Respecting Trump Voters and Abstainers Must Include Viewing Them as Responsible for Their Decisions, Not as Helpless Children
During the 2016 presidential election, I heard about a meme that went something like this: "I wanted a craft West Coast pale ale with citra hops and a crisp aftertaste, but this bar doesn't have that. I shall thus drink battery acid." The idea, of course, was that people were picking out one thing or another about Hillary Clinton that made them not want to vote for her, but they had no argument about why they voted for the toxic alternative that was Donald Trump.
Of course, at the time, the background assumption was that Trump would lose badly in any case, so such votes for him would prove to be protest votes and nothing more. Similarly, the large numbers of people who did not vote at all could hardly hide -- indeed, they were openly performing -- their sense of virtue in not sullying themselves with a Clinton vote, supposedly safe in the knowledge that other voters would do the dirty work of putting her in office.
In 2024, Trump votes or non-votes were not protests. This was thus not "I shall thus drink battery acid," but rather "I shall thus burn down the bar with everyone (possibly even including me) in it." That is, these were not empty statements or acts of solely self-harm. They were affirmatively antisocial decisions. But even that does not get it completely right, because it assumes that the people truly were voting against Harris or abstaining from voting for her for something approximating substantive and defensible reasons. (See hop choices, supra.)
In a Dorf on Law column later this week, I will address in some detail the people who are saying that Democrats lost because of "condescension" or similarly conclusory nonsense. The satirist Alexandra Petri perfectly exposed that sleazy move in a column last Friday:
Like lots of people on the internet right now, I am certain that the thing that went wrong in the 2024 Harris campaign is the very thing that I have been going on about for years. …
I know that some people are saying, “Your prescription is the opposite of what is true. You are just bringing a bad set of assumptions to a situation where there is no evidence that your suggested course would have made things any better!” To them I say: No! Try it! Only one way to find out, and that’s to try it!
In short, the last week has been knives out, but without any of the fun. For those who cannot wait for my next column (and even for those who can), Seth Meyers's "A Closer Look" last night devastatingly took down the now-trendy attacks on the Democrats' left wing and similarly exposed an essentialist misfire by Bernie Sanders. Sanders aside, the bulk of the discussion in Washington since last Tuesday has been an exercise in hippie-punching, which I summarized a few years ago in a column in which I coined a slogan that might as well be tattooed on the foreheads of establishment Democrats: "It is always the hippies' fault."
Here, however, I want to focus on the assumption that I noted above, which is "that the people truly were voting against Harris or abstaining for something approximating substantive and defensible reasons." That assumption, when taken seriously, merely ends up being a way of saying that voters are never to be blamed for what they believe in their hearts or for making decisions that harm themselves and others. That assumption also forms the basis for the loud claims that "Democrats now have to get these people back by meeting the voters where they are."
That is both nonsensical and dangerous. More to the point, considering that so much of the commentary has it that Democrats are the ones who disrespect voters, we have to ask why the people who supposedly care so much about "personal responsibility" never hold anyone who votes for Trump personally responsible. I cannot imagine anything more condescending than saying to a person: "Oh, you voted for a fascist just now, and others will suffer for it? Oh, that's completely understandable, because you're hurting and it's not your fault. Anything you do is somebody else's fault."
Before exploring that political contradiction (that is, that personal responsibility never applies to persons who vote for or enable Republicans), it is worth going over some of the numbers from the election. Last Thursday, I wrote a column about the election results in which I pointed out that the outcome was well within the range of possibilities that we saw in the advance polls. Almost every swing state was rated a toss-up, and somewhere around half of a projected electorate of up to 150 million people seemed locked in on Trump. What ensued fell within the margin or error, no matter how much anyone wants to call it a landslide or a mandate.
So, those numbers: As of this writing (early on the afternoon of November 12), the popular votes totals are (according to C-SPAN) 71.9 million for Harris and 75.1 million for Trump, or a 3.2 million vote difference. The percentage split is 2.2 (48.1 for Harris, 50.3 for Trump). The latter compares to splits for the last three Democratic presidents of 5.6 (Clinton I), 8.5 (Clinton II), 7.2 (Obama I), 3.9 (Obama II), and 4.4 (Biden). For the last three Republican presidents, the splits were 7.8 (Bush pere), negative 0.5 (Bush fils I), 2.4 (Bush fils II), and negative 2.1 (Trump I). Trump 2024 beats only the negative wins by W and Trump himself.
That is all for context, even in the "let's only look at percentages" world. But my point last week was that we should be looking at the vote totals, because they are even less surprising or impressive than the percentages. Trump's total in 2024 is 0.9 million above his losing total last time. Harris's 71.9 million, meanwhile, is almost 9.4 million lower than Biden's total last time. Or, as one reader pointed out to me in an email:
So what all the pundits who say Harris and the Dems sent voters to Trump is wrong; they sent them home! The Dems do not need to retool their message to be more Trumpy to appeal to working class voters since the Biden voters accepted the Dems' message. Changing their message would be a huge mistake. Dems need to figure why voters stayed home and how next time they can get them to vote.
And that insight gets to the larger point. Trump's numbers did bump up very slightly -- and because his voting base skews older, he had to more than make up for some considerable number of now-deceased 2020 voters even to get his 2024 up at all -- but he did not "build a new multiracial coalition," or whatever the nonsense is that I am seeing in headlines in the mainstream press. (I currently have only limited tolerance for forcing myself to read such columns.) Trump ended up within his likely range, and Harris was within her likely range -- both based on pre-election polling -- but Harris's underperformance relative to Biden's four years earlier was caused by millions of people deciding that they would not rouse themselves to vote for her.
In a column a few weeks ago, I recounted a scene at an election event in which a supposedly undecided young White union member said somberly that he was going to "do more independent research before I make my judgment." That struck me as laughable then, and it looks even worse now. That guy was obviously choosing not to reveal that he was going to vote for Trump, and he hid behind the "I don't know enough" excuse.
Which brings us to the related questions. Why would people not peel away from Trump, and why would people not show up for Harris? Gosh, those are tough ones, are they not? It is apparently forbidden to draw the obvious conclusion: sexism and racism decided this election. But why not? No other explanation, or even combination of explanations, comes close to explaining the facts on the ground. If Occam's Razor means anything, it has to apply here.
Ah, but the conventional wisdom holds that the good people of the United States were angry about inflation and scared about immigration. That, not hatred and bigotry, is their excuse. But as I wrote above, this is condescending -- indeed, it is infantilizing of American adults. "I burned the bar down because I was angry!" "Oh, well as long as you had a good reason."
Put differently, I respect voters enough to say that they meant to do what they did and that they should own it. I believe that they did what they wanted, that they did not get distracted by shiny objects, and that they voted for Trump because they like him or stayed home because they did not dislike him enough to keep him out of the White House. They are people who made fateful choices that will harm millions of people -- in many cases including themselves and their loved ones -- and they not only should have known what they were doing but in fact did know.
But were they not in an information bubble? Fox and the other right-wing outlets are definitely propaganda outlets, frantically supporting Trump's lies about "J6 hostages" or whatever, but that cannot explain what happened. One paradox of Trump is that he is a pathological liar who is utterly transparent and is thus weirdly honest about his true self. A person who wanted to "do more independent research" only had to listen to Trump himself.
I pointed out last week that Trump ran one of the worst campaigns imaginable, and he did. Anyone who did not like what he stood for did not need to watch MSNBC or read Dorf on Law to know what Trump wanted to do.
Trump called immigrants vermin who were poisoning the bloody of the country. He called for military crackdowns on American citizens. He ran on a platform of mass deportations and said openly that it would be a bloody process. He fantasized about having his enemies (including the "enemies of the people" in the media) killed. He did all of that and more, in speech after speech after speech, only leavening the hatred with digressions demonstrating his mental decline. There is a reason that reports prior to election day had off-the-record comments from Trump's team worrying that the "wheels are falling off," and similar comments.
There are low-information voters, but no one is that low-information. Anyone who would claim to know nothing about either candidate but who then voted for Trump anyway was not being hoodwinked. They voted for the man who had revealed himself to be a fascist.
"But voters were angry about prices." Again, respecting people's intelligence and agency means expecting them to say, "OK, I'm angry about X, so who should I vote for?" No one needed Paul Krugman to tell them that Trump's tariff obsession would be inflationary and otherwise an economic disaster, because a person who was not motivated by things like sexism and racism would simply say, "I'm angry about prices, but I do notice Trump has not offered anything that even plausibly would bring prices down."
And if a voter thought that it was a good idea to vote for Trump (or to stay home) because they were worried about trans kids or immigrants eating pets, then they made a conscious decision to allow their government to target the most vulnerable people in the country. Why? Because the voter is angry and scared? Plenty of angry and scared people refrain from burning down the bar, because they know that doing so will do nothing to change what they are angry and scared about. Those who do choose to burn it down did just that: they chose to burn it down.
Late last week, Harper's magazine sent out its weekly list of columns from its archives that are newly relevant to the world today. One such column included in that email was “Who Goes Nazi?” by Dorothy Thompson, which included this teaser quote: "Nice people don’t go Nazi. Their race, color, creed, or social condition is not the criterion. It is something in them." Indeed.
There are trans kids in the U.S. today who will face increased bullying, isolation, and depression because of Trump's victory, and their governments will actively block them from receiving medically indicated care. Some will suffer so badly that they will choose to end their lives.
The people of Springfield, Ohio -- immigrants and US-born, of all races -- were all the victims when Trump and his allies grabbed onto a false issue that was generated by literal Nazis (marching in the streets with swastikas and Hitler-saluting Nazis from outside of Springfield), but even the term-limited, elderly Republican governor of Ohio did not denounce him and call for people to vote for Harris.
People who claim that "Kamala didn't give me enough information to make me want to vote for her" are not necessarily lying to themselves, because that might or might not be true. Even so, not voting for her -- either by voting for him or by abstaining -- was not only about not knowing enough about Harris, because one thing that we did know about Harris is that she is none of the things that Trump is. Moreover, even if it was about not know enough about Harris, their votes and non-votes were crucially about knowing more than enough about Trump yet saying, "Yeah, I'm OK with that."
I do understand why Democratic politicians would be hesitant to say any of this out loud. But I am not a politician, and it is important to be clear about what happened. The excuses for voting for Trump or for not voting only work if we condescend to those Americans and treat them as children who are not responsible for their actions. Being clear about that, and not accepting those excuses, will at least make it possible to try to think about how to get people who have made a horrible choice to act differently in the future. Coddling them and saying that it is someone else's fault -- which amounts to acting as if they did not in fact vote for a man who had told them in clear terms who he is -- is not going to help.
And most importantly, as my emailer noted in the quote above, the difference this time was all about people who agree with Democrats but who did not show up. Although they should also be held responsible for their choices, they are the real story and might well vote for a different Democrat next time, assuming that that Democrat is White and male -- and that there is a next time.