Trump's Weird America vs. Kamala's Bland America

More examples of how flyover suburbia, long excoriated by Democratic culturati, trended toward Kamala, while Trump increasingly dominated the forgotten fringes of America, such as the Lumbees.

For awhile, I’ve been promoting the Twitter posts of Cornell law student Siddharth Khurana recounting electoral trends from 2012 through 2024 in various particularly interesting locales. He has a knack for finding illustrative examples.

Today, he came up with a couple of bangers that illustrate my observation that the Democrats have done well with what you might call the modern mainstream of America: people who live in suburbs, have been to college, perhaps who fly frequently on business, who ate white bread as children when visiting their grandparents (but who would never buy white bread today, unless it came into ironic fashion), and so forth: the kind of folks whom Democrat-leaning writers, filmmakers, musicians, and other style-setters have been denouncing as bland and boring for 60 years.

In contrast, Trump increasingly triumphed among the more forgotten fringes of America: Trump’s Weird America, Old and New. (The “old, weird America” is a famous characterization by rock critic Greil Marcus of the subject matter of Bob Dylan’s songs.)

As I’ve pointed out before, Trump did relatively well among such exemplars of the New, Weird America as Persian Jews in Beverly Hills and the Old, Weird America, such as French-Canadian lumberjacks in Maine.

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Johnson County, Kansas outlined in red

First, consider Johnson County, Kansas, home of many of Kansas City, Missouri’s most prominent suburbs, such as Overland Park. It’s the epitome of comfortable-but-boring middle American fly-over suburbia.

Johnson County is a nice place: 57% college graduate, 77% white, 9% Hispanic, 5% Asian, and 5% black. Only 5% of residents are below the poverty line. Median household income is $107,000, but homes average only $366,000. Hence, the population continues to grow.

Johnson County played a starring role in liberal journalist Thomas Frank’s well-known 2004 book What’s the Matter with Kansas? Why, oh, why, the Johnson County native repeatedly lamented, did Kansans vote Republican? In 2004, for example, Bush beat Kerry in Johnson County 61-38 (+23).

But in the 2020s, Frank’s dreams for his home county have come true: Kamala beat Trump 53-44 in suburban Johnson County.

Another tweet by Khurana today focuses on Robeson County, North Carolina, down on the South Carolina border.

Robeson is a poor county with a strikingly diverse population. From Wikipedia:

As of the 2020 census, the county's population was 116,530. It is a majority-minority county; its residents are approximately 38 percent Native American, 22 percent white, 22 percent black, and 10 percent Hispanic. … The state-recognized Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina is headquartered in Pembroke.

Wikipedia’s history of Robeson County is features this bit of Old, Weird Americana:

The Native American/American Indian-descent people in the Lumber River valley eventually coalesced into a series of farming communities collectively dubbed "Scuffletown" by whites but known by inhabitants as "the Settlement". … Culturally, the Scuffletonians were similar to other Europeans in their dress and style of homes. They were Protestant Christians and spoke English, though they spoke an "older form", which set them apart from later settlers. Not viewed as Native Americans by the state of North Carolina until the 1880s, these people were generally dubbed "mulattos" by locals and in federal documents throughout the mid-1800s to distinguish them from blacks. The original Scuffletonians were joined by some whites and blacks in the mid-1700s, including some escaping enslavement.

Interestingly, the local Lumbee Tribe, what is commonly called a tri-racial isolate, is a post-World War II social construct out of people descended from a mix of Scuffletonians, ex-slaves, downscale whites, and who knows what else (Croatians? Sephardic Jews?)?

Hundreds of Indians from Robeson County fought for the United States during World War II in white units (blacks were segregated into different outfits). Many returned with a willingness to pursue social change. Some of them, especially the war veterans, disliked Robeson County's segregation. In 1945, a group of Indians petitioned the governor to support the restoration of an elected municipal government in Pembroke, which had been swapped for an appointive system in 1917 at the behest of the community's white minority. Two years later, the town returned to an elected government, and Pembroke chose its first Indian mayor. Other Indian leaders lobbied to adopt a unique name to identify their group. In 1952, the name Lumbee, inspired by the Lumbee/Lumber River, was approved by the Indians in a referendum, and the following year, the General Assembly formally recognized the label. In 1956, the United States Congress formally extended partial recognition to the Lumbee Tribe, affirming their existence as an Indigenous community but disallowing them from the use of federal funds and services available to other Native American groups. Other Indians rejected the Lumbee designation and identified themselves as Tuscarora—stressing a connection to the Tuscarora people who had populated North Carolina in the 1700s—intending to secure a better chance at full federal recognition.

Here’s a picture of the founders of the Lumbee Regional Development Association a few decades ago:

Locklear is the most prominent Lumbee name. In case you are wondering, actress Heather Locklear of Melrose Place is said to have Lumbee ancestry on her father’s side.

So, while the Lumbee seem pretty diverse, they rank low on the Great Awokening’s Pyramid of Privileged Diversity. They don’t even get to have their own tourist casino.

Times have been tough in Robeson County, with the decline of traditional industries, such as moonshining and weed growing, and some bad floods. The population declined 13% from 2010 to 2020. Donald Trump became the first presidential candidate to campaign in Robeson County in 2020.

And Robeson has swung strongly toward the GOP following Romney’s run.

The Great Awokening didn't hurt the Democrats too much during its first decade when it was kept strategically vague who was on top of the Democrats’ Pyramid of Privilege: Women? Muslims? Hispanics? Immigrants? Each had their moment in the spotlight in the 2010s.

But 2020’s Racial Reckoning, Democrats doubling down on trans supremacy, and Kamala's DEI nomination as a Presidential candidate with no distinguishing features other than being a black woman, made clear the Great Awokening’s winners were black women (and trans).

So, by 2024 you saw a broadening of the trend first noticed in 2020 when Texan Mexican-American men realized the "racial reckoning" was for blacks, not for them.

Lumbees, too, apparently saw that the writing was on the wall.

By 2024, even straight black men were starting to bail out of the Democrats' focus on “centering” black women and trans.