Throughout our history, Black leaders have championed the idea of a multiracial coalition that would upend the white-dominated American political system.
In “Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880,” W.E.B. Du Bois bemoaned the lack of economic and political solidarity between Black and poor white Americans.
When Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, he had already embarked on the Poor People’s Campaign, which he called “the beginning of a new cooperation, understanding and a determination by poor people of all colors and backgrounds to assert and win their right to a decent life and respect for their culture and dignity.”
When Jesse Jackson announced his 1984 presidential campaign, he said: “Women cannot be free until Blacks and Hispanics are free. Blacks, whites, women, Hispanics, workers, Indians, Chinese, Filipinos — we must come together and form the rainbow coalition.”
And in 2008, Barack Obama marshaled that spirit and turned it into a coalition that elected America’s first Black president. But 16 years later, this coalition failed to coalesce for a Black woman seeking the Oval Office.
Yes, it’s a different era, with different candidates. (And yes, Republicans are crowing that there’s still a multiracial coalition, but now it’s just forming on their side of the aisle.) But the results of the 2024 presidential election might be a sign that the lift-all-boats approach that Jackson called for — a simultaneous fight for the rights, aspirations and dignity of all Americans, including women, people of color and members of the L.G.B.T.Q. community — is no longer the galvanizing force that many liberals were counting on.
Tuesday’s results suggest that some Hispanic, Asian American, Arab American, white female and, indeed, Black voters put less stock in diversity as a defining and mobilizing concept. Some of them, including some Democrats, believe diversity is a talking point that does nothing to advance their interests. This augurs a reckoning not only within the Democratic Party but also among Black voters, the Democrats’ most loyal constituency.
There’s a school of thought on the Democratic side of the aisle that has preached progress through pluralism. Faith in that view has withered.
Kamala Harris brought joy to the campaign trail, campaigning on the most American of ideals: freedom. But many Americans — including many young people — fumed at the Biden-Harris administration over the war in Gaza. Some feminists reject a transgender-inclusive definition of womanhood. In 2022 it was revealed that several Latino leaders in California had privately disparaged Black people, Jewish people and people of Mexican descent with Indigenous ancestry. Some Black residents of cities where migrants have been bused in recent years have chafed at the prospect of public resources being used to accommodate them.
One of the more seismic results in this election was the shift among Hispanic voters toward Donald Trump — particularly Hispanic men, who supported him over Harris by 12 percentage points, according to CNN exit polls, while they backed Biden in 2020 by 23 points. Some Democrats were puzzled by how Trump drove up these numbers and won traditionally Democratic areas like Miami-Dade County and Texas border counties, all while promising mass deportations and demonizing undocumented immigrants from Latin America.
But the reasoning for some Hispanic voters has become clearer, and it’s not simply the adage that the Hispanic electorate isn’t a monolith.
As Rebecca Martínez, a co-editor of “Betrayal U: The Politics of Belonging in Higher Education,” told me, with respect to Trump, some Hispanic voters think, “‘I’m not illegal. He doesn’t mean me.’ And by identifying with that, they align with power in a bid for protection and being the ‘good Hispanic.’” This sentiment tracks with the findings of a study published this year in Public Opinion Quarterly analyzing potential reasons that some Hispanic voters blame immigrants for their “status devaluation.”
That kind of tension isn’t new in our history. For instance, when the Great Migration — the movement of millions of Black Americans to the North and West — began, a Howard University dean wrote a letter to the editor of this newspaper expressing concern about new migrants from the South diminishing the social and political standing of Black people already in the North: “Should the influx of Negro laborers to the North, without proper restriction and control, be allowed to prejudice public opinion and thus reproduce Southern proscription in the Northern states, the last state of the race would be worse than the first.”
Rashad Robinson, the president of Color of Change, stressed the imperative of Democrats coming around to this new reality if they want to win elections: “When we think that people’s identities are automatic stand-ins for their beliefs and choices, we lose them.”
This year Democrats hoped that white women would break for Harris in a major way, especially in response to the threat to reproductive rights posed by the Supreme Court, a third of which was appointed by Trump. But that didn’t happen.
A Democratic pollster, Cornell Belcher, described this misplaced hope as the “white women facade,” the idea that these voters, as a bloc, would go in a vastly different direction in 2024 from 2020. Belcher told me that in “polite conversation” the votes of some white women will be discussed in terms of the votes of the broader white working class, but he said those conversations would really be a proxy for something else: White women “surged for white nationalism.”
If some groups of voters are increasingly wagering that it’s better to be by Trump’s side than in his path, that strikes me as a bad bargain. Once his retrogressive instincts are again unleashed, they may prove impossible to control. There’s ample evidence — Project 2025, his first-term record, the revanchist rallying cry “Make America great again” — that a central part of his project is to undo as much societal progress as possible before his window of opportunity closes.
Of course, all voters should vote their consciences. But it also strikes me that in the end, no people should count themselves truly safe who don’t align with the founders’ vision of who should be politically empowered in this country: propertied white men.
The election result of a week ago is evidence that the vision of a rainbow coalition as a political organizing principle is fading. It’s evidence that many Americans are willing to subordinate racial and gender concerns when faced with unrelenting language about a lack of physical, economic and cultural security.
It’s also hard to separate that result from the backlash to the movement for Black lives, the demonization of members of the L.G.B.T.Q. community and the scapegoating of immigrants for an array of societal challenges. It’s hard not to think that one of the takeaways from this election is that some Americans don’t see others’ oppression as their problem — that people have bought into the fallacious logic that personal prosperity and a broad pursuit of equal rights and social justice cannot coexist.
And part of the sadness of so many voters today is the realization that the pain that may be visited on some women and minorities in the near future has been abetted by the votes of other women and minorities — and the realization that we may well be reaching the end of the rainbow.
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