The Silent Majority Has the Last Word

First published in The American Spectator.

The polls were wrong, the projections off, the media biased, and the silent majority came to vote. Donald Trump is president-elect of the United States, and the pundits are scratching their heads.

Why were Trump’s supporters — many of whom were uncomfortable with his rhetoric — so mobilized to come out and support a tainted candidate?

Some of the credit lies with these media pundits themselves, along with the rest of Clinton’s base. They don’t see this, and will surely never admit it, but they themselves helped to galvanize support for Donald Trump and gave him the election.

The old-guard media, convinced that the public is hanging on its every word, was not content to merely broadcast Trump’s actual failings. Instead, it repeatedly engaged in unfair and scurrilous condemnation.

Every American pays the least possible tax owed by law, as Judge Learned Hand observed in 1935, yet we were told it was “reprehensible” for Trump to do the same. Tim Kaine accused Trump of praising Putin as a “great leader,” and media outlets dutifully concurred with an obvious lie. Trump had assessed Putin as stronger than Obama. In fact, Philippine President Duterte recently agreed, demonstrating that the perception of weak American leadership is detrimental to the spread of liberty and human rights around the world.

These are but a few examples of an ongoing effort to misrepresent and even falsify the statements of candidate Trump. Everyone following the election has surely noticed multiple instances of talking heads misconstruing a quote from Trump. “That’s not what he said!” many a viewer would mutter — or scream.

When Clinton herself described Trump supporters as “a basket of deplorables,” the media agreed and her fans ran with it. As Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame) observed, “If you have a Trump sign on your lawn, they will steal it. If you have a Trump bumper sticker, they will deface your car. If you speak of Trump at work, you could get fired.”

This was no exaggeration. Viral video captured the verbal and physical assault upon a student wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat on campus. Though the victim was married to an immigrant, his assailant continued to berate him for racism, sexism and hatred toward immigrants until a third party grabbed the hat from his head and ran off.

I experienced this kind of abuse personally. One Clinton fan called me “a rabbi supporting the next Hitler” for a brief pro-Trump comment on Facebook. Another bizarrely called Trump a “candidate who says about other ethnic groups what Hitler said about Jews” and accused me of abandoning Jewish values. Others “merely” said that voting for Trump both encourages anti-Semitism and is tantamount to a personal endorsement of Trump’s failings.

Adams’s response to the harassment and vandalism was to brand Democrats the “Bully Party,” stating that he endorses Donald Trump “because I oppose bullying in all its forms.” Yet this alone does not explain why so many voters identified with Trump and came forward to support him. It is because they felt bullied in other ways as well — and not, as one CNN commentator insisted, because they are white. On the contrary, Americans of all ethnicities and national origins identified with similar persecution by the Left, targeting their core values.

People are tired of being characterized as sexist and homophobic because of their sincerely held religious beliefs. They are angry at being labeled racist or xenophobic simply because they believe in the rule of law and the Constitution. They object to being told that support for the moral virtues found in the Holy Bible is somehow immoral.

Trump has been the voice of those vilified by a media culture for being out of lockstep with the values of Hollywood and made to feel inferior to the denizens of cosmopolitan Manhattan.

This is why the press and the pundits were caught off guard on election night. The media and Beltway experts, in their hubris, didn’t believe their polling could be wrong, or they misunderstood the American people. These same people made Trump supporters feel dirty. Their message was to stay in the closet, so they stayed hidden when polls were taken and kept the yard sign in the garage.

Yet at the end of the day, the very rhetoric and behavior designed to bully them into silence only inspired them to come out and stand against the relentless pursuit of big government policies that hurt their families and endangered the very democracy they cherish.

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13 Responses

  1. micha berger says:

    “The polls were wrong, the projections off, the media biased, and the silent majority came to vote.” While the projection were off and the media was and is biased, the polls were correct.

    The last RealClearPolitics running average of recent polls had HRC ahead by 3.3 percentage points. With a margin of error of about 3 of them. The popular vote gave HRC the lead by .6%. Both were in agreement, the race was neck-and-neck.

    The error was all in the spin.

    There was no silent majority that the pollsters missed.

    What did happen was at least two things:

    1- Someone released the Anthony Weiner emails to the FBI just in time for the bad news to be the last see-saw in popularity.

    2- ACA (ObamaCare) premiums and deductibles for 2017 came out. This wasn’t consciously timed — it’s the same time of year as most open enrollment for group plans. But the timing was poor for the Democrat candidate.

    So there was a final upsurge, but it wasn’t hidden, it was all people who were perfectly ready to admit in advance in public that they were planning on voting for Trump.

  2. DF says:

    100% accurate. Would only add that the spin we heard all through the election period is that a vote for Trump indicates approval for everything that candidate ever said, did, or thought.  But the public saw through that nonsense, even if some people who should have known better did not. The ballot presents a choice of essentially two options, and the voter’s job is to pick one. That’s not to say Trump isn’t inherently a worthy choice, or that his win is only the product of being the lesser of two evils. It is only to say that we cannot divine the thoughts of more than  25 million voters , nor was it any time relevant. It was a fraudulent narrative  from the get-go.

  3. Reb Yid says:

    There was no majority, silent or otherwise.  There wasn’t even a plurality.

    • Natan Thaler says:

      you could have a majority without a plurality.

      • mycroft says:

        How? One can have a plurality without a majority but I am ignorant as to how one can have a majority without a plurality.

      • Reb Yid says:

        At this point HRC has received 1 million+ more votes than DT, and that figure is likely to increase before all ballots have been tabulated.

      • Reb Yid says:

        Actually, you can’t.  But by definition a plurality means you have more votes than anyone else without receiving at least 50.0000001% of the total vote.

    • Steve Brizel says:

      That’s because the Constitution , via the wonderful mechanism of the electoral college, has never mandated that a majority or plurality of the citizens of this country elect the president. The electoral college assures all Americans that their views are important, not just the political and cultural elites who live in NY or California and like to dictate their views to the rest of the country.

    • Bob Miller says:

      The genius behind the Electoral College is that the concerns and cultures of smaller states stay on the candidates’ radar.  This is the same basic reason why we have a Senate and the Federal system itself.  The system was a necessary condition for states to agree to unite in the first place.  If NY and CA, for example, effectively ran the nation because of their great ability to mobilize and create votes, only their narrow needs and desires would be addressed (addressed poorly in the end, because the Left in power always manages to make its less wealthy supporters poorer and angrier than before.)    Now, when so many colleges and universities cultivate immaturity, immorality, and lack of perspective in their students, at least this one College does its proper job.

       

       

       

  4. David Ohsie says:

    This analysis would have been much more convincing if it had been written before the election.  As it is, the Trump people also thought that they were behind.  I wonder if, had the had shift the 1% in the swing states and Clinton had won, you would have drawn the opposition conclusion and a vindication of everything Clinton, or would you have stated the truth: that this was a razor thin election where an innumerable number of factors could have swung it one way or the other.

    Also, I’m interested in any analysis that you wrote in 2012, when Obama outperformed his polls more significantly than Trump did this year and the Romney folks thought that they had the win.  Was there a silent majority for Obama?

    Finally, the proof of the pudding is in the pie.  I’m very much hoping that I was wrong about Trump and he’ll do a bang up job.   If he does, then you’ll have something really substantial to tout.  I hope to be eating crow.

  5. Wolf says:

    Even if it is true that Trump only won because of … or didn’t really win the majority  etc. One thing is certain. Even had he lost he still would have done a lot better than the media ever would have imagined he would.

    And a lot of the reason for that is Rabbi Menken’s analysis.

  6. Steve Brizel says:

    Excellent article. IMO, the key to the article is:

    “…Americans of all ethnicities and national origins identified with similar persecution by the Left, targeting their core values.
    People are tired of being characterized as sexist and homophobic because of their sincerely held religious beliefs. They are angry at being labeled racist or xenophobic simply because they believe in the rule of law and the Constitution. They object to being told that support for the moral virtues found in the Holy Bible is somehow immoral.
     

    If you want to see why and why users of social media use the same to suppress and label opposing views, read the comments at the site of the linked article.

  7. Reb Yid says:

    With each passing day, HRC’s popular vote margin increases.  At present, it is nearly 1.5 million votes more than DT–by far the largest margin among any candidate who lost the Electoral College.

    Out of more than 130 million total votes cast, a swing of 65,000 total votes in 3 states (PA, WI, MI) would have given HRC the Electoral College victory.

     

     

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