The Impact of the 2024 Election – Dateline USA

Selene Ozturk

The presidential election has cast doubt on the country’s record on political violence, women, immigrants and the environment.

Through all of these issues, Nov. 5 shattered public assumptions that an increasingly multiracial America necessarily means an increasingly progressive America, political, immigration and economic experts said at Ethnic Media Services’ Friday, Nov. 8, election analysis briefing.

Political violence

There’s a similar public delusion about political violence: “We seem to assume that we can either predict it or it won’t happen at all, so we’re constantly surprised when it happens,” said Dr. Robert Pape, professor of political science at the University of Chicago and founder and director Chicago Project on Security and Threats (CPOST).

As of November 8, the Ministry of Justice made public a contract killing for an accused Iranian government asset to assassinate President-elect Trump before the election.

Professor Robert Pape, professor of political science at the University of Chicago and founder and director of the Chicago Project on Security and Threats (CPOST), shares what he believes are potential causes of post-election political violence.

“We have to be vigilant about it. It wouldn’t surprise me if between now and January 20th…and the first 100 days after that there are more assassination attempts, especially if he continues with aggressive deportation plans that involve sending ICE agents to blue sanctuary cities like Chicago. , San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York and Portland … where immigration protests turned violent in 2020,” Pape said.

“Political violence works like a forest fire. We can measure the material that can burn, but we cannot predict provoked lightning strikes, thrown butts, abandoned fires,” he added. “Just because the resistance march in Washington this January, for example, is planned to be a peaceful gathering of 50,000 people does not mean that it will be. We are in the powder box of the country.”

women

“Political violence is fueled by narratives that blame any one group of people for the outcome of this election — such as that women lost the election to a woman candidate,” said Kelly Dittmar, research director of the Center on American Women and Politics at Rutgers. university.

Exit polls in 2024 show that 54% of women and 44% of men voted for Harris, and 44% of women and 54% of men voted for Trump.

Kelly Dittmar, director of research at Rutgers University’s Center on American Women and Politics, says Trump has consistently played on the fear of disrupting gender roles and threatening masculinity, which has proven effective in campaigning against a female candidate.

The gender gap in the 2024 vote, with women 10 points less likely than men to support Trump, is similar to that of the last election; in 2020 the gap was 12 points, compared to 11 in 2016.

Women are more likely than men to support a Democratic candidate and less likely to support a Republican candidate in every election since 1980. “But these aggregate counts alone are not enough to truly understand women’s voices,” Dittmar said.

While a majority of white women (52%) voted Republican, for example, more than 90% of black women voted Democratic.

An AP VoteCast exit poll shows that a third of black women said Harris being the first female president “was the most important factor” in their vote, compared to 14 percent of all women and 11 percent of all men.

“We talk about the gender of voters, but we also have to recognize how gender plays a role in who we’re willing to vote for,” she continued.

Institute for the Study of Public Religion in October 2024 poll found that while 43% of Americans agree that “society as a whole has become too soft and effeminate,” down from 48% who agreed in 2023, the partisan divide has more than doubled since 2011.

Now 73% of Republicans think society is too soft and feminine, compared to 42% of independents and 16% of Democrats.

“It’s not so much about who Harris is as it is about why a man who filed complaints about threats to masculinity didn’t disqualify him from winning,” Dittmar added.

Voice of America Executive Director Vanessa Cardenas discusses the impact of the Trump presidency on immigration, as well as the lives of immigrants.

Immigrants and Asian Americans

“Without sugar coating this is the worst outcome we could have expected… The majority of the popular vote is against us,” said Vanessa Cardenas, executive director Voice of America. “Economic problems have overtaken everything.”

September 2024 Pew Research The poll found that 81% of registered voters said “the economy will be very important to their vote.”

An AP exit poll found that “voters generally believe Trump will be better equipped than Harris to lead the economy and jobs.”

“Unsurprisingly, immigration was another major motivating factor because Republicans have run the most vicious anti-immigrant campaign of any major party in modern history,” Cárdenas continued.

Voice of America for October 2024 report using AdImpact data found that Republican candidates and organizations spent “$964 million on 1,892 unique television ads that mention immigration” this year.

John C. Young, president and chief executive of the AAJC Asian American Organization, said the polls showed immigration was a top issue for Asian American voters, with a majority in favor of pro-immigrant laws.

“Immigration itself is being rethought,” Cárdenas explained. “As conversations about ending birthright citizenship, TPS and DACA become mainstream, the lines between ‘legal’ and ‘undocumented’ are blurring.”

“The Asian American caucus is particularly supportive of pro-immigrant laws, especially those that allow citizens to bring relatives to the U.S.,” said John S. Young, president and CEO of the Asian American Association for the Advancement of Justice (AAJC).

The AAPI community has highest the share of immigrants among all racial and ethnic groups, with roughly two-thirds of Asian Americans and one-sixth of Pacific Islanders born outside the U.S.

October 2024 Pew poll found that 82% of Asian American immigrants support family-friendly immigration policies.

AAJC voter poll The polls that month showed that overall, the issues most important to AAPI voters were the same as those most important to voters overall, with the top three being jobs and the economy (86%), inflation (85%) and health care (85%). ) ).

Green jobs

“These challenges have resulted in Trump becoming the first Republican president to win the popular vote in more than 20 years,” said Ben Jeloz, executive director of the Sierra Club and former president and CEO of the NAACP. “You can’t explain that without looking at the deindustrialization of our country over the last 30 years since NAFTA.”

Ben Geloz, executive director of the Sierra Club and former president and chief executive officer of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), discusses the Anti-Inflation Act and the impact it will have on the US economy.

From 1994, when the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) went into effect under President Clinton, the U.S. lost more than 80,000 manufacturing plants through 2014, the most recent year Census Business Dynamics Statistics data is available

For comparison, the United States has approximately 19,500 cities and towns

“This means that most Americans now live where a factory used to be, and when that factory closed, there was an explosion of despair, poverty, unemployment, drug abuse and suicide,” Jealous said. “We have to go back to the basic American formula of building an economy that lifts all boats by doing what we’ve always done: design new things with science and then build them here.”

Thanks to President Biden’s 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which authorizes $783 billion in domestic energy and climate change spending, the largest in U.S. history: “We’re doing something we haven’t done in our lifetime: We’re opening plants through the biggest economic opportunity on earth, a chance to change the way the world is fed,” he continued.

As of August 2024, Climate Power data shows that U.S. companies reported 646 new clean energy projects, creating 334,565 new jobs and attracting $372 billion in new investment.

“The turn to the right that we’ve seen is a direct line from us betraying the working people of this country,” Jealous said, adding that it was reflected in Trump’s own speeches: “In 2016, he promised to kill Obamacare and his own party rebelled This time, Vice President-elect Vance called the new “green” jobs “junk,” and Republican voters roared back.”

“In a lot of red states, voters may be divided on whether they want clean tech, but they’re united in wanting it made there because they understand their fortunes are tied to it,” he added. “Trump can say what he wants, but this is the future and people are not coming back.”