change. Or get left behind.
