But that’s only a piece of why the election is so shameful.
That the contest appears as tight as it does speaks to the relative success of the Republican Party, the minority party, at holding on to power via maneuvering such as voter disenfranchisement, gerrymandering and voter suppression, which disproportionately affect Black voters, who overwhelmingly back the Democratic Party.
For instance, one state that had pundits on edge was Florida. Many wondered whether it might go into Biden’s column, given the direction of preelection polling. Ultimately, Trump won the state by a wafer-thin margin. His victory, though, was helped by the fact that many people didn’t have access to the ballot box.
“My view is that this is being done to discourage minorities from voting,” Carol Mann, a Democratic candidate for District 1 election commissioner, told the Mississippi Free Press. “These streets and these apartment complexes, and I can tell you having gone through all of them and knocking on doors in this area, are vastly majority African American.”
While galling, these two connected elements of the election — White Americans’ buoying of Trump, the jockeying of a minority party to maintain control of a country that increasingly rejects it — aren’t surprising. Arguably, they reveal what America has always been.