The silent majority rises

On election night 1960, John F. Kennedy was at home at Hyannis Port, Mass., watching the election returns. The initial glee of a potential Kennedy landslide turned dark when returns from the Midwest began to come in.

Ohio was a particular disappointment to Kennedy who had traveled to the state six times and saw overwhelming crowds greeting him. Theodore H. White described one trip where Ohioans “lined 113 miles of highway almost solidly, holding their children up to see him, tearing at him, waving at him, shrieking at him, until his staff had feared for his safety.”

When Richard Nixon was declared the winner, White reported that Kennedy held up his inflamed hand and said, “Ohio did that to me — they did it there.”

Although Nixon narrowly lost to Kennedy —including a popular vote loss of slightly more than 100,000 votes out of nearly 69,000,000 cast — he was redeemed with a victory eight years later.

In his 1969 Inaugural Address, Richard Nixon spoke of “the voices of quiet anguish, the voices that speak without words.” More than a year later, facing rising protests on college campuses and a seemingly unending war in Vietnam, Nixon was in trouble. In a November address, he appealed to “the great silent majority of my fellow Americans” for their support.

Opposing Nixon were college students and their professors, the media, and what Vice President Spiro Agnew called “an effete corps of impudent snobs,” labeling liberal Democrats as “nattering nabobs of negativism.”

Nixon privately amplified Agnew’s sentiments: “Never forget, the press is the enemy," he said. "The establishment is the enemy; the professors are the enemy. Write that on a blackboard 100 times and never forget it.”

America was becoming polarized, and Republicans were able time and again to call upon their silent majority to deliver them victory.

I am reminded of this history lesson given the results of the 2024 election. Throughout the fall campaign, Kamala Harris attracted capacity crowds, outperformed Donald Trump in their only debate, raised more than $1 billion dollars in private donations, and held narrow leads in many polls. A Gallup poll found her campaign had personally reached more voters than Barack Obama had either in 2008 and 2012.

But just as in Nixon’s time, a silent majority has arisen and made its voice heard. For the first time since 2004, Republicans won a majority of the popular vote. Like Nixon, Trump’s victory was built upon their grievances. These included resentments against a new economic order that has gutted the working class, the changing racial makeup of the country, and antipathy toward the media, which Trump repeatedly derided and labeled as “fake news.”

Above all, Americans disapproved of Joe Biden. Exit polls found just 40 percent approved of Biden’s performance as President. Most tellingly, 67 percent described the nation’s economy as “not good” or “poor.”

For Kamala Harris, inflation was a job killer — 75 percent said inflation had caused them either “severe” or “moderate” hardship.

James Carville’s famous maxim withstood the test of the 2024 election: “It’s the economy, stupid!”

There are hard lessons for Democrats to absorb. Although a 34 percent plurality of voters named “democracy” as the most important issue, the price of eggs mattered more.

Another lesson is that racial and gender identity are no longer deciding factors, and Democrats must work to broaden their appeal. Here the results are clear: Trump won the highest percentage of Hispanic voters in modern history, and a solid 55 percent of Hispanic men. And although two-thirds of voters thought abortion should be legal in either all or most cases, white suburban women preferred Trump 51 percent to 47 percent.

Another hard reality for Democrats is that young voters, especially young men, are no longer as reliable a source of support. Just 77 percent of voters aged 18 to 29 backed Harris, a ten-point decline from the 87 percent who had backed Joe Biden in 2020.

Unlike the young Franklin D. Roosevelt Democrats of yore, these younger voters have never experienced a reign of economic or governmental successes. Democrats cannot rely on negative partisanship and their antipathy toward Trump for their continued support.

Much as Republicans did after Mitt Romney’s defeat for president in 2012, Democrats must now ask themselves hard questions. Republicans evidently came up with the wrong answers back then by suggesting the GOP open its doors to more immigrants and build bridges rather than walls on the southern border. Even so, a tough examination by the Democrats remains warranted.

What is not warranted is focusing on candidate-related issues — either Joe Biden’s belated withdrawal from the race or the deficiencies in the Kamala Harris candidacy. During the 1980s, Democrats made that mistake by deriding Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis. Only after a third consecutive defeat did Democrats realize that they had more than a candidate problem; they had a party problem.

Trump’s victory means that he now owns the Republican Party lock, stock, and barrel. His evisceration of the Republican establishment that began in 2016 is now complete.

But the road ahead is still perilous — for Trump, for the Democrats, and for our democracy itself.

In his 1862 address to Congress, Abraham Lincoln said, “The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.”

He concluded, “The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation.”

The trials ahead and how we respond to them will not only depend on those in power but also on us.

John Kenneth White is a professor emeritus at The Catholic University of America. His latest book is titled “Grand Old Unraveling: The Republican Party, Donald Trump, and the Rise of Authoritarianism.”