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- What America Just Voted Against
The Vibe Shift
In 2020, Joe Biden won a resounding victory because the voters were sick and tired of the Trump era and all that came along with it - constant chaos and outrage and investigations. The daily cycle of “breaking news” about every insane thing he and his allies were saying and doing just wore people out. The pandemic exacerbated the mental exhaustion of it all and so when the voters went to the polls, they voted for “a return to normalcy.” Only, that’s not what they got. They got the cumulative effect of three years of inflation against a backdrop of wars breaking out all over the world with a President who couldn’t stop falling down or having “senior moments” in public.
And so we got what we got this past week - a broad coalition of working class people of every race, religion and gender surprising the professionals with a vote for the return of Donald Trump.
How much of this was Biden’s fault or Harris’s fault or the missteps of their campaigns or the happenstance of timing? I’ll leave that for the people who cover politics for a living. You have your opinions and I have mine and nobody is going to convince anyone of anything, so that’s not the purpose of today’s post.
I’ve been reading and listening over the past week and, from what I can surmise, there wasn’t a singular issue that produced Trump’s landslide in both the popular vote and the electoral college. The parable about the three blind men feeling different parts of the elephant to try to describe the whole animal is an apt one here. To try to pinpoint the one thing that animated tens of millions of people to vote for Trump is to miss the larger story.
We had a vibe shift in this country a couple of years ago which had first become apparent to elites and the media after Kid Rock shot up a case of Bud Light and the resulting boycott crushed the beer brand for a generation. Target, Disney, Alphabet, Meta and other large corporations found themselves scrambling away from the Culture War battlefields as fast as they could. Bob Iger didn’t donate or endorse anyone this cycle. Jeff Bezos rolled over a week before the election and personally intervened before his newspaper, The Washington Post, could publish their preference for Harris. Right-leaning billionaires went all in for Trump while many centrist and left-leaning billionaires sat it out or switched sides. They read the tea leaves and decided they didn’t want the smoke. Trump doesn’t exactly hide his vindictive side, it’s a feature not a bug.
What did Bezos and Iger see? I think they recognized that Trump was going to win on the biggest issues of the day.
My big picture take on the issues that mattered this time around: Inflation, immigration and freedom of speech were the most important things. Kamala Harris took gun control off the menu of things the right could pummel her with by declaring herself a legal and responsible gun owner. The environment only came up a single time during the debate and Harris also removed that as an issue by coming out as pro-fracking in a nod toward the closeness of the Pennsylvania race. The undecided voter was not going to come out for her based on either of those issues and so she neutralized them both. A good decision politically, but not enough to matter in the end. She correctly emphasized the Democratic stance on women’s reproductive rights and the horror that many people felt at the overturning of Roe v. Wade, but it also proved not to be enough.
Trump and the Republicans set the terms of this year’s election and they were inflation, immigration and freedom of speech. These were the most animating issues of the day and the GOP understood that better than the Democrats did.
Gen Z
The popularity of Donald Trump dancing videos across TikTok swept up an ocean of young people who were tired of being scolded by the moralizing of their Millennial big brothers and sisters. Gen Z, it turns out, wants to have fun, trade crypto, say whatever they want on social media and break away from the people who had them sitting in high school wearing masks and apologizing for things that happened hundreds of years ago.
There are a million versions of what you see below, all over the most popular app among young people in America. They get a kick out of him. He’s a human cartoon character. A living meme. They’re tired of having to pretend otherwise.
@luke.did.that.01 The Trump Dance 🕺#donaldtrump #election #trump2024 #usa #republican #maga #ymca #donaldtrump #viral #fyb #song #maracana #trumpdance
Silly? Maybe. But Trump’s strategy of spending hours podcasting with Joe Rogan, Theo Von, the Nelk Boys, Adin Ross and Tim Dillon paid off in an era where the next generation of voters can’t even find CNN or 60 Minutes in the online environments they live inside of. To dismiss this as “the Barstool effect” or “the Bro Vote” or remark upon the ignorance or nihilism of young men is to ignore the larger story here: The kids are tired of the lecturing and cannot be reached by the platforms of the 20th century.
These influential personalities are not “alt right.” Joe Rogan once endorsed Bernie Sanders. Tim Dillon is a gay stand-up comic. Adin Ross is a hip hop aficionado who hangs out with rappers. This isn’t a “right wing” movement. What these people and platforms have in common is that they are anti-woke and anti-political correctness and they speak to Gen Z the way the mainstream media does not. They gleefully offend and pick fights with Hollywood and the establishment’s sacred cows. They make jokes about once taboo subjects and they say the things out loud that many people are quietly thinking. The secret to their influence is their willingness to take risk and to enlarge the Overton Window. They “go there” and serve as a counterbalance to Cancel Culture. The audience can’t get enough of it.
NBC News demonstrates the extent to which Trump’s gambit worked:
Trump picked up a larger proportion of voters under 30 than any Republican presidential candidate since 2008, according to NBC News exit polling, improving with both young men and young women. In 2020, President Joe Biden beat Trump by 11 percentage points among young men; this year, Trump beat Kamala Harris by 2 points. Among young women, Biden’s 35-point lead over Trump in 2020 shrunk to a 24-point lead for Harris. Among young white men without college degrees, Trump beat Harris, 56% to 40%.
USA Today explains that young people, while still overwhelmingly voting Democrat as in previous generations, simply didn’t find the Biden-Harris messaging on the economy to be convincing:
A big part of that shift has to do with the economy, the No. 1 issue for Gen Z as a whole and one they trust Trump with more than Vice President Kamala Harris: 31% of Gen Z said the economy was their priority before the election, an issue that voters have long preferred Trump on, despite some recent tightening of the polls on the issue.
Gen Z believes, correctly or not, that the current administration is responsible for high rent and food prices and the housing affordability crisis. They see her as out of touch, hanging out with celebrities and part of the problem. They don’t know or care about the fact that inflation came as a consequence of the pandemic response under Trump. They don’t know or care about the latest CPI reading. They don’t know or care about how tariffs may exacerbate the higher prices they have to pay to survive. All they know is that everything costs twice as much as it did five years ago and Kamala Harris was in the White House the whole time. This is their perception and perception is reality.
Immigration
Immigration was probably the biggest problem for the Harris campaign and this was something everybody understood long before Tuesday night made it official.
The New York Times talks about how even Trump’s most gruesome rhetoric on the topic seemed to resonate with the populace in 2024:
In July, 55 percent of Americans told Gallup that they supported a decrease in immigration. That share was 28 percent in 2020.
Mr. Trump rode to victory painting migrants as a menace, an “invasion” of foreigners from developing countries who were “poisoning the blood of our country.” Resolving the problem would demand a “bloody story,” he said — an operation to deport immigrants en masse. He would invoke the Alien Enemies Act , an obscure, centuries-old law to achieve it.
Recent polling found that a majority of voters favored elements of Mr. Trump’s approach.
Fifty-seven percent of voters in a New York Times/Siena College poll conducted in October said they supported deporting immigrants living in the country illegally, including about 30 percent of Democrats and 58 percent of independents.
We’ll see if 30 percent of Democrats and 58 percent of independents remain on board with the planned deportations once they actually get underway, presumably early next year. It’s not going to be a pleasant sight on television if the media has anything to say on the subject, which they will.
Moms and their sons
46% of women voted for Donald Trump. Another huge surprise that should not have been such a huge surprise after all.
It turns out that when a certain segment of the left repeatedly refers to young men as “toxic males” or “the oppressor” or speaks dismissively of them as though they are “a relic of the patriarchy” and no longer worthy of respect, the mothers of those young men are going to take offense to that and listen to the other side.
The Democrats assumed that mothers voting in defense of their daughters’ health and reproductive rights would come out in force for the female candidate in this race, especially given Trump’s history. It turned out to have been more complicated than that. Women voters, like African American voters and Latino voters and Jewish voters and the voters of countless other groups, do not vote monolithically or along the same lines of any one issue.
And moms do not like it when their sons are spoken about as though they are the primary problem of society. Young women do not view masculinity as a negative trait in the men in their lives or the boys they will someday raise. The Culture War is a war precisely because there are two sides to this (and every) issue. It can be easy to forget that when we’re all sitting in our own algorithmically-created information silos.
And speaking of young men, Allison Schrager wrote about their swing to the right over the weekend:
I’ll leave the post-mortems to the political experts, but I find it fascinating that so many young people—especially men—swung Republican. Young people are typically reliably left-leaning before they start paying taxes. I suppose the signs were there, with polls worldwide showing young men becoming more conservative. It may be cultural; the left didn’t seem to like men very much lately, and perhaps they didn’t like them back. It seems obvious, but genuinely liking the voters you need is important.
In my Bloomberg piece, I argued that economic reasons also played a role. Young men face very real economic challenges—lower labor force participation, stagnant wages, and an economy where job growth is concentrated in sectors they traditionally don’t enter, like caregiving or education. However, young men saw some economic improvement during Trump’s previous administration, while the Biden-era recovery seemed to benefit women more. This may not have been deliberate policy choices, just the nature of the post-pandemic economy. But men saw some improvement under Trump, and just treaded water with Biden.
Trump has an opportunity to build a truly inclusive economy—one where everyone, including men, can thrive. He could reform the labor market to make it more dynamic and flexible or continue imposing tariffs to revive manufacturing. If he chooses the former, he could convert a generation to the Republican Party.
Reaching young men again is going to be the biggest challenge the Democrats will have to find an answer to in the next election.
Hispanics
One of the more shocking revelations from this election was the degree to which Hispanic populations along the southern border went for Trump this time around, despite the blanket assumption on the left that recent Latin American immigrants would never go in for someone who is openly and unapologetically anti-immigration. Trump’s messaging about inflation and out of control borders struck a chord with this working class audience and it’s worth pointing out that these are the people who suffer most when gangs and criminals and undocumented workers flood into the country. They are the most at risk of losing their jobs to the next wave of immigrants. They don’t want the schools their children attend to become overburdened and potentially dangerous.
The New York Times described this shift - which not only took place in Texas but in Miami, New York and New Jersey - as an “earthquake along the border”:
Nowhere in the United States have historically Democratic counties shifted so far and so fast in the direction of former President Donald J. Trump as they have in the Texas communities along the Rio Grande, where Hispanic residents make up an overwhelming majority.
In recent elections, the region’s mix of sprawling urban centers and rural ranch lands that had been reliable Democratic strongholds for generations were beginning to turn red.
Then on Tuesday, Mr. Trump brought South Texas and the border region firmly into his column, taking 12 of the 14 counties along the border with Mexico, and making significant inroads even in El Paso, the border’s biggest city. In 2016, Mr. Trump carried only five of the counties.
Working class Latino voters put their own economic wellbeing above all the social politics surrounding their racial identities. They were not alone in doing so this time around.
One of the more dismissive responses to this flip of the Hispanic vote I heard was people saying “Oh, it’s because they’re misogynists.” Lots of Hispanic women voted for Donald Trump too. Are they misogynists? I think the price of groceries and the rising risks of crime in the community is a much more obvious explanation. Republicans did a better job of appealing to these people’s pragmatism. When you live paycheck to paycheck, policing people’s language falls way down on your list of priorities.
The List
San Francisco voted to kick out its mayor, London Breed, and several other officials they believe to be responsible for the decline of their once-great city. Across the Bay, the residents of Oakland threw out their Democratic mayor too. Biden won 85% of the San Francisco vote but Harris only retained 80%. The most notable burst of enthusiasm for Trump came from the working class areas of Visitacion Valley and Portola, two neighborhoods in which half the households speak Asian or Pacific Islander languages in the home. The perception of out of control street crime, homelessness, open-air drug use and the prevalence of dangerous, emotionally disturbed people transcended race and language. The people living there have had enough.
Americans have increasingly drawn the connection between Democratic policies and many of the things about their lives they hate. It’s a list. Bill Maher did a segment of his show this Friday night talking about how the Democrats’ agenda had begun to sound increasingly “anti-common sense” to working class people - working class people of all types. They may not like everything Trump says or does, but they want common sense policies in areas like crime and immigration and his arguments resonated. This is what they told the exit polls. This is what the results say. They may not end up liking the tariffs and the deportation, but the backlash against liberalism is real and they were willing to risk it.
Below is a fairly complete list of the things Americans just voted against, in overwhelming numbers, this past week. You will find yourself nodding your head to some of these items while taking offense to others. But what you can’t do is dismiss any of them as having been factors in the decision-making of your friends and neighbors. Because clearly they were, to greater or lesser extent depending on who you talk to:
High prices
Wokeness
Cancel Culture
“Out of control” immigration
“Boys playing girls’ sports”
Identity Politics
Cultural Marxism
Pro-Hamas Campus Protests
Locked-up toothpaste at Walgreens
Shoplifting as a misdemeanor
Race-based admissions policies
Defund the Police
Migrant crime
Critical Race Theory
Censorship
Fentanyl “pouring across the border”
Pronouns
DEI in the workplace
“Reining in” crypto
Teachers discussing gender with children
Drilling / fracking restrictions
Language policing
“Words are violence”
“Billions and billions of dollars” for Ukraine
Socialism
These are the things I’ve heard the most from reading and from talking to people. Not just from Trumpers or ordinary Republicans or “angry white men” or people on Wall Street. From just about everyone. It’s what was in the air all year. It’s what got the most attention online and at the kitchen table each night, rightly or wrongly. It’s what drove people to choose him, in record numbers.
These are the ideas that Americans of every race, color, religion, income level and region of the country have just informed us they have had enough of.
The Democrats are now debating which of these things were the culprit for their historic defeat every night on CNN. My best guess is it’s a combination of all of them. Some of these items are minor issues that were weaponized and amplified to devastating effect in political ads and online discussions. Some are more widespread and legitimately consequential for society at large. I will leave it up to you to decide which is which.
You may disagree with the the people who have just voted against it all. You may feel passionately opposed to their opposition to these things or the cruel ways in which they are discussed. You’ll have a chance to vote again in two years and to make your case during the midterms. You’ll have another chance two years after that. And if your friends and neighbors all over the country can become convinced that they voted in error this time, perhaps the pendulum will swing back.
This is America. We don’t stay in any one place for very long. But this is the place we are in today.
Thanks for reading, talk soon. - Josh