One of my new neighbors in Denver ended our friendship a few days ago over what I do for a living and my vote for President Donald Trump.
Because my work features skepticism of the mainstream media, he told me, it is akin to empowering the Ku Klux Klan, and therefore I am as guilty as the white supremacist calling to lynch black people. It’s an extreme conclusion, to be sure, but it’s one millions of left-wing liberals have come to genuinely believe following years of media indoctrination in which unaccountable elites with Trump Derangement Syndrome painted the president and his supporters as irredeemably racist.
It’s hardly surprising to find such polarizing liberals close to downtown Denver, but it’s no less painful when the politics become so personal to the point where relationships cease to even be possible.
If I had no understanding of American politics, I would think I’m completely alone in my support for the president where I live. Seeing social justice yard signs call me a bad person for not succumbing to their leftist group-think. Their simple mantras apparently solve complex problems, and they are scattered around the neighborhood in the absence of any Trump posters. I at least I know I’m in the minority, well-aware that if I were to put up any sign like the one below my home would be egged.
A sign for your front yard. pic.twitter.com/YWBcKsYL7h
— Christina Sommers (@CHSommers) November 17, 2020
In Denver, however, 71,000 people still voted for the president, a few of whom are probably on my street. They just choose to hide it.
Trump reaped a record-breaking 73 million votes this election, totaling more than any other candidate in American history, coming second only to former Vice President Joe Biden, who drew in almost 80 million.
The Democratic nominee might have captured more votes than the incumbent Republican, but there’s no denying that 73 million is a force within the American population to be reckoned with. This huge number of voters backed the president at the ballot box despite the onslaught of media intimidation endlessly characterizing any and all who might support the big bad orange man as contemptible citizens of a 21st-century Nazi state.
Further analysis of the voter data shows Trump voters are more widespread throughout the country than corporate media depicts. While Biden decisively won the popular vote by 6 million, more than 5 million came entirely from within California, where the former vice president with a Californian running mate took home nearly 11 million votes compared to Trump’s nearly 6 million. The rest of the gap could be made up if the vote totals broke even in Washington and Oregon or even just New York, where Biden beat Trump by more than 1 million votes. This shows Biden’s popular vote win came from a handful of states on the nation’s coasts.
Examining Biden’s projected victory in the Electoral College, pending legal challenges, shows an even narrower victory than Trump’s triumphant win four years ago. Biden is on track to land his first term in the White House thanks to just 45,000 votes across three tipping-point states.
In Georgia, a recount completed this week reported a Biden win by just 12,000 votes. In Wisconsin, where a recount is still underway, the president lost the initial count by 20,000. In Arizona, Biden flipped the state by an even narrower margin of fewer than 10,500 votes.
If Trump captured all three, a tie would occur in the Electoral College, kicking the election to the House, where each state gets one vote. That map favors Republicans, who hold more House members from more states than Democrats, whose members remain more concentrated in a smaller number of states.
In 2016, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton lost the election by about 77,000 votes across three different states spanning the Midwest.
The point is, Trump suffered no grand repudiation across the country. Instead, he was a dealt a blow in the popular vote by voters dominating the coastal regions. This month’s election results not only exposed the reality of the shy Trump voter but illustrated their existence in neighborhoods throughout the nation whether or not they make their presence known. Clearly, they don’t, and given the recent demands by Democrats to seek punishment for those who supported the president, it’s hard to blame them.
Pointing to a post-election survey by Public Opinion Strategies, Federalist senior contributor Kelsey Bolar explained earlier this month that a majority of shy Trump voters could be unmasked as white, college-educated women. The study found that 19 percent of all Trump supporters reported keeping their vote for the president secret from their friends as opposed to the 8 percent of Biden supporters who said the same.
Bolar pointed to the fact that Trump landed more than half of the white female vote in this election, which, Bolar wrote, “is nothing short of astounding compared to the narrative of the past four years: That white, suburban women were leaving Trump and the Republican Party in droves.”
Further, suburban women were more likely than others to conceal their vote for Trump. According to Public Opinion Strategies, 28 percent of these women said they kept their support for Trump hidden from their friends while only 7 percent of those who voted for Biden followed suit.
“I got called a white supremacist and a racist so I kept it to myself so I wouldn’t hear those words,” one woman told the research firm.
“I was afraid for my safety. Because of the way the media portrayed everything … that it was okay to be a Democrat, but not a Republican,” said another.
One woman’s friends were more explicit about the danger that the public disclosure of her vote could pose, saying, “I had neighbors say they would like to kill all Trump supporters. These were people with whom I really got along with well.”
There were clear signs throughout the election that such voters were present, contrary to the media narrative, which the Washington Post encapsulated in its pre-election analysis, declaring, “Shy Trump voters don’t really exist.”
According to findings from a national survey from the Cato Institute published this summer, 77 percent of Republicans felt they held views they were afraid to share. Republicans of all educational backgrounds also said they worried their political views could jeopardize their employment. That number rose higher in conjunction with a voter’s degree of education, supporting the idea that most shy Trump voters were well-educated.
Indeed, a third of Americans said they wanted to “punish” those who donated to Trump’s campaign, an idea that garnered support from 50 percent of strong liberals. Considering the animosity directed at Trump supporters by Democrats, the media, and even supposedly friendly neighbors declaring those who disagree with leftism as ignorant, homophobic racists, it’s not hard to see why so many Americans kept their vote for the president hidden at the ballot box.
These aren’t just Americans at the fringes. They’re your next-door neighbor whose kids go to school with yours, who check you out at the grocery store, who interact with you at the park, and whose lives make the neighborhood a community. If their support for Trump scares you, then you are the one with a problem.
