By now you will have
probably read thousands of words about Trump’s sweeping election
victory, so what can I hope to add? The biggest puzzle for me, and I
suspect many others both inside and outside the US, has always been
to understand Trump’s appeal to voters. After all, unlike 2016,
this
time they must have known what they were voting for.
In Europe we
sometimes pretend that someone who is so obviously unsuited to run
anything, let alone the country with the most powerful military in
the world, could never get elected in our country. Past crimes, past
behaviour in office, lack of respect for democracy or the truth,
obvious narcissism: so many things that would disqualify him as even
a contender in any election in Western Europe.
Except in the UK
voters chose Boris Johnson as Prime Minister. Sure there were
particular reasons at the time, but there always are, and you will
have read plenty of examples with the US election (Biden’s late
withdrawal etc etc). There are some factors that are important in the
US that don’t apply so much elsewhere, like the religious vote or
race, but these are not sufficient to argue that the US is peculiar
in its ability to choose someone like Trump, just perhaps more likely
to do so. 39% of UK voters in a very
recent poll were not unhappy to see Trump elected, and
that number rose to a majority among Conservative and Reform voters
combined.
This post will start
with the main reasons why so many voters switched from voting for
Democratic to Republican candidates last week. But that leaves the
question posed by the title of this post unanswered. The second part
talks about the absence of Trump aversion for so many voters. Both
discussions place lack of information at their centre, and a final
section looks at why most voters don’t get good information about
politics.
Understanding the
swing
The Democrats did
very badly across the board last week, so it is reasonable to treat
this as a vote against the incumbent regime. Most voters use
elections to cast judgement on the incumbent rather than their
opponents. This in part reflects lack of knowledge about opposition
parties, but it also reflects a desire that many have to use their
vote to punish actions by governments they dislike. This can lead to
perverse results, particularly in voting systems where preferences
among opposition parties are ignored.
To understand the
swing to the Republicans and Trump there is no point in looking at
factors that are pretty constant across elections, like race or
socially conservative attitudes. There is no point talking to people
attending Trump speeches, because they will always vote for Trump.
Those who voted for Trump gave
the economy as their number one concern. The reason
for this is not mysterious, as the chart below shows.
Voters looking over
the entire four years of Biden’s presidency will have seen little
or no real income growth, compared to strong income growth in the
previous four years under Trump.
The reason is very
simple: all the major economies suffered from rising energy and food
prices, which doesn’t directly impact real GDP growth but does hit
real incomes. This also helps explain why the voters who
really turned from Biden to Trump were those on middle
and lower incomes, who would have felt most strongly the impact of
higher food and energy prices. This is a key reason why this has been
a
terrible time for incumbent parties in elections in so
many countries. Compared to other incumbents Harris
did relatively well.
To respond
to this by saying that Biden and the Democrats ‘failed
the working class’ is dangerously misleading. Economies can get hit
by negative external shocks, and these are likely to happen
increasingly often because of climate change, foolish dictators and
so on. No government has the power to stop all these events impacting
negatively on their citizens.
But while real
income growth under Biden may not have matched its growth under
Trump, there are plenty of other things to say about the economy that
are positive. As an economist I also know that the US has dealt with post-pandemic problems far better
than other countries. US GDP growth has far exceeded growth in the
major European economies or Japan. This has in part been due to
better economic policies, as I argued here. As an economist I also
know that some of Trump’s policies will be very bad for the US
economy (and the rest of the world). Yet most voters are not
economists. What voters know about is their income.
Yet you do not need
to be an economist to know that the problems experienced by the US
economy have nothing to do with Democrat politicians, that the US
pandemic recovery is the envy of the world and that Trump’s policy
proposals will be disastrous. Those who have the time and who want to
find out can do so. They could look at what winners of the Nobel
prize for economics say, for example. Why didn’t
this happen?
Unfortunately in the
UK we know about this. Exactly the same happened during the Brexit
referendum. For every argument an economist can make for why Biden
has actually done pretty well with the situation he found himself in,
and Trump’s policies would be a disaster, Republicans can find
counter arguments that to many will sound equally plausible. As the
Brexit referendum showed, good economics can easily be drowned out by
those with a partisan agenda and the power and ability to get their
message across. While the experience of falling real wages allowed
Trump’s negative message on Biden’s handling of the economy to
gain traction, it was amplified by plenty of misinformation as well.
Trump voters believed Trump’s campaign rhetoric, and as a result
were
badly informed compared to Harris voters. They also
tended to get their information from
social media rather than traditional media sources.
Politicians being
blamed for events beyond their control is a familiar story. As Prime
Minister Gordon Brown handled the Global Financial Crisis pretty
well, but that doesn’t mean that most voters gave him much credit
for that. Instead many blamed him for the recession that followed.
Biden deserves a lot of credit for the policy measures he managed to
enact during and after the recovery from the pandemic, but he will
only get that credit from those who know about it.
Trump aversion and attraction
But surely stagnant
real incomes cannot excuse voting for someone like Trump? To start
answering the question posed by the title of this post, the first
thing to do is to forget almost everything you know. I would never
have voted for Trump because I know too much about him, but most US
voters do not know nearly so much, just as many UK voters knew very
little of the obvious failings that would and did make Johnson a
terrible PM.
One reason for that
is that most voters are not that interested in politics, or just
don’t have the time or resources to find things out. But that alone
is insufficient. I’m not very interested in the mechanics of how a
car works, but when I need to buy a car I know where to look to find
out if particular cars are reliable, cheap to run and so on. I don’t
need to know a lot about cars to find these things out.
Now imagine that
instead of a few well known trusted sources for information on cars
there were in fact dozens, some genuinely providing knowledge and
some there to push particular brands. Without prior knowledge, to
find out which guides could be trusted and which could not I would
need to do a lot more work. I might even have to find out a bit about
how cars worked. That is more like the situation with both politics
and economics during an election.
With lack of good
information come various attitudes that dilute distaste for Trump.
All politicians are regarded as ‘in it for themselves’ and part
of a system that works against ‘ordinary people’. To some who are
not political but hate Washington politicians and think the system
works against them an outsider like Trump can be seen as refreshing.
They actively want a bull
to shake up the Washington China shop, and Trump
certainly has the qualifications to be such a bull. The lack of
respect for a pluralist democracy that many find so off-putting and
dangerous about Trump becomes a virtue if you see those institutions
as acting against rather than for you.
An example is the
law. While those who respect legal institutions (at least most of the
time) will find Trump’s felonies pretty damning, those with
less respect are more easily convinced that these institutions can be
manipulated to punish an outsider for political gain. All this is
encouraged by a partisan media. Is Trump accused of crimes because he
is guilty or because Democrat politicians want to discredit him?
Aren’t all politicians selfish and don’t they all lie a lot of
the time?
What about the
cruelty? A core part of any populist/dictatorial/fascist platform is
to focus on an other/outsider group and dehumanise them. However much we may
dislike it, this form
of cruelty is part of human nature. Yet despite voting
for Trump, many
States (including Republican ones) passed abortion
rights initiatives. Demonisation of and cruelty to others also relies
on lack of information, or the spread of disinformation. The more
people see ‘the other’ as human beings much like themselves
(which they are), the more difficult it is to pretend otherwise.
On top and perhaps
beyond all is something that Trump has for many Americans, like so
many populists in many different countries, which is charisma.
Charisma can be like Marmite: some of the very things I find so
unattractive about Trump others find appealing. But charisma
fits into the information problem as well. In a complex environment
without trusted sources of information and with a high volume of
information noise, what you believe can easily depend on who you
believe. When it comes to key election facts and issues, far too many
voters were
inclined to believe Trump because they liked Trump, or erroneously thought Trump liked them.
Democracy and
information
Democracy has a
great weakness, which is that nothing stops voters electing a leader
or party that is prepared to dismantle democracy. Once democracy
ends, it is very difficult and costly to get it back. If the
re-election of Trump shows us one thing (which history has already
shown), it is that sometimes voters will let this happen. For some
voters that is because they have lost faith in democracy, and for
others it is because they do not believe what they are doing will
have that effect.
That weakness is
inherent in democracy, and all we can do is reduce the risk of it
happening. To understand what the greatest risks are we only need to
look at the priorities of the enemies of pluralistic democracy.
Invariably this involves controlling sources of information for
voters, be it newspapers or television channels or social
media platforms. With ownership of the media comes the
power to manipulate information. The enemies of democracies along
with most
democratic politicians have always understood the
importance of this power.
Yet there is also a
strong segment of opinion, which unsurprisingly is given plenty of
space in the media, that says we shouldn’t worry about this because
it doesn’t matter that much. This is nonsense. Academic
work tells us the media does matter, as do the actions
of those that want power to preserve privilege. Another argument is that there is
nothing we can do about it without giving the state too much power,
and we just have to live with the way things are. To say that the
cure might possibly be worse than the disease because it could give
the state too much power just means that you prefer the certainty of that power being in the hands of individual oligarchs. The election of
people like Trump and Johnson are the result of that attitude.
Others who like to
call themselves centrists bemoan what they call the increasingly
partisan nature of politics and the media, but that misunderstands
what is going on. The issue is not that the media has become more
polarised, but instead that a large part of the media (invariably on
the right of the political spectrum) is promoting propaganda and
disinformation. As I argue
here, propaganda in favour of a particular political
side is very different from manufacturing consent for the status quo.
Consider climate
change. Trump calls it a scam, but we know it is both real and an
existential threat. Why can Trump say that and still get elected? In
one
poll 22% of those surveyed in the US didn’t believe
in man-made climate change. In the UK that number was only 11%,
despite the fact that right wing newspapers have increasingly been
giving space to climate change deniers. The much lower number in the
UK could reflect many things, but I suspect a big factor is that the
main broadcasters, including and especially the BBC, do not regard
this issue as one where they have to stay neutral (to be unbiased), and
instead provide in a variety of ways good information on the issue.
(There are lapses, and they could do more, of course.) In the US
there is no similar media outlet that most people see or read that
does the same.
More generally, the
dominance of non-partisan organisations providing TV news and current
affairs in the UK may help explain why conspiracy theories have less
traction in the UK compared to the US. It is why individuals from the
political right are so keen to try and create the equivalent of Fox
News in the UK. Their success in beginning this process (in part
because of the timidity of OFCOM), coupled with factors ranging from
the success of Farage in this year’s elections to the dramatic
rise in the number of cases of whooping cough, suggest
that the UK is following a path set by the US. In the US Trump has
said he will consider a ban on vaccines, and may
put an anti-vaccine campaigner in charge of Health.
To understand is not
to condone. US voters were both wrong and foolish to elect Trump, and
anyone voting Republican today puts lives and the planet at risk. In
the US and UK, and in many other countries, the political right is
embracing policies that are not only authoritarian and cruel, but are
also foolish and dangerous. To promote those policies they need to
either remove sources of knowledge, or make enough voters distrust
those sources. To this end new media outlets have been created, or
what were once media outlets that were just partisan have been turned
into propaganda outlets and sometimes promoters of conspiracy
theories or dangerous misinformation.
Yet despite the
evidence staring them in the face, those on the other political side
are doing almost nothing to stop this happening. It is no good
thinking that good government will be enough to end populism. I wrote
this well before Trump was elected, but his victory
rather proves my point. In terms of domestic policy Biden and the
Democrats governed well in difficult circumstances, but it didn’t
win his party votes in large part because voters were badly informed or misinformed. If you hand your opponent a megaphone while you
have only your voice, don’t expect your voice to be heard. When
those with the megaphone have the clear intention of making people
doubt knowledge and expertise, and when that involves among other
things letting the planet burn, doing nothing about that megaphone is
just crazy.
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