JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
In the days since President-elect Donald Trump won back the White House, there have been conversations that try to better understand Trump's victory and the nation's apparent shift to the right. Eddie Glaude Jr. is a professor at Princeton University, and he's been in some of those conversations. He's also the former chair of the school's African American Studies program and the author of "We Are The Leaders We Have Been Looking For," which explores how voters can be more democratically engaged. He argues that while economic angst and dissatisfaction with the current administration are key reasons for why the election turned out the way it did, Trump's identity politics also lie at the heart of his appeal. We spoke earlier this week.
How do you think about the results of the most recent election, where we saw a - sweeping victories by President-elect Donald Trump and Republicans up and down the ballot? He won all seven swing states. There were moves by a number of demographic groups shifting towards the right. How do you parse that?
EDDIE GLAUDE JR: Well, you know, it's been hard to kind of make sense of it. But I think it's clear to me that race and gender played a role. I know that there are those who are making the claim that this is evidence that the Democratic Party has, you know, lost its way in relation to working-class people. I don't think that's necessarily true, particularly because Black and brown working-class people did not vote for Trump in overwhelming numbers, so we need to unpack what we mean by the working class. We see split-ticket voting. We saw Democrats in some places - Democratic senatorial candidates win, or they didn't lose by the same number or margins as Vice President Harris.
So if Democrats were being punished for policies that harmed working-class folk or if they were being punished for inflation and the like, one would think you would see that across the board. But we saw, instead, split-ticket voting not only in relation to senatorial candidates, but in terms of the abortion rights initiatives, 7 out of the 9 that passed. So we had American voters voting for a Donald Trump - right? - voting for a Democratic candidate and voting for Donald Trump. We had American voters voting for abortion rights and voting for Donald Trump. Now, how do we understand that?
SUMMERS: Yeah, what does that tell you to you?
GLAUDE: It tells me that race and gender were at work because they decided - many people decided, without any evidence, that Donald Trump would respond to their lives. They would prefer someone like Donald Trump than they would Kamala Harris. Now, what's the substance of that preference? I think, to my mind, he gives folk a permission structure to blame others for their condition.
SUMMERS: I am curious. What would you say to someone who makes the case that focusing, as some Democratic candidates did, on the rights of LGBTQ people in this country, focusing on racism in America, focusing on issues like abortion rights - it alienates voters for whom these issues don't have personal stakes. What would you say to them?
GLAUDE: It's actually proving the point. You know, there is this shorthand about wokeness, you know, wokeism (ph) as the problem, that this insistence on identity politics or that this has been alienating. But here, we're seeing wokeism as a kind of dog whistle - right? - 'cause what was woke about Kamala Harris' campaign? You know, it was - how could one put it? It was kind of book - I mean, textbook third-way politics. The only thing that was woke or representational about her campaign was her - her body, the fact that she was a woman of color. So I think that the concern, the so-called backlash, to tending to the diversity of the nation actually proves the point.
SUMMERS: You know, I covered politics for a long time, and in this election and in so many others, we've talked so much about the issues of immigration, the economy - in the past few elections, abortion rights - as the issues that the American electorate cares most about. But I wonder, for you, as we take a step back - what do those issues have to do with identity and what we know as identity politics? Does identity sit at the fault lines of the political divide in this country?
GLAUDE: I think so, and we know that political identity is kind of bound up with personal identity, right? It's more than just simply a set of political views or ideological positions. It's constitutive of who we take ourselves to be. So identity is at the heart of this thing.
SUMMERS: Eddie Glaude Jr. of Princeton University, thank you so much.
GLAUDE: Thank you. I appreciate you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
