What "the Will of the Voters" Tells Us About the United States in 2024
Early yesterday morning, as I tried to recover after seeing the results of the US election, one of my first thoughts (after "Oh, no!") was: "Well, I was wrong." After all, as recently as the day before, I had renewed my repeated-ad-nauseam prediction that Kamala Harris would seem to have won the election but that Donald Trump and the Republicans would exploit the weaknesses in the country's legal system to install Trump in the White House in January. Not only did Harris not win the Electoral College, however, she did not even win the popular vote. The one scenario that I had dismissed as too farfetched -- Trump winning outright on the night of the election -- had happened.
It is true that this outcome is the same as it would have been in my predicted scenario, with Trump becoming President again. And as a grim-but-real silver lining, at least this way the agonizing and harmful scenes that I had expected to play out over the next two and a half months will not come to pass. In fact, given that I was also mostly wrong in predicting a spate of Trump-inspired violence before and on Election Day, this was the least violent possible election and transition that we could have seen.
But that is cold comfort, of course, because it merely means that Trump's promised violence against immigrants (and people who "look foreign") can commence, along with assaults on the rights and lives of other vulnerable people. This is not in any way a happy ending, to say the least.
The country, then, will get to where I thought it would go, but by a very different path. Still, it occurs to me that I had jumped to thinking about that "different path" in the wrong way. The initial shock in the results was in seeing that Trump had gotten more votes than expected, and what had been a big popular vote loss in 2020 became a relatively wide margin of victory in 2024. Is that a sensible way to think about it? Put differently, was the outcome so different from expected that we now truly know something "about America" that we did not know before? Not really.
In 2016, Trump's popular vote total was just under 63 million. In 2020, more than 74 million people voted for him (as he has reminded people endlessly). Shortly after the 2020 votes had been counted, I wrote a Dorf on Law column noting my amazement that eleven million additional people had voted for Trump after four years of his insane presidency -- all while voters were still directly dealing with the results of his gross mismanagement of the pandemic. I simply could not understand how his numbers could have gone up. After thinking about my presumptions, however, I wrote this:
My mistake was in thinking that non-Trump voters were repulsed by Trump in an irreversible way ... . What I was essentially doing was to concede that some voters are immune to logic and decency but that the rest would look at Trump and say, "Never!" The problem is that some people who voted against Trump in 2016 might be illogical or indecent enough to have seen something that they liked since then, flipping them to Trump. What might they have liked? The point is that it is impossible to know -- and it is impossible to know for the same reason that Trump's 2016 voters are impossible to understand.
In 2024, we knew that there would be something like 140 million total votes cast, and the best guess was that Trump would receive something slightly under half of those votes. The latest count shows him with nearly 73 million, meaning that he outperformed expectations by a few million.
Again, however, that he won roughly four percent more of the vote than expected simply means that instead of 68 million Americans deciding to vote for him, 73 million did so. Even if things had gone the way the polls indicated, and even if Harris and the Democrats had in fact been able to stop Trump's coup from succeeding, we would have been looking at a country in which about 70 million people who took the trouble to vote chose Trump. Those people were not going anywhere, and the threats of violence and political dirty deeds (abetted by an all-in Supreme Court super-majority) meant that the present and the future would have been fraught at best.
To put it in a slightly different light, consider that Trump ran the worst possible campaign imaginable. He was rambling and incoherent, boring his own audiences and giving his opponents endless ammunition. He lost the non-debate badly. He chose an odious running mate. He put his own voters in harm's way by lying about Springfield, Ohio, and Aurora, Colorado. He held a rally in Madison Square Garden that was ex ante creepily Nazi-like, and the event itself was even worse. He did not deny having said positive things about Hitler or wanting to have generals like the ones who served the Fuhrer.
When people were asking before the election, "How is this even close?" they were in fact conceding that what ended up happening was on the table. We were surprised that maybe 68 million people might vote for the man, but the number only ended up being a few million more than that. That difference is big in turning a loss into a win, but it is a number well within the range of what we all knew was possible -- again, even though he was objectively (even in the eyes of his Republican supporters in Congress and elsewhere, who wanted him to "talk policy" rather than ramble about a dead golfer's package) a terrible candidate.
Trump's message was loud and clear, which was that he will rule without restraint and make tens of millions of people's lives miserable (or worse). Many of those future victims of Trump's whims voted for him. In 2006, John Dean's book Conservatives Without Conscience summarized social science research that concluded that roughly one-fourth of Americans were open to following a strongman leader. That was worrisome, of course, but neither of the two parties would sensibly bet on being able to win with that number of potential voters. Trump showed that the number could be -- is -- more like fifty percent.
And even if voter suppression were not a huge issue, there is no way to know whether that would have made the difference for Harris. Again, the difference between Harris winning and Trump winning is massive -- the difference between muddling along and becoming a dictatorship. But what we know now is simply that the number of fascist and fascist-tolerant voters is enough not only to make the election close but to allow Trump to win in what by US standards looks like a trouncing.
At the end of an interview yesterday, Democratic congressman Jim Himes of Connecticut said this:
I just, to my core, believe that there's no way that tens of millions of Americans are gonna sign up and say, 'Yes, let me have a guy who lies fifty times a day, who ... is constantly in trouble with the law, who cheats and lies. The idea that the American public -- a significant chunk of the American public -- says, 'Yeah, that's my guy'? It fundamentally alters, at least for me, this optimism and sense of the American public as fundamentally decent."
Himes immediately caught himself and added: "That's for me to work out, because of course we took the shellacking, and now we need to go to work to make sure we're doing exactly what the Constitution demands that we do, which is to be a loyal and aggressive opposition." Good effort at walking it back, but his fundamental point is correct. In addition to everything else, Trump's 70-plus million voters lived through the sacking of the Capitol four years ago, and they have heard him promise to pardon the "heroes" and "hostages" who participated in that insurrection. They voted for him anyway. That is fundamentally indecent.
The danger in any democracy is that its participants might not value it. Dictators are elected far too often, because the trains are not running on time or whatever, and it takes years or decades to get back to a decent society, if indeed it ever happens at all. Again, we knew that something like half of all American adults were willing to go down this road, and while the "something like" makes all the difference in the immediate outcome, we have long been essentially one or two unlucky breaks away from seeing the entire system break. "Americans are divided" is trite and overused, but it is also insane because such a description inherently treats both sides of the divide as defensible choices.
All of which means that the completely predictable insta-pundtiry about what "the Democrats did wrong" is utter nonsense. One New York Times columnist, who was given his current position after lying about climate change and then lying about lying about it, immediately decided to go with his favorite hobbyhorse, which is that Democrats are "condescending" and voters hate them for it. Yesterday, for example, he derided Democrats as "a party of prigs and pontificators," which merely reveals a deep grudge because he personally has never won liberals' respect, which he then projects onto the "real Americans" that he -- an elite of the highest order -- supposedly represents and understands.
But it is not only the usual suspects on the right who went straight to blaming the losing side for being bested by fascists. The very lefty British humorist Jonathan Pie, for example, ranted yesterday about how Democrats had supposedly done themselves in by insulting women. How? After hearing women say that they were afraid of voting for Harris when their husbands wanted them to vote for Trump, the Harris-Walz campaign ran ads that simply said the truth, which is that ballots are secret. That was, in fact, a very good ad based on evidence-driven campaign strategy, but Pie decided that it was condescending to women to treat them as if they are afraid of their husbands. Sorry, but many of them are, and even some of the women on Fox News pushed back on their colleagues who expressed outrage that their wives might vote "the wrong way."
Meanwhile, Trump's opponents were sober, likable, disciplined, and apparently winning over hearts and minds. Many Republicans -- not enough, but many -- loudly and enthusiastically backed the Democratic ticket. This was not "bad candidates" or "bad strategy."
Yet this, sadly, is where the conversation will go. Literally or figuratively, the press is going to go back to the diners in the Midwest and talk to guys in red hats about what their "real concerns" were about Harris. The incumbent Vice President ran for President during the strongest economy in memory -- one that the conservative British magazine The Economist less than three weeks ago called "the envy of the world" -- against the most flawed candidate imaginable. Yet we are supposed to believe that more than 70 million people supposedly said: "But I'm angry about the price of bacon"? Or that it bothered them that Tim Walz was somehow sort of putting his foot in his mouth?
Yes, this is all terrifying. What makes it even more terrifying is that this truly is the will of the voters, about half of whom were open to -- even eager for -- the fascist agenda that Trump did everything possible to make clear was his deepest desire. And what make it even more terrifying than that is that the pundits are going to go back to pretending this was all about strategy and errors.
Think of it this way: There was no argument, no strategy, no brilliant tactic would have convinced Steve Bannon to abandon Trump and back Harris. We hoped that there were not enough Americans like Bannon to tip the election to Trump. There are. And as I noted above, even many of them will now suffer the consequences.