[thread] One progressive tic that I'd like to see go away is "X constituency won the election." We’ve seen this in a lot of elections, most memorably (for me) the Jones special election in Alabama.

If the point is to give a gold star to people who voted for your candidate, then the gold stars go to… everybody who voted for your candidate. You don’t deserve less credit for voting Democratic simply because fewer members of your demographic also voted Democratic.

One of the problems with this habit is that it reduces people to their race, or sometimes race+gender. Most voters are cross-pressured by multiple factors: education, religion, geography, etc. Seeing voters as undifferentiated ethnic blocs is terrible politics.

I’m not making a principled case for race-neutrality everywhere. There are issues where it makes sense to discuss people as broad identity categories. I just don’t think it makes sense to transpose this habit onto voting.

To cite a specific instance here, trying to shame white women who voted for Biden because *other* white women voted for Trump is nuts, both morally and politically. When you see people saying this, it's indicative of a deeper race/gender essentialism run totally amok.