Disclaimer: The opinions presented in this piece are solely those of the author and do not mirror the views of North by Northwestern or its editorial team.
When Donald Trump campaigned for president in 2016, he pledged to revitalize an allegedly broken economy, promising his voters a record number of manufacturing and mining jobs. When he took office, he rode the wave of former president Barack Obama’s economic policies. At its peak in 2014 and 2015, the workforce accommodated 225,000 new jobs per month and unemployment held steady at around five percent.
In his 2020 and 2024 campaign literature and speeches, Trump boasted about how his policies created economic prosperity in the former race, portraying Joe Biden as the boogeyman of inflation. He did a remarkable job of convincing his voters they were better off under his economic policies, regardless of his often erroneous claims and shoddy evidence.
In turn, millions of voters backed Trump in fear of economic collapse under democratic administrations. This approach encapsulates a pervasive trend in politics: the rise of single-issue voting.
Many people in socially ostracized positions – including but not limited to racial minorities, women, immigrants and the working class – become the target of political rhetoric and virtue signaling in an age of identity politics. Trump weaponized this trend, seizing on growing anxieties within the working class about inflation and unemployment – many of which he himself helped inculcate and manufacture. Scores of these voters, including a record number of Black and Latino men, took stock of his arguments. Voters from these demographics thus backed Trump, effectively sacrificing their own rights to liberty and upward mobility, along with the women in their lives. Without the support of critical government agencies like the Department of Education, marginalized communities will be further socially disenfranchised.
Single-issue voting is perilous because it presumes that to solve one issue, you must abandon all others. But fighting for a more perfect nation is not a zero-sum game. The prioritization of one issue above all else is a divisive approach that will set us back generations.
In his 2024 presidential campaign, Trump promised us a lot of things. He would significantly divest from and dismantle the Department of Education. He would leave abortion policies to the states’ jurisdiction. He would deport undocumented immigrants in never-before-seen numbers. Time and time again, his opponents pleaded with the American public to understand the consequences of these promises. Tens of millions of individuals did not.
Contrary to what Trump has publicly espoused, his lower taxes on billionaires and higher spending will put more strain on the average family’s finances. According to CNN, it will add $7.5 trillion to the national debt.
Despite this evidence disproving his assertions of economic prosperity, voters entered ballot boxes with a narrow-minded goal to ‘save the economy’ and stem illegal immigration, often against their own interests.
Many Black men voted for a public figure who has long demonized Black men in the media, once taking a full-page ad calling for the death penalty of the Exonerated Five in The New York Times and infamously denying real estate sales to Black renters in New York. Black men were increasingly apprehensive about the state of the economy, which Trump framed to be downwardly trending. Many Latino men voted for a politician who promised to deport millions of people within the Latinx community. They chafed against rising inflation in key battleground states like Michigan. Many Arab Americans in Dearborn, Michigan voted for Trump despite his first-term Muslim ban and close ties with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. They felt pushed away from the Biden-Harris administration’s policies that prioritized Israeli sovereignty over Palestinian rights’ to statehood. Many white women voted for a leader who paved the way for the overturning of Roe V. Wade, effectively jeopardizing women’s bodily autonomy in his next presidential term.
The minorities who voted Trump were not without their rationales. After all, he created partisan fears about the economy, spouting blatant untruths about economic calamity under Biden to discredit policies that actually created 15.7 million new jobs by July 2024. He also stoked fears around illegal immigration at the Southern border, embellishing crime rates tied to undocumented immigrants. Yet when the Biden administration attempted to pass a bill hiring 1,500 new border patrol agents and putting a cap on the flow of fentanyl to the United States, Trump called his cronies in Congress and had the bill killed. This drove Harris’ now-haunted slogan, where she condemned Trump for preferring to “run on problems instead of fixing problems”
In the coming years, we will see the impact of single-issue voting firsthand. Voters who opted for lower gas prices at the cost of women’s fundamental rights may be in for a rude awakening. Those who voted to curb shrinkflation, while witnessing the destruction of crucial democratic systems like the Department of Education, may not be too keen on their children losing opportunities because their schools are underfunded. Moreover, individuals who honor the constitution may be unsettled by a convicted felon gaining complete immunity from all official acts and avoiding the consequences of his indictments.
As we enter uncharted waters, the choice the majority of American voters made will bear a seismic impact. Tens of millions of us elected a president with a flagrant disregard for the rule of law and a cavalier disrespect of women’s autonomy. Seventy-four million voters backed a man who has already shown his promises are meaningless, and yet cling to whatever vestige of change he promises in his daily vagaries. Regardless of whom you voted for this election, history is undoubtedly watching us.