The Candidates Who Defeated the Politics of White Grievance

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In races across the South, Democratic candidates attracted the support of a wide swath of voters, and repudiated Donald Trump’s racist rhetoric. Their campaigns are evidence of the viability of class politics in every corner of the country.

Since the 2024 Presidential race, Donald Trump has wrapped himself in the argument that white people are the real victims of racism. This January, in the lead-up to Martin Luther King, Jr., Day, Trump went even further, claiming that the protections initiated in the sixties under the Civil Rights Act led to white people being treated “very badly.” Trump’s acolytes have parroted his claims of white victimhood as an explanation for downward mobility and hardship. Vice-President J. D. Vance has repeatedly claimed that white men, in particular, are victims of racial discrimination.

Apparently, there is an expiration date on the red-meat racism of Trumpism. El-Sayed defeated his Republican opponent, Mike Rogers, by seven points. Elsewhere, Republicans attempted to link Black candidates to chaos and crime, but these tried-and-true tactics appear to have had little effect. Angie Nixon, a Florida state representative and union organizer, ran an upstart campaign for the U.S. Senate, and was subject to witheringly racist attacks from the President and his supporters.

In the Georgia gubernatorial race, the Democratic candidate, Keisha Lance Bottoms, was pitted against the Republican Rick Jackson, a billionaire health-care executive who spent more than two hundred million dollars of his own money on the election. Bottoms, who served as the mayor of Atlanta during Trump’s first term, gained prominence during those years as one of the President’s opponents: she denied ICE the right to hold detainees in the city’s jail, in response to the Administration’s family-detention practices, and opposed the rapid reopening of Georgia at the height of the pandemic.

مطلع المقال، مقتطف من The New Yorker. لقراءة المقال كاملًا، افتحه على موقع الناشر.