I Don't Think Dan Le Batard Should Dump on Trump Voters

If you didn't see this coming, maybe you don't know why it happened

In the aftermath of the election results, I’d like to appropriate Mark Halperin’s slogan of, “Peace, love and understanding.” In that spirit, I want to riff on the topic Ryan Glasspiegel and I discussed last week: Dan Le Batard, mogul of the The Dan Le Batard Show.

I’ve never met Dan outside of podcast appearances, but I personally quite like him. Friends of mine have worked and/or are working for Dan Le Batard. I wish Dan nothing but the best. I’ve got no urge to dunk on him in the aftermath of a Trump win that seemed to have him visibly shaken.

If anything, I’m writing this to lessen the pain. Because, if you are viewing your American friends and neighbors in the way Dan appears to be, it’s just a) Harder to be happy and b) Harder to understand what’s happening from their perspective.

And I should rely on Le Batard to commune with the feelings of others. He’s a natural empath, in a way that I am not. It’s partially why, in his day, Le Batard was a better profile writer than I was. Marcus Thompson at the Athletic is also a great profile writer, and also a natural empath. But I digress here. The point is that Le Batard has the natural ability to understand the perspective of others, but politics tends to render us less open. Or to quote Dan:

If I view that as a threat, and then you view that as your preference, you become a threat. That’s the America that I live in.

It’s hard to discuss politics because the stakes are real. The elected officials actually do make life or death decisions at scale. There’s no way I could completely disprove the idea that a second Donald Trump presidency would end in nuclear war, famine or whatever other calamity. That’s not even a commentary on Trump. Those options (plus many others) are always on the table for any American president, so it’s difficult to reason a person out of fight/flight if they believe the winning candidate to be spectacularly unfit.

Personally I think the underrated potential Trump disaster might be some sort of crypto-driven financial crisis, but that’s not really what I want to talk about. Trump’s presidency will be whatever it is, and in the meantime, my niche quixotic goal is for people in sports media to understand their out group better, starting with Dan.

Quoting Le Batard on his show:

If I am to discuss what people are here today for because they want liberal tears, and in some ways I do weep for my country liberally. America has spoken and America has spoken resoundingly that what they want representing our country in office is that. Is everything that represents.

Well, yes and no. We are offered a binary choice in this system, so it’s not as though a selected option necessarily represents all that a voter wants. It’s just the choice deemed preferable to the alternative, based on any number of factors. Many (most?) of my liberal friends privately conceded that Kamala Harris was terrible in this or that way, but voted for her regardless. It often happens on the other side. But anyway, Dan continues:

Whether you want to say, ‘hate wins’ or whether you want to say, ‘the white man’s got a dynasty.’ And there was that one loss, the Washington Generals/Barack Obama, put on them one time. But they are the Harlem Globetrotters — they do not give up the power. And it’s a dynasty that will stay in power at least four more years because people have spoken and men have spoken. ‘You will not take this power from us. We will overtake the woman’s body and we’ll be a threat to minorities and others.

I pause on this part because I think Tuesday’s results suggest the opposite of what Dan is saying. If Trump was simply reliant on White resentment, he would have seen shrinking margins. Instead, in our increasingly multiethnic nation, his party sees gains all over. The oppressed vs. oppressor prism doesn’t explain why Trump made big inroads into that bastion of White supremacy otherwise known as the Bronx. Or that MAGA Country we call Chicago. All around America, our major cities, while still blue, got redder.

Well, to be a bit more exact, one major urban area got redder, but didn’t stay blue: Miami-Dade County, highly Hispanic seat of the Le Batard show, voted for Trump by roughly 11 percent. This would be unthinkable a decade ago, and perhaps even a half decade ago. In 2016, Hillary Clinton won Miami-Dade by 29 percent. Now, this county with a White non Hispanic population of 13.4 percent, is roughly as red as the state of Ohio.

What a gloriously weird place it is, by the way. Miami is an uncanny valley, worthy of that joke about being so great in part because, “Whenever you want to go on vacation, America is right next door.” I, like Dan, love Miami. I don’t love it in spite of its politics. Instead, I consider a highly urbanized cosmopolitan Republican city to be a fascinating development in 2024. I’m flat out curious about the place.

In 2022, I asked Dan about the Miami shift towards Trump, and he brought up issues with race among Cubans. I can’t really disconfirm that, but there’s clearly a lot more going on in Florida than a critical mass of Miami Cubans suddenly, over the last eight years, re-discovering racism.

In my visits, the streets haven’t appeared to be teeming with “hate,” though maybe it’s a matter of vantage. From a Bay Area perspective, it’s visually shocking to drive through Miami Beach and witness so much open support for the Jewish homeland. I see huge banners with messages like, “BAGEL WORLD STANDS WITH ISRAEL,” as I mull how, back in the Bay, such an establishment would court vandalism and/or protests. This isn’t a commentary on what should happen in Gaza, but more an observation that pro Israel Jews are trending right within and outside of Florida. One party seems generally more supportive of “Zionists,” a fashionable term of derision on the left that happens to describe the vast majority of Jewish people.

Yes, some Jews shifted to Trump. I saw this a lot anecdotally, and it’s reflected in not just the Miami margin, but also Democratic underperformance in New Jersey and New York. I don’t think Jews defected from the Democratic party because they wanted to “overtake the woman’s body.” I believe that some noticed how squeamish the party had become about Israel following the October 7th attack. You can quibble with their views, and there are surely many factors, but the leader of Florida’s Democratic Party openly conceded that many Jewish constituents were relieved to have Ron DeSantis as governor as anti-Israel protests roiled campuses (mostly) elsewhere.

The point is that people have their reasons. During the pandemic, Florida came to represent a relaxed redoubt from onerous Blue World restrictions. It’s not my state, but I’d hazard that the promoted freedom became a point of pride for some, helping to accelerate the rightward trend. Having lived through a variety of California pandemic mandates, I can at least understand the appeal of being allowed to proceed normally, if you so choose. Beyond the civil liberties consideration, I also get that there’s a business aspect to the anti lockdown policy. If you’re a Miami restauranteur or gym owner, you might vote Republican because, back then, your operation was allowed to stay open. People elsewhere had their lifelong dreams crushed not just by the pandemic, but by overboard governmental responses. One party became more associated with that sort of thing.

I could come up with other reasons for why Florida went from toss up to safe red, but it would mostly be speculation. Even if I’ve been visiting South Florida since childhood, again, it is not my state. I do not claim to fully know why it does what it does. I don’t even think its residents wholly know why they do what they do. But I’ve long depended on the Dan Le Batard show to lend me some insight into the hearts and minds of Miamians.

To an uncommon degree, Dan was fiercely committed to staying local, even when going national. During the Heatles run, I’d listen to The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz for LeBron-based NBA reactions, but found myself most immersed in Miami specific talk. Ron Magill from Zoo Miami would regularly come on to take calls from residents about their exotic animal sightings. The segment was a delightfully informative reminder of just how much tropical fauna these urbanites were living beside. Magill, a gigantic Cuban-American man with an outsized charisma to match, offered an animal’s eye window into the lives of the people down there in South Florida.

There were other callers, fans who sent parody songs, fans who ranted with hilarious abandon. Dan made it a policy to not start with pleasantries and get right to the good stuff. Conversations got colorful quick.

I liked those people, for all their quirks. They had a real connection with the show that went beyond typical sports talk. If I had to guess, I’d hazard most of that old male-skewing sports talk radio audience voted Trump, if they voted at all. I’d advise Dan not to see these people as morally inferior to those who voted otherwise. I get that Dan sees Trump as a threat, and sure, rip him if you like. But the people?

I guess it’s his program and his choice, but there’s a level sanctimony conveyed on the show that is, in my opinion, beneath him. There’s a negative pathologizing of the surrounding culture that seems reductive and incurious. It’s a characterization that is, at the very least, completely out of step with how so many voters would explain their own decisions. How many express a predatory zeal to “overtake the woman’s body”? How many, in this coalition that’s rapidly gaining minorities, explain that they simply wish to be “a threat to minorities”?

You can hate their vote, hate Trump, fear what it means for “democracy.” I’d just stop before you hit moral superiority versus what is, at the moment, most voters. You are not a better person because you voted for whatever candidate. Sorry. The other side can just as easily come up with a reason for why your vote is depraved. Don’t like that reason? Think it’s unfair? That’s the point.

Ultimately, your life’s worth is going to be defined by personal connections, not some bet you made between two options on a contest you couldn’t impact, whatever its import. Fortunately for Dan, it seems like he’s built a tremendous life for himself, replete with strong loyalties. He’s a good person. He’s just not, on the basis of political preference, in a position to lecture most people in his Miami community about their moral deficit. It’s condescending. It’s sanctimonious. And most importantly, it fails to see the humanity that literally surrounds the studio.