No landslide for Biden? California Democrats dismayed by the power of Trump love

As she watched results come in on election night, California Democrat Jodi Hicks found what she was seeing shocking.

After four years of President Donald Trump, Hicks had been hoping for a resounding “no” to the policies she felt were racist, sexist and harmful. But rather than a sweeping rebuke of Trump, Hicks saw the president gain electoral votes in states like Florida and Texas. It quickly became clear that Democrat Joe Biden would not get a clear and easy victory.

For those like Hicks, CEO of Planned Parenthood Affiliates of California, it was hurtful.

“In 2016, I think there was a way to be heartbroken and still believe that people didn’t know what they were voting for,” she said. “For me personally and for other folks, for other women, for people of color, we wanted sort of a recognition of people saying ‘no’ to all the things we’ve seen in the last four years.”

After four years of leading the nation, many California Democrats figured the odds were stacked against the president for the 2020 election.

In their eyes, a president who had stoked the flames of hatred, committed impeachable acts, and failed to focus on the 230,000 Americans dying in a global pandemic could not possibly have the same level of support he did in 2016.

But as results began to roll in on Tuesday, it became clear that Trump’s time in the White House had not dampened the enthusiasm of his 2016 supporters. Hopes that states like Texas and Florida would turn blue were dashed.

While Biden claimed the 2020 presidential election on Saturday, the nail-biter race was not the outcome many liberals had planned for in a state where Biden led Trump by 32 percentage points.

In 2016, “Folks were definitely wringing their hands, like, ‘what does this mean? And how did this happen?’,” said Kimberly Peeler-Allen, a visiting practitioner at Rutgers University’s Center for American Women and Politics. “Now, it’s a conversation of ‘okay, we know what Trump does... we know what we’re working with now,’ and how could we possibly, as a people, as a county, how could so many people be aligned with that?”

Trump and race

Those who study politics for a living say liberals underestimated and misunderstood why voters supported Trump.

Despite the national reckoning over race the U.S. experienced this summer, Steve Maviglio, a California Democratic consultant noted that a large number of Americans still tolerate Trump’s insensitive racial remarks.

Even in deep blue California, he noted, 33% of voters were backing Trump in the latest count.

“Here’s a president who’s declared war on our state for four years, and he still has a third of the electorate backing him. It’s baffling. Democrats just don’t understand it,” Maviglio said. “They don’t understand how people can think that way. And when they don’t understand it, they can’t really change it.”

A portion of the Trump base are white nationalists, but it’s a small population, said Laura E. Gómez, a professor and the faculty director of the Critical Race Studies Program at the University of California, Los Angeles. There are many more supporters who are racists rather than white nationalists, but the largest segment of Trump supporters, she said, is made up of people who are fed up with institutions, and may see Trump as protecting their way of life.

“It’s like a protest vote. It’s a disgruntlement vote and some of that is race-linked, too,” she said. “They’re voting for him because they’re upset with American politics, generally, and they’re upset with their perception of being neglected by politicians.”

Some liberals may be overestimating the self-reflection that Americans have done over the past year, Peeler-Allen said. The recently national reckoning on race is not likely to undermine the feelings some portions of the country have harbored quietly for years.

“What Donald Trump has been given permission to speak out loud is really a lot of fears that some white people have about the diversifying of America, about where they fall in the racial and class hierarchy in this country,” she said. “I don’t know how we put this genie back in the bottle. You can’t undo 400 years of structural and systemic racism in the span of two election cycles.”

It’s clear that extremism is a reality in America, but it won’t be easy to suppress, said Steve Schmidt, a Republican consultant who worked in the George W. Bush White House and helped elect Arnold Schwarzenegger to the California governor’s office.

“In this country, we need to bury these militia groups, these white supremacist groups,” Schmidt said in a panel with the Sacramento Press Club on Friday. “It needs to be sealed back underground in a Chernobyl-type sarcophagus, and it’s going to take years and years to do.”

Trump’s COVID-19 approach

Some California Democrats were also mystified that Trump wasn’t hurt more by his handling of the coronavirus.

To the contrary, Trump’s message of avoiding lockdowns and moving past the coronavirus may have resonated strongly with Americans, suggested Addisu Demissie, a California political strategist and former campaign manager for Sen. Cory Booker and Gov. Gavin Newsom.

“Shoot, I’m a Democrat and I’m sick of it,” Demissie said at the Sacramento Press Club panel. “It’s been eight months and we all want to go back to some sense of normal.”

Trump spoke to many Americans struggling financially from the pandemic, Schmidt said.

“I think there’s a desperation for people who are hanging on economically and were looking for anything, and Trump’s lie was something,” he said. “When Trump said ‘you can’t stay locked inside forever,’ he was speaking in the language of America on something they intuitively get.”

That said, Schmidt said Democrats failed to express their enthusiasm for reopening the economy along with their concerns about public health dangers.

“It’s not a hard argument: We cannot open the economy and get people back to work...until this is under control,” he said.

Love for Trump

“Blue America” needs to have a discussion about the reality of Trump supporters, said Lawrence Rosenthal, chair of the Center for Right Wing Studies at the University of California Berkeley.

“The Democratic world was expecting something very different,” he said. “There was an assumption that, this time we’ve got Joe Biden, it’s not like we have Hillary Clinton who has been trashed for 30 years by the right and was easy to demonize. It’s hard to demonize Biden.”

But Rosenthal said he failed to account for how much people have come to love Trump.

“There was every reason to believe negative partisanship had become the formula for negative elections,” he said. “But it appears that has changed, and it changed with Trump’s base being enthralled with Trump.”

The 2020 election proves there’s still a large population of people who support Trump, and California Democrats must find a way to understand them, Maviglio said.

“We can’t use the excuse that (Democrats) didn’t show up, because they did,” he said. “But the Trump base is broader and wider than I think most Democrats even imagined.”

This story was originally published November 8, 2020 at 5:00 AM.