The handwringing since November’s election from Democratic elites and pundits as to how former President Donald Trump defeated Vice President Kamala Harris has mostly boiled down to scapegoating: Democrats lost because they didn’t have their own Joe Rogan or because Harris was too progressive or because Gen Z abandoned them. But if you have actually spoken to Trump supporters, as I have, then you know that none of this really mattered as Americans entered the voting booths Nov. 5.
As a journalist, I’ve spent the better part of the last decade monitoring right-wing spaces online and covering far-right extremist influencers. As a civilian, I have Trump supporters in my own family and could fill pages here with accounts of our various political fights across the dinner table since 2015. And so far, I have seen nothing from the Democratic establishment or the liberal media that I believe could have actually convinced Trump supporters to have flipped blue — especially for an establishment Democrat like Harris.
At this point, almost a decade into Trump’s political career, his voters don’t see themselves as Republicans.
The first thing you have to understand is that Trump supporters may be “low information voters,” in the sense that they aren’t getting much from the establishment media beyond Fox News, but they aren’t checked out. Yes, they’re listening to podcasts like Rogan’s, but they’re also watching videos on Facebook and Instagram, sharing memes and articles in group chats, and closely following what Trump is saying at rallies.
They don’t take what he says literally, but they’re excited about his often contradictory and sometimes outright ridiculous policy ideas, as much as he even has them. And they don’t particularly care how much those line up with establishment Republican ideals, either. You can see this reflected in last month’s results, as red states like Missouri voted for Trump while also voting to increase minimum wage.
Which leads us to a point that most coverage of Trump voters overlooks, something they will happily tell you. At this point, almost a decade into Trump’s political career, his voters don’t see themselves as Republicans. They vote for Trump, and Trump just so happens to be on the Republican ticket.
But that still leaves the question of why those political contradictions don’t bother them, even if they’re all coming from Trump. How could a state like Montana vote for him and also vote to essentially enshrine reproductive freedom in the state’s Constitution? And I’ve seen no better articulation of this tension, and glimpse into the Trump supporter’s mindset, than a quote from a 2019 New York Times story interviewing Trump supporters who started to realize that his policies were negatively impacting their community.
“I thought he was going to do good things. He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting,” one voter told The Times.
This idea — that a vote for Trump was a vote against the opportunities of some Other — was articulated even more directly in a 2018 essay from The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer entitled “The Cruelty Is the Point.” Trump could announce America was turning into Sweden tomorrow and as long as he told his supporters that the people they don’t like wouldn’t benefit from it, whether it’s trans people, Black people, women or immigrants, they’d happily support it.
So, of course, the question is: What exactly can Democrats do here?
Much has been written already about how this tendency toward xenophobia is fascist, with echoes of Nazi Germany — and there are authoritarian elements to both Trump’s base and his own politics. But I’d argue there is a more recent political movement that Trumpism more closely resembles, at least in its conflicting structure. Former Argentine President Juan Perón similarly came to power in 1973 atop a jumble of ever-shifting populist policies. Though, as Ernesto Semán, an assistant professor at the University of Richmond wrote in The Washington Post in 2018, Peronism “led a process of expanding economic equality, collective organization and political enfranchisement,” which even Trump supporters would tell you is not what they want. But there is a similar fluidity with which Trump combines competing political ideas to ignite his base.
Which is all to say that Trump supporters do not have to be written off as out-of-control fascists. They just need a candidate they like better than Trump.
So, of course, the question is: What exactly can Democrats do here? Unfortunately, it seems like the current consensus within the Democratic Party is to lean further to the center. Which is a conclusion you can only come to if you ignore everything Trump supporters have been saying since 2016. Not only will they happily follow Trump down any section of the political compass he chooses, but they will also lash out at anything and everything Democrats do. If Harris had spent the summer literally repeating everything Trump said, she still would have lost because she’s a Democrat. No viral podcaster is going to fix that reputation problem.
As Peter Shamshiri, the co-host of the podcast “If Books Could Kill,” opined in an episode this month, marijuana legalization is currently a bipartisan issue across the country, but if Democrats had run on it this year, it no longer would be. And it doesn’t seem like Democrats have really digested, yet, exactly how badly their brand has been tarnished. There is simply nothing they could have offered that Trump voters would have accepted for the simple fact it was coming from Democrats.
Which is an existential problem, to be sure, but not an insurmountable one. Instead of trying to pander to a group of voters who, at least right now, will never vote for them, the Democrats need to spend their four-year walkabout igniting a base of their own. They need to come to terms with the fact that the slick, corporate, pop-star-laden Obama era is well and truly dead. Conservatives hate them and young progressives don’t trust them. Democrats can’t reverse their fortunes if they don’t acknowledge this fundamental problem. And while they’re at it, they might want to consider finding a candidate liberals and progressives like as much as conservatives like Trump.
