As we continue our post-mortem here (and everywhere), I want to focus for a moment on one peculiar anomaly: fewer people voted than in 2020. In that election, Biden got 81.3 million votes, and Trump got 74.2 million, out of a total voting age population of almost 257 million.
In 2024, the voting age population was around 262 million (estimated), an increase of about 2%. In this election, Trump’s total (not yet complete, but getting there) is around 74 million, while Harris's is just over 70 million. In other words, Trump’s total vote remained about the same (though it appears the mix was different this time), but Harris could not get anywhere near Biden’s 2020 votes.
Not only that: although there were 5 million more Americans of voting age in 2024 than in 2020, the total number of voters for both candidates combined dropped by roughly 14 million — even though Covid had made it much harder to vote in 2020.
I suggest this result is a combination of commitment and apathy — on both sides.
We were never going to win over the Trump committed voters. The MAGA disease has no known cure other than time. Once someone commits to a fantasy, trying to convince them that it is a fantasy only makes them cling it all the harder.
This type of denial is akin to Stephen Colbert’s “truthiness” in that these deniers adamantly refuse to accept verified scientific facts because they get in the way of their own rigid ideas. The Denial of Reality (Psychology Today)
Biden reached the apathetic voters in the middle of a pandemic when they could see immediately how government action or inaction was affecting them. By four years later, they had forgotten all about those days.
Here is Greg Sargent’s observation (Why Did Trump Win? These Dems Have Discovered a Very Disturbing Answer):
Undecided voters didn’t believe that some of the highest profile things that happened during Trump’s presidency—even if they saw these things negatively—were his fault.
But there were also the Trump apathetic voters. They knew what Trump was, they admitted it, and they mostly didn’t care. The media has to shoulder a lot of blame for the way they “sanewashed “ him, but one of their arguments they gave for doing so was that “everyone already knows what he’s like, so this isn’t news.”
Well, in fact, his increasing deterioration, dementia, rage, incoherence were news, but that excuse gave them license for their laziness and cowardice.
We were misled by the size of the crowds at the rallies. Harris drew the committed, while Trump’s apathetic voters didn’t need to go to the rallies, or walked out in the middle. They didn’t care what Trump said or did; they knew they were going to vote for him even if he performed microphone sex on stage. (Call it a kind of apathetic commitment.)
Harris had fewer committed voters.
We talk about how Harris appealed mainly to the college-educated voters as though that were a bad thing. But those are the people who have been trained to think for themselves, and to think critically, and that is why her arguments resonated with them.
Those with less education, and those who pay no attention to politics except for one week every 4 years, were turned off by her arguments — even though she was right. They did not have the awareness or the critical thinking skills to process what she was trying to tell them.
The war against public education over the past half century and the rise of highly focused social media left them uninterested and unconcerned — or, worse, open to rejecting the truth. Heather Cox Richardson looked into this in her newsletter this morning:
An Ipsos/Reuters poll from October showed that voters who were misinformed about immigration, crime, and the economy tended to vote Republican, while those who knew the facts preferred Democrats. Many Americans turn for information to social media or to friends and family who traffic in conspiracy theories. As Angelo Carusone of Media Matters put it: “We have a country that is pickled in right-wing misinformation and rage.”
This also helps explain why reproductive rights measures succeeded in some of the states that Harris lost. Voters saw those measures as immediately protecting them, but at the same time they missed the connection to how the federal government could take them away. The first was obvious, while the second was obfuscated. Here’s Richardson again:
Republican strategist Sarah Longwell, who studies focus groups, told NPR, “When I ask voters in focus groups if they think Donald Trump is an authoritarian, the #1 response by far is, ‘What is an authoritarian?’”
Now the voters who picked Trump and the voters who stayed home because they thought it didn’t matter who won are learning otherwise. Richardson, one more time:
Social media has been flooded today with stories of Trump voters who are shocked to learn that tariffs will raise consumer prices as reporters are covering that information. . . . There are also stories that voters who chose Trump to lower household expenses are unhappy to discover that their undocumented relatives are in danger of deportation.
Also, Trump Allies Suddenly Feel Safe Touting Project 2025:
“Now that the election is over I think we can finally say that yeah actually Project 2025 is the agenda. Lol,” Matt Walsh, a right-wing podcast host, wrote on X hours after Trump secured his victory over Vice President Kamala Harris.
Democracy survives only when its citizens are educated about reality and trained to use reason.
Autocrats from the Catholic Church and fundamentalist Protestants to Vladimir Putin to ante-bellum Southern gentry to Elon Musk and of course Trump and Vance (and yes, the list is a lot longer, but this is a short essay) all know this.
Long term, this is what we need to achieve if we are to restore our freedoms. Short term, we need to break through the misinformation and the apathy.
Let’s work on that and stop blaming Harris for the obstacles neither she nor any other Democrat could overcome.
No comments:
Post a Comment