The presidential election has left a country questioning outcomes on political violence, women, immigrants and the environment.
Through all these issues, November 5 shattered public assumptions that an increasingly multiracial America necessarily means an increasingly progressive one, said political, immigration and economic experts at a Friday, November 8 Ethnic Media Services briefing on election insights.
Political violence
There’s a similar public misconception around political violence: “We seem to assume that either we can predict it or else it’s not going to happen at all, which is why we’re constantly surprised when it does happen,” said Dr. Robert Pape, professor of political science at the University of Chicago and founder and director of the Chicago Project on Security and Threats (CPOST).
Already, as of November 8, the Justice Department disclosed a murder-for-hire plot for an accused Iranian government asset to kill President-elect Trump before the election.
“We need to be watchful against this. It would not come as a surprise to me if there are more assassination attempts between now and January 20 … and in the first 100 days after that, especially if he proceeds with aggressive deportation plans, which include sending ICE agents into blue sanctuary cities like Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York and Portland … where immigration protests turned violent in 2020,” said Pape.
“Political violence operates like a wildfire. We can measure the material that can combust, but we can’t predict the triggering lightning strikes, thrown cigarette butts, the unattended campfires,” he added. “Because the Washington resistance march this January, for instance, is planned to be a peaceful gathering of 50,000, that doesn’t mean it will be. We’re in a tinderbox of a country.”
Women
“What contributes to political violence are narratives that blame any one group of people for the outcome of this election — like that women lost the election for a woman candidate,” said Kelly Dittmar, research director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University.
2024 exit polls show that 54% of women and 44% of men voted for Harris, while 44% of women and 54% of men voted for Trump.
The 2024 voting gender gap, where women were 10 points less likely than men to support Trump, is similar to those in recent elections; in 2020 the gap was 12 points, while in 2016 it was 11.
Women have been more likely than men to support the Democratic candidate and less likely to support the Republican in every election since 1980 — “But these aggregate counts alone are insufficient to truly understand the women’s vote,” said Dittmar.
While most white women (52%) voted Republican, for example, over 90% of Black women voted Democrat.
An AP VoteCast exit poll shows that a third of Black women said Harris being the first woman president “was the most important factor” in their vote, compared to 14% of all women and 11% of all men.
“We talk about the gender of the voters, but we also have to recognize the ways in which gender plays a role in who we’re willing to vote for,” she continued.
An October 2024 Public Religion Research Institute survey found that, while the 43% of Americans overall agreeing that “society as a whole has become too soft and feminine” is down from 48% agreeing in 2023, partisan divides have more than doubled since 2011.
Now, 73% of Republicans say that society is too soft and feminine, compared with 42% of independents and 16% of Democrats.
“It’s less about Harris’ identity, and more about why a man tapping into grievances about threatened masculinity did not disqualify him from winning,” added Dittmar.
Immigrants and Asian Americans
“Without sugar coating it, this is the worst outcome we could have expected … That the majority of the popular vote is against us,” said Vanessa Cardenas, executive director of America’s Voice. “Economic issues overtook everything.”
A September 2024 Pew Research poll found that 81% of registered voters said “the economy will be very important to their vote.”
An AP exit poll found “voters broadly believed that Trump would be better equipped than Harris to handle the economy and jobs.”
“It’s no surprise that immigration was another major motivating factor, because Republicans ran the most vicious anti-immigrant campaign of any major party in modern history,” Cardenas continued.
An October 2024 America’s Voice report using AdImpact data finds that Republican candidates and organizations spent “$964 million on 1,892 unique TV ads that mention immigration so far this year.”
“Immigration itself is being redefined,” explained Cardenas. “As conversations around ending birthright citizenship, TPS and DACA are becoming mainstreamed, the lines between ‘legal’ and ‘undocumented’ are being blurred.”
“The Asian American voting bloc is particularly supportive of pro-immigrant laws, especially those allowing citizens to bring relatives to the U.S., said John C. Yang, president and executive director of Asian Americans Advancing Justice (AAJC).
The AAPI community has the highest proportion of immigrants among all racial and ethnic groups, with about two-thirds of Asian Americans and one-sixth of Pacific Islanders born outside the U.S.
An October 2024 Pew poll found that 82% of Asian American immigrants supported prioritizing family immigration policies.
An AAJC voter survey conducted that month found that overall, however, the issues most important to AAPI voters were similar] to those most important to voters generally, the top three being jobs and the economy (86%), inflation (85%) and healthcare (85%).
Green jobs
“These issues have led to Trump being the first Republican president to be elected with having won the popular vote in more than 20 years,” said Ben Jealous, executive director of the Sierra Club and former president and CEO of the NAACP. “You can’t account for this without looking at the deindustrialization of our nation in the last 30 years after NAFTA.”
Since 1994, when the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) came into effect under President Clinton, the U.S. lost over 80,000 manufacturing plants through 2014, the last year that Census Business Dynamics Statistics data is available.
In comparison, there are approximately 19,500 cities and towns in the U.S.
“That means that most Americans now live where there used to be a factory, and when that factory shut down, what shot up was despair, poverty, joblessness, drug abuse and death from suicide,” said Jealous. “We’ve got to get back to the basic American formula of building an economy that lifts all boats by doing what we’ve always done: designing new things by following the science, then building them here.”
With the Inflation Reduction Act, passed under President Biden in 2022 and authorizing $783 billion for domestic energy and climate change spending, the largest in U.S. history, “We’re doing something we haven’t done in my lifetime: opening factories through the biggest economic opportunity on earth, a chance to change the way the world is powered,” he continued.
As of August 2024, Climate Power data shows that U.S. companies have reported 646 new clean energy projects, creating 334,565 new jobs and driving $372 billion in new investments.
“The turn to the right that we saw is a straight line from us betraying the working people of this country,” said Jealous, adding that this was reflected in Trump’s own performance: “In 2016, he promised to kill Obamacare, and his own party rebelled. This time, Vice President-elect Vance attacked the new green jobs as ‘table scraps,’ and Republican voters roared back.”
“In many red states, voters can be divided on whether or not they want clean technology, but they’re united on wanting it produced there, because they understand that their fortunes are tied to it,” he added. “Trump can say what he wants, but this is the future, and people aren’t going back.”
