On November 6, the racist Trump regime will discover whether voter suppression, gerrymandering, and mobilizing raging white nationalists will be enough to keep it in power by making sure both houses of Congress remain in the hands of Republicans too spineless to even consider removing the most unfit president in American history from office.
Trump’s name won’t be on the ballot on November 6, but his white nationalism will. That’s because every Republican on the ballot, for every office, is complicit with Trump’s vicious campaign against any American who isn’t a white Christian conservative.
Republicans in Congress have refused to stand up to Trump for two very simple reasons: they fear his angry white voters, and they’re terrified of losing money from rich, white donors who reject the idea of a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural America. Whether they’re running for U.S. Senator or local alderman, Republican candidates are convinced they have to be Trump sock puppets in order to survive.
Once Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report is filed, everyone expects there will be more than enough legitimate grounds to impeach an authoritarian grifter whose entire public career has been fueled by racism and white supremacy. But unless a majority of the House of Representatives votes to impeach Trump, and two-thirds of the Senate votes to convict him on those impeachment charges, Trump will stay in office.
Democrats won’t even say the word “impeachment” for fear of mobilizing Trump’s angry, racist voter base, but when they say this election is about America’s future, impeachment is exactly what they’re talking about. Republicans, who’ve been playing footsies with white nationalists ever since the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts of the mid-sixties, are completely comfortable now that the GOP has finished morphing into the White People’s Party, and want Trump and his campaign of white grievance to remain in office.
They may get their wish if the Democrats’ core of African Americans, Hispanics, white progressives, and organized labor voters stay home or, worse, vote Republican. It takes a lot of different colors to make a blue wave, and despite projections of a Democratic voting surge in November, it might not be big enough.
Black voters, like all voters, vote less in midterms than they do in a presidential election year. But in St. Louis city and county, African-American turnout dropped in 2016, compared to the Obama elections of ’08 and ’12. In the city, black turnout was 83 percent in 2008, when Obama first ran. In 2012, it dropped to 74 percent, and in the 2016 election that brought actual American fascism to power, only 67.6 percent of registered African-American voters bothered to turn out. Meanwhile, voter turnout surged in white-flight areas like St. Charles and Jefferson counties.
Hispanics in the St. Louis area have not made up a significant part of the population since over half of the city’s Mexican population was driven out during the Great Depression by a combination of white racists and stepped-up federal deportation programs. But the few thousand registered Hispanic voters in the region should show up in force, given that Mexicans have been the first targets of Trump’s attempt to turn America into a white ethno-state.
Progressives have their own problems, as is apparent to anyone who spends more than five minutes on social media. The activists, white and black, who supported Cori Bush in her failed attempt to oust U.S. Rep. Wm. Lacy Clay in the 1st Congressional District primary might just stay home November 6.
Organized labor is the most problematic part of any Democratic coalition to fight Trump because a significant number of union members are racists, a problem not unique to St. Louis, nor new in American political life. Even though progressives campaigned alongside union members to defeat “Right to Work” on the August 7 Missouri ballot, a lot of those same white unionists vote GOP. Even after every racist, vicious, unhinged, and potentially treasonous thing Trump has done, he still has the support of 47 percent of union members nationwide, according to a May poll by Reuters/Ipsos.
Of those four, the single biggest key is the black vote. In a red state like Missouri, that’s a problem because red state Democrats, like U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill, campaign hard in white, conservative, rural areas, trying to peel off a few thousand right-of-center votes, while mostly ignoring black areas and concerns, figuring black voters will vote for them anyway.
In normal times, that might cause many black voters to stay home. But these are anything but normal times. We are living in what presidential historian Michael Bechloss calls “a national emergency.” Controlling Trump means the only other viable national alternative, the Democrats, must control either the U.S. House or Senate this November.
And that means every part of that Democratic coalition needs to vote – holding their noses, if necessary – for any Democrat running for the House or the Senate. In Missouri, that means McCaskill for the Senate, and Democrats like Cort VanOstran in the 2nd Congressional District, the seat currently held by pro-Trump U.S. Rep. Ann Wagner.
If you think Trump siding with white nationalists is awful – and his targeting of Mexicans, Muslims, and dark-skinned immigrants – is bad now, just watch what happens if the GOP continues to control Congress after the November 6 election. A president who calls black figures from Maxine Waters to Colin Kapaernick “low IQ…stupid…treasonous.” who wanted the Central Park Five executed, who discriminated against African Americans during his entire career as a landlord, and who reportedly said condemning neo-Nazis was “The biggest f**king mistake I’ve made” is just waiting for GOP House and Senate victories so he can accelerate his racist agenda.
Vote November 6 like your family’s life depends on it. Because it does.
Charles Jaco is a journalist, author, and activist. Follow him on Twitter at @charlesjaco1.
