Since the November election, much of the bickering from Democratic elites and commentators about how former President Donald Trump defeated Vice President Kamala Harris has centered on scapegoating. Democrats lost because they didn’t have their own Joe Rogan, or because Harris was too progressive, or because of Biden. Z abandoned them. But if you’ve ever actually talked to Trump supporters, as I have, you know that none of this mattered when Americans entered the voting booths on November 5th. Sho.
As a journalist, I have spent much of the past decade monitoring online right-wing spaces and reporting on far-right extremist influencers. As a private citizen, I have Trump supporters in my own family, and I’ve filled the pages here with records of the various political battles that have taken place over the dinner table since 2015. And so far, I haven’t seen anything from the Democratic establishment or liberal media that I believe. In fact, it may have convinced Trump supporters to turn blue, especially for an establishment Democrat like Harris.
At this point, nearly a decade into his political career, Trump’s voters don’t consider themselves Republicans.
The first thing to understand is that Trump supporters may be “low-informed voters” in the sense that they don’t get much information from establishment media other than FOX News, but are unchecked. That means there is. Sure, they listen to podcasts like Rogan, but they also watch videos on Facebook and Instagram, share memes and articles in group chats, and closely monitor President Trump’s remarks at rallies. are.
They don’t take anything he says literally, but they are as excited as he is about his often contradictory and sometimes downright ridiculous policy ideas. And they don’t particularly care how much they align with establishment Republican ideals. We can see this reflected in last month’s results, as red states like Missouri voted for Trump while also voting for a minimum wage increase.
This brings us to a point that most reporting on Trump voters misses, but that they would be happy to tell you. At this point, nearly a decade into his political career, Trump’s voters don’t consider themselves Republicans. They voted for Trump, who happened to be the Republican candidate.
But even if it all comes from Mr. Trump, the question remains why those political contradictions don’t bother them. How could a state like Montana vote for him and vote to essentially enshrine reproductive freedom in the state constitution? And nothing captures this tension better than this quote from a 2019 New York Times article that interviewed Trump supporters who were beginning to realize that his policies were negatively impacting their communities. There is no glimpse of his way of thinking.
“I thought he would do good things. He didn’t hurt the people he was supposed to hurt,” one voter told the Times.
This idea that a vote for Trump is a vote against someone else’s opportunity was expressed even more directly in a 2018 essay by The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer, “The Cruelty Is the Point.” President Trump could announce tomorrow that America is turning into Sweden, and even tell his supporters that people they don’t like won’t benefit from this policy, whether they’re transgender, black, women, or immigrants. If you tell them, they’ll be happy to support it. .
The question, of course, is, “What can Democrats do here?”
Much has already been written about how this xenophobic trend is fascist, reminiscent of Nazi Germany. And there are authoritarian elements in both Trump’s base and his own politics. But I would argue that there is a more recent political movement that closely resembles Trumpism, at least in its conflict structure. Former Argentine President Juan Peron similarly came to power in 1973 with a hodgepodge of ever-changing populist policies. But as Ernesto Seman, an assistant professor at the University of Richmond, wrote in the Washington Post in 2018, Peronism “led a process of economic equality, collective organizing, and political enfranchisement,” but Trump supporters Even they would say it wasn’t their idea. want. But Trump’s ability to combine competing political ideas to galvanize his base is equally fluid.
In other words, there is no need to dismiss Trump supporters as out-of-control fascists. They just need a candidate they like better than Trump.
The question, of course, is: What can Democrats do here? Unfortunately, the current consensus within the Democratic Party appears to be leaning even further toward the center. This is a conclusion you can only reach if you ignore everything Trump supporters have been saying since 2016. Not only will they be happy to follow whatever part of Trump’s political compass he chooses, they will lash out at anything the Democrats do. . If Ms. Harris had spent the summer repeating literally everything Mr. Trump said, she still would have lost because she is a Democrat. Viral podcasters never solve their reputation problems.
As Peter Shamshiri, co-host of the podcast “If Books Could Kill,” noted on this month’s episode, marijuana legalization is currently a bipartisan issue across the United States, but if Democrats push the bill this year. If they had, legalization would not have happened anymore. Get used to it. And Democrats still don’t seem to understand exactly how badly their brand has been damaged. There was nothing they could offer that Trump voters would accept due to the simple fact that it was from a Democrat.
This is an existential problem, to be sure, but it is not an insurmountable problem. Democrats need to spend four years building their base of support rather than trying to pander to a group of voters who will never vote for them, at least for now. They need to accept the fact that the Obama era of sophisticated corporations and pop stars is completely over. Conservatives hate them and young progressives don’t trust them. Democrats cannot reverse their fortunes unless they acknowledge this fundamental problem. And while they’re at it, they might want to consider finding candidates who are just as liberal or progressive as conservatives like Trump.
