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Donald Trump took full advantage of a racial backlash to the presidency of Barack Obama. He successfully rebooted and gave new life to the Southern Strategy 2.0 – which rallied white voters on the back of heightened racial animosity.

The president-elect’s campaign of coded, “dog whistle” language worked to consolidate a solid 58% majority of white voters. His successful rise was fueled by many things: the fact that there is a black man in the White House, America’s steady advancement towards becoming a majority-minority country and the fact that minorities are flexing their political muscles.

His supporters turned to him, in part, because they feared that the political will of the white voter in this country no longer ruled the day. This backlash was fueled by fear of an America where minorities are becoming the majority.

Of course: minorities are not yet the majority. But a minority is currently head of the government. They had been waiting to take their country back and, this year, they got their opportunity. Despite many arguments early on about Hillary Clinton garnering strong support among women, the election showed that race trumps gender.

Clinton lost white women on her way to winning even less white voters (37%) than Obama did in 2012. She made no inroad in the overall white vote aggregate while failing to more fully hold the diverse and younger Obama coalition. Not that they went to Trump, instead many of them rejected both candidates and pulled the ballot for a third party candidate.

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Barack Obama’s victories in 2008 and 2012 symbolized a new country – half of Obama’s winning majority coalition in Florida was non-white, for example – and that’s one of the key drivers in the heightened racial aversion we witnessed in Donald Trump’s campaign, as I’ve previously noted through polling data.

It took until now for a Donald Trump to become the nominee of a major American political party because the “menace” of diversity and demographic change wasn’t threatening white dominance before. But when Barack Obama was elected, suddenly this threat was real. White voters voted overwhelmingly for a candidate that most Americans reportedly thought was not qualified and lacked the temperament to be president.

When people say they want to take their country back, we should believe them. And they will take it back by whatever means necessary, even if that means voting for someone they know isn’t qualified to be president.

With Obama’s rise, the need to take back their country from the brown and black people who were usurping it – the need to assert continued white superiority and supremacy – became urgent. We shouldn’t be surprised that in a racially charged environment, a blustering strong man would rise. Trump’s base found, in his candidacy, their voice: someone who will speak for those who perceive civil rights as a zero-sum game.

Our politics were therefore irreparably disrupted because a black man was in the White House. Congress literally is no longer a functioning body. Worse still, in state after state, Republicans knowingly created hurdles to keep people of color from voting. For instance, in Greensboro County, North Carolina, home of one of the largest blocs of minority voters in the state, they have gone from having 16 early voting locations in 2012 to having just one this year.

Now, those voters who screamed that they wanted to “take back” their country have a momentary victory. I fear what that means for our democracy. I fear that the lesson for this is it’s OK to be openly racist again.

White voters are at their weakest point electorally in America’s history. This election showed that when up against a wall they will back a modern-day George Wallace with less actual policy knowledge. It showed that, the weaker they become, the stronger they will fight against increasingly powerful minorities. Power concedes nothing – until it is forced to do so.

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That is why, in the aftermath of this election, we will have to address the problem of racial division as one America. Demographics are destiny. As America continues to grow browner, we can no longer afford to play this zero-sum tribal game. In order for white people to win, it needn’t be that brown people have to lose. If we do, we will all lose the future.

