Seeing the Election as Trump Voters Did

Regardless of how Democrats may feel about the last election—meaning how depressed and despairing they are—it is time to move past fantasies and caricatures.  The fantasy centers on the continued insistence by some on the left that their resounding defeat was due to Harris’s failures as a candidate, including her inability to articulate a persuasive message, lack of a convincing economic program, a poor choice of running mate, and an unwillingness to give effective interviews.  The conclusion that springs inevitably from these perceived flaws is that a different nominee could have won, although Harris critics are vague on just who that might have been.

 I continue to believe this is nonsense, but to fully appreciate why, we must stop dismissing all Trump voters as greedy bigots, religious fanatics, or misguided idiots. Although each of these subgroups was generously represented in Trump’s totals, they don’t explain his stunning margin of victory.  For that, Democrats need to see the world the way mainstream Republican voters did.

The first fiction to be dispelled is that they were consciously rejecting democracy.  Although given who they elected, it might turn out that way, in their view, they were defending democracy.  They were rejecting what they saw as an extra-constitutional power grab by Washington that denied them the right to make decisions that both comported with their values and aligned with the principles under which the nation was founded.  When they looked at the Constitution—and many did, at least superficially—they saw a system of government designed so that most authority was to be reserved “to the states or to the people,” as the Tenth Amendment plainly promised.

They may have used phrasing Democrats found silly, such as “deep state” or “administrative state,” but their grievances about federal overreach were real.  They felt a government dominated by liberal elites was imposing on them a corrupt, immoral way of life, and for many, a Godless one.  Why, for example, should their children be forced to share school bathrooms with fellow students whose genitalia did not match the door they walked in from?  Someone, they reasoned, would have to endure discomfort, but why did it have to be their child, who was normal?  Those of us who abhor discrimination find this reasoning cruel and callous, but Trump voters found liberals to be every bit as discriminatory in forcing on them what they saw as an abhorrent social standard in which they had no say. 

Nor did Trump’s voters see themselves as racist.  They believe that the country has moved away from the meritocracy it was supposed to be and some groups—not theirs—have been given unfair advantages in employment, college admissions, federal programs, even the responsibility to prove they can vote legally, while they, the (usually) white, hardworking churchgoers, have been relegated to what they see as second class citizenship.  All they are asking, they insist, is that the starting line be made equal, unwilling to accept that their definition of equal is inherently unequal.  That argument, paradoxically for the left, deeply resonated with Latinos.

One place that the left was sort of correct was that Harris failed to make the case that the economy’s broad improvement would eventually modulate the huge rise in the cost of living for the middle class.  It is, however, difficult to see how she could effectively have explained away the doubling of prices for staples despite a post-pandemic economy that was advertised as more robust than virtually any other in the world.  Consumers who could no longer afford to buy a whole chicken would reasonably conclude that the money was going to others, by which they meant Democrats.

Trump voters, both the hardcore and the recently converted, have long been convinced that the American ethos was far more conservative than Democrats pretended.  They rejected Democrats’ constant refrain that the Electoral College had skewed the nation to minority rule, even though, except for 2004, Republicans had not won the popular vote since 1988.  Take away the liberal bastions of California, New York, and Illinois, they argued, and they were actually the majority.  That convenient math was buttressed when Trump won the popular vote.  In addition, Republicans have insisted that our system of government was set up as a republic, not a pure democracy, in which, once again, the rights of states were to be protected from a central government created to have extremely limited power over them. 

This is not to say these, or any other of the litany of complaints, are valid—they are at best half-truths—but, if these mainstream voters are ever to be enticed to again vote Democratic, it will not be done by insulting them or demeaning their intelligence, which many surely felt was the case in this election.

That will be a tall order since fundamentally the Democrats were correct.  Whether or not Republicans thought they were rejecting democracy, they were; protecting vulnerable minorities is a responsibility a free and equal nation must take on, not dismiss because those who are different make some people uncomfortable; racism is still prevalent in this country, and some adjustment of the starting line is necessary to make the competition fair; the United States was not founded to be a theocratic Christian nation, simply one in which Protestants happened to be the dominant religious group; every government program Republicans loath was initiated because the private sector failed; like it or not, California, New York, and Illinois are every bit as much a part of the United States as Texas, Florida, and Tennessee; Democrats fulfilled their primary economic responsibility in a post-pandemic society by putting millions and millions back to work; and finally and by far most important, they chose to elect a man and a team that is far more likely to bring disaster than success.

It is difficult for Democrats to accept that so many chose to look away from discrimination, short-sightedness, and, yes, true patriotism, but they will have no chance of taking the country back if they refuse to recognize and understand why they were rejected.