LET me start by saying, boy was I wrong! In my last article on the eve of the US elections, I had predicted that Kamala Harris would win. I had based in on three assumptions: women power, Gen Zs influence in favor of Kamala and decency of the larger US population that would vote character over pocket. Turns out, not only were my assumptions turned upside down, but other factors came into play that are even more remarkable, far-reaching and have potentially changed the US landscape forever. Let us look at what happened and what does it portend for the future.
First, let us look at the women vote. Many election watchers including the author theorized that 2024 was a unique electoral environment – with reproductive health access on the ballot in many states, a Republican nominee held liable for sexual about and a woman on top of the Democratic ticket. Surely, the combination of the three would have women lean heavily in favour of Kamala. Not at all! According to CAWP (Center of American Women and Politics), women voted as they had in the previous election with no marked shift towards Kamala. Around 53% of women voted for Kamala which was lesser percentage than women who voted for Biden. Essentially, women voted as they always did and the female candidate on the top of the ticket and other factors didn’t have any impact on the female vote. More notably, white women voted for Trump at 52%. This speaks volumes given Trump’s history with women.
No one anticipated that men would change their voting pattern and support a female candidate and the macho US men did not disappoint. They voted for Trump 55%. Given that 71% of the voters were white, the majority of white men (and women) voting for Trump spelt doom for Kamala, but it didn’t end there. It was reported that the Gen-Z, or young voters between 18–24 years was going to favour Kamala by 12-14 points. However, in the end, young voters supported Kamala by only 4 point margin which was a much smaller margin than the 25-point support young voters gave to President Biden in 2020. This shift was driven by young men who voted for Biden in 2020 but switched to Trump in 2024, especially the young white men. So, more whites voting for a white candidate.
Right after the elections, I visited the US and had an opportunity to see things first hand. Three stark realities hit me like a ton of bricks. First, US men are men first and are not ready to vote for a woman to become president. This was true in November 2024 regardless of their race, with even the black men voting for Kamala in the lowest numbers in the past three decades (77% for Kamala versus 95% for Obama). Concurrently, Latino men voted for Trump in a majority with only 43% voting for Kamala. This is again the lowest percentage of Latino men voting for a democrat in the past three decades. Second, Gen-Z and younger voters have unsurprisingly become anti-establishment and Trump was seen as a non-establishment candidate. And Gen-Z men seemingly have decided to ignore any flaws in character, decency, competence for leadership as long as the candidate was anti-establishment. Don’t we know this in Pakistan as well? And it has been witnessed in the few years in the elections in Thailand as well as the recent developments in Bangladesh. Third, character in a candidate is trumped, no pun intended, by race and gender. US will pick a flawed character over a black women and that is that.
Leaving the above analysis of this specific election aside, there is a trend in the US which may not portend well for the future of US elections. The trend is the ethnic shift in the US. In 1950, US was almost 90 percent white, which is now down to 59%. Concurrently, the Hispanic and Latino population has skyrocketed from 2% to almost 20% in the same timeframe, to become the second largest minority in the US. They used to be overwhelmingly democratic voters in the past but have shown that Trump’s message of populism appeals to them. This should be no surprise since they have fled countries in Latin America with similar populistic and opportunistic leaders. Why would their voting trend be any different in the US? As the ethnic shift continues in the US where minorities become the majority in the next decade, what kind of leaders would US be electing? This is going to be interesting to observe, and will US eventually become an isolated banana-republic.
—The writer is a former Senior Advisor to the Government and a sector development specialist. He is on the Governing Council of Non-Resident Pakistanis (NRPs) in US.
