Last week I read Gary Bourbeau’s “My Turn” piece about the 2020 election. I was struck by how impassioned it was. Here are the parts that I found most interesting:
“74,216,772. That’s the official count of the much-hated who voted for the losing presidential candidate. To those of you who malign, vilify, condemn, disparage, demonize and dismiss them, consider the vastness of that number. 74,216,772.” Mr. Bourbeau is correct: that is a very large number, as is the number 81,268,924, the official vote count for President Biden.
Note the audience that Mr. Bourbeau wants to address: “those of you who malign, condemn, disparage, demonize and dismiss.” I don’t consider myself much of a maligner, condemner, disparager, demonizer, or dismisser, but I was interested to read his message to such people, and I even asked myself, “Am I a maligner? Maybe I am and I don’t even know it. If so, this message could be pertinent to me.” Mr. Bourbeau went on to address the maligners:
“Oh, and by the way, since the racial element is at the forefront of your thinking on every conceivable issue, how many of those of the 74 million that you hate, or think are stupid, or are under some sort of evil spell and need to be reprogrammed, are from the minority community, the community you condescendingly believe you are protecting by expressing your hatred toward very large numbers of people you don’t even know?” This part was interesting because Mr. Bourbeau implies that he understands how all the maligners think, particularly with regard to race. And this, I think, is a trap that Mr. Bourbeau and I and many, many other people fall into: we think we know what others are thinking. We say “all conservatives think this way” or “all liberals think this way.” And as far as I can tell, that’s rarely accurate or productive. I imagine that Mr. Bourbeau would agree.
But this brings me back to something else: a couple more numbers to think about. According to an exit poll of over 15,000 voters, 58% of whites voted for the losing presidential candidate in 2020 while only 24% of non-whites voted for him. My hope is that this doesn’t give cause for whites to hate non-whites or non-whites to hate whites, but it certainly seems to be something worth pondering.
I hope that if I were white (which I am) and had voted for Trump (which I didn’t), I might ask myself the following, “Why did so few non-whites vote for my candidate? What could it be about him that they might find unappealing? After all, Biden was an elderly white man, too. What could the reasons be for this?” And then I hope I’d start digging, reading up on the history of my candidate and his statements about non-whites and his behavior towards them. Maybe I’d find some compelling reasons that a non-white would mistrust my candidate.
One final set of numbers: if only men had been allowed to vote, Biden would have lost by 8 percentage points. If only women had been allowed to vote, Biden would have won by 15 percentage points. Maybe Biden voters should ask Trump voters, “Hey, what’s the story here? Why were men so much less likely than women to vote for my candidate? What did they find offensive about him?” And then, with civility, and without fear of being hated by others (or by millions of others), each of us, one by one, could find out what goes on in the mind of someone who didn’t vote the way we did. Mr. Bourbeau, I’d be happy to talk any time.
Michael Fleck lives in Greenfield.