Janet Kira Lessin

Americans Didn’t Vote for What Donald Trump Is About to Give Them

https://www.yahoo.com/news/americans-didn-t-vote-donald-154051128.html?fr=sycsrp_catchall

By now, every pundit in America has their own 2024 election take, mostly confirming their prior opinions. Every Republican has a take, too, which is that Americans voted resoundingly for — well, for whatever policy that Republican cares about, from opposition to transgender rights to support for prayer in schools. And of course, progressives, especially younger ones, have every right to feel afraid, angry, or alienated.

But the data tells a specific story, not a choose-your-own-adventure. And that is that swing voters voted mostly out of economic insecurity and discontent. They actually liked Kamala Harris more than Donald Trump (Harris’ favorability was 48 percent, compared to 44 percent for Trump). But Harris was the incumbent, and incumbents don’t win elections when people think the economy is bad.

This is not just an American phenomenon. As the Financial Times reported, in every developed country in the world, the incumbents lost this year. This is unprecedented.

If, like me, you’re being kept awake at night thinking about this election, this explanation helps. Yes, people were willing to put up with Trump’s criminality, coup attempts, and extreme xenophobia, and that is still terrible. Many were also on board with scapegoating immigrants for our economic woes, which is as factually preposterous as it is morally offensive.

But they didn’t vote for MAGA. They didn’t vote against women, or wokeness, or coastal elites, or climate regulation, or government regulation in general, or queer people. Not directly, anyway. They voted against the incumbent party, like every other developed country in the world this year. The shock waves from the Covid-19 pandemic — inflation, empty shelves, housing prices — are global, and this is a global trend. Everywhere in the world, voters have chosen to throw the bastards out because of the economy.

In fact, if you look closely at the Financial Times data, Trump actually did worse than most other non-incumbents. Yes, he won a clear victory. But it was not as big a victory as parties in France, Italy, or even New Zealand.

I don’t think any Democrat could’ve won this election. Maybe, if there were a Bernie Sanders-like outsider figure, different enough from Joe Biden and Harris to not seem like a continuation of them, and possessed of Trump-like abilities to tune into the grievances and alienation of working-class people, that person could have won. (Biden himself, before his cognitive decline, had those qualities; he was known as Scranton Joe, after all.) But even then, that candidate would have to buck a global trend. I doubt anyone could do that.

Of course, there’s still much to be deeply concerned about, because why a country votes for a candidate, and what they actually get from them, are often completely different. And American voters voted for a candidate promising mass deportations, authoritarianism, reactionary anti-feminism, ethno-nationalism, and a mean, vindictive spirit of revenge, grievance, and retribution. Shit is about to get very real, very soon. And, quick history lesson, the Nazi party was voted into power in 1932 largely because of economic discontent. Once in power, parties do what they want to do, not what voters actually voted for.

That’s true even in economic policy specifically. Trump and his allies are likely to enact another wave of tax cuts for the wealthiest 0.1 percent of Americans — the exact opposite of “populism” or help for the working class.

So I don’t want to sugarcoat anything.

I also don’t want to suggest that swing voters took a clear look at the two sides and made some rational, informed decision. They did not. Right-wing media like Fox News, right-wing influencers like Elon Musk, and supposedly “independent” figures like Joe Rogan all ignored or minimized Trump’s past misdeeds, lied about immigrant crime, exaggerated the evils of “wokeness,” glossed over abject racism, and totally failed to connect the dots on the economy. It’s not like swing voters took a long, hard look at Trump’s felonies and mental health and voted for him anyway because of the price of eggs (more on that in a moment). They were, in part, bamboozled.

But, while I think pessimism is the only morally justifiable outlook on the next few years, the reality of the 2024 election — that swing voters voted for one thing, but Trump will deliver something else — does mean those swing voters are soon to be let down, even enraged. Ultimately, there is likely to be a backlash.

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