What Racial Anxiety Can Tell Us About America’s Urban Myth of Voter Fraud

Changing Demographics Partly Explain Trump's Currency And Why City Voters Will Be In The Spotlight.

A central anxiety driving Donald Trump’s supporters to the polls helps explain why and where there are likely to be moments of contention and possibly even conflict after the vote. At around 80 per cent, Trump’s support is overwhelmingly, though by no means exclusively, white. Within the next 20 to 25 years (depending in no small part on immigration rates) white people will become a minority in America.??

For many of those who believe that America is a fundamentally and essentially white country, this long-standing trend is deeply troubling. It is important to understand that America was a slave state for more than 200 years, an apartheid state for 100 years and has only been a non-racial democracy for 60 years. As Trump’s late October New York rally, where one speaker condemned Puerto Rico an island of garbage indicated, the grip of white supremacy on the political culture is still very strong.?

There are already 6 states (California, Georgia, Maryland, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas) and the District of Columbia, where white people are a minority. Florida, New York and New Jersey are not far behind. As of 2019 less than half of US children aged 15 or under were white. Demography is not destiny. Texas has been majority-minority for some time and has remained reliably Republican, albeit increasingly contested: Republicans won 59.3 per cent of the vote there in 2000: by 2020 it was down to 52.1 per cent. There are other important factors, not least the economy, driving voters' concerns.?

In a country as segregated as America in which the political culture is so heavily racialised – the Democrats have not won a presidential election with the white vote alone for 60 years, since, not coincidentally, they passed a raft of civil rights legislation. So race matters.??

Take Georgia. In 2020 it went narrowly for Biden – the first time a Democrat had won the state since Bill Clinton took it in 1992.? On the infamous morning of January 6th 2021 the state elected its first black senator, Rapahel Warnock – it was the first time it had elected a Democrat in that capacity in two decades. Not long after Trump supporters had ransacked the Capitol in DC that same day, results came in from Georgia’s second senate race. The Democrats had won again, and the state had elected its first Jewish senator.??

There has been around a 28 per cent increase in minorities in Georgia over the past 20 years. To understand how this will shape the Republican response to the results we must reimagine the American electoral map. Most people see it as states that are red (Republican) or blue (Democrat). But that configuration, while logical because that is how the electoral votes are tailed, belies where the votes are. For that we should look on America more like an archipelago, where the cities are overwhelmingly Democrat and the rural areas are Republican. Of the 100 largest cities in America only 25 are Republican. Cities are also the most diverse spaces and suburbs are becoming increasingly diverse.?

When the polls are closed it is the votes from Milwaukee that will be decisive for Wisconsin; Atlanta for Georgia, and Philadelphia and Pittsburgh for Philadelphia and so on. These are the spaces, most of them minority-majority, many black-led, that hold the key to Republican defeat. This is why the Trump campaign targeted vote counters in Fulton County, which has indicted Trump and 18 co-defendants on charges of racketeering and other crimes relating to them trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election. It’s why two armed men were arrested near the vote counting site in Philadelphia shortly after the election. When I reported from Racine, Wisconsin, Republicans in 2018 considered Milwaukee, where white people are not only the minority but outnumbered by African-Americans, a punch line to any tale about corruption or dysfunction.?

None of these developments are new in America. But they are approaching a critical point and, in Trump, they have inflammatory and divisive conduit.??

Gary Younge was the US correspondent for The Guardian from 2003-2015 and has covered 6 presidential elections?

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Image Attribution: "Donald Trump" by Gage Skidmore is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0