The Daily Populous Sunday November 10th, 2024 night edition
Authored by theguardian.com and submitted by kinkoscuro

It has been an extraordinary week for US politics – and a very depressing couple of days for those such as me who spent hours on the phone to people, trying to persuade them to vote for Kamala Harris and not Donald Trump. This is what voters told me time and again, and why so many did vote for Trump.

The first type of voter I encountered as a volunteer on the Harris phone bank was the one focused purely on the economy. It is hard for us to grasp on this side of the Atlantic that soaring growth rates and low unemployment in the US would not be seen positively in the eyes of an American voter. But it was clear in my conversations that the Trump campaign was extremely effective at countering that story. Wages may well be rising at all levels, but everyday inflation was more discernible to voters.

Very often, I spoke to small business owners who would talk about the price of gas or bread, rendering any attempted explanation of global pressures responsible for that ineffective at best, and at worst condescending. Often, they would also tell me that everyone they knew was doing badly, even if they were just fine themselves. Was poor messaging to blame? That didn’t seem obvious. Democrats tried to tell the story of average wages being higher and unemployment being at an historic low, but people just seemed to believe Trump more often than they believed Harris and Tim Walz. There was no easy way to counter that, especially in a campaign lasting barely 100 days.

The next group of voter was extremely focused on Harris as a candidate. She was as baggage-free as a vice-president could have been, and many voters spoke of how much they admired her. But there were too many others. Multiple times, I was told that Harris was a “communist”, “clueless” and that she had “thrown black men in jail for carrying one blunt”. One Latin American voter told me at length that she had “seen it all before in South America”.

Her perceived failures on border security did come up too, but mainly the criticisms came straight from the mouth of the Trump campaign. Some spoke of Harris’s tough stance on crime as the district attorney of San Francisco. Others, very often of Latino origin, would tell me that she was soft on law and order. Quite remarkably, the Trump campaign successfully branded Harris as both a communist – lax on law and order – and simultaneously too tough on crime. To many, she was both an ineffective vice-president and one who had her hands all over the Biden administration. Voters held these facts in their heads at once – and would not be persuaded otherwise.

I started calling voters five weeks ago and especially then, many voters said they didn’t know who Harris was or what she stood for. It is said that an open primary process would have given Harris the chance to separate herself from Biden, but not a single person I spoke to suggested that they would have preferred a different candidate.

But gender did play a role. Time and again, voters, very often women themselves, told me that they just didn’t think that “America is ready for a female president”. People said they couldn’t “see her in the chair” and asked if I “really thought a woman could run the country”. One person memorably told me that she couldn’t vote for Harris because “you don’t see women building skyscrapers”. Sometimes, these people would be persuaded, but more often than not it was a red line. Many conversations would start with positive discussions on policy and then end on Harris and her gender. That is an extraordinary and uncomfortable truth.

You should know what I didn’t hear during the hours speaking to US voters. I can only think of one occasion when someone mentioned stricter taxes on billionaires or any similar policies. The atrocities being committed by Israel in Gaza only came up six times in more than 1,000 calls. The idea that Harris was not leftwing enough seems false: the majority of the country just voted for the complete opposite.

After all those conversations, I think the main reason that Harris and Walz lost this campaign is simple: Trump. Ultimately, he was simply too much of a pull again. Despite the gaffes, despite his views on women, despite his distaste for democracy and despite an insurrection, voters just didn’t care.

For reasons that I’m sure will be studied for decades, when he speaks, people listen. When he speaks, people believe him. After all those calls, I can be shocked at this result, but hardly surprised.

PickleTickleKumquat on November 9th, 2024 at 15:45 UTC »

I spent the lead up to the election trying to genuinely understand what the conservatives in my orbit saw in Trump and how they were arriving at their conclusion that he is best for America. Approaching this with curiosity and non-judgment, it became pretty clear to me that there were several things that were true to them and conclusions they were arriving at through what I perceived to be a convoluted kind of logic.

All politicians lie. They believe fundamentally that all politicians are serial liars, including Trump (e.g., “you can’t take him literally”, “he’s never going to actually do that”). But here’s the rub: they can at least figure Trump out. It’s clear he’s a bullshitter, they know it, but he’s batting for their team. Harris, on the other hand, struck them as a true politician—one who will say whatever is necessary to win votes, regardless of the lie. Clinton was similar in their eyes, and yes, you can’t divorce the fact that they’re also women.

Trump is more authentic. He “says it like it is” even if the “like it is” is complete, nonsensical bullshit. They know it, but again, at least they can parse it. Spend any time in rural America, and you’ll see bullshitting opinions is the great American pastime. And, they get that. The mental leap they make from here though is that this all actually makes Trump the more authentic candidate. Basically, “we don’t know exactly how Kamala is lying to us but we know she is” whereas the other guy is bullshitting us but we’re used to that kind of lying (look at how they excuse anything crazy Trump says with “he didn’t mean it that way” or “you’re taking him out of context”). Then wrap all this in overt and unconscious biases and you have a recipe for how to arrive at who is trustworthy.

In this set of mental gymnastics, Trump is seen as the more trustworthy candidate, stemming from their perception of his authenticity. Yeah, they know he’s bullshitting them, but their intuition has led them to believe they understand Trump’s intent (e.g., Make America Great Again) so the semantics of whether or not he is actually being truthful about anything specific is of little concern. They trust him because he’s authentic, and they can’t (or don’t want to put in the effort to) parse where a candidate like Harris might be telling the truth versus lying. So, they dismiss it all and never look back. They’ve been spurned by politicians in the past so it’s just easier to go with the guy they see as authentic.

Couple all this with the most massive disinformation campaign I’ve ever seen on X and other social media and you have the recipe for Trump getting elected. It all feels very logical to them, and they can’t understand why we don’t see it like they do. In their world, they have no clue why anyone would vote for Kamala Harris and why the left sees her as more trustworthy than Donald Trump (ergo, the left must just be batshit crazy!) They are two completely different heuristics, and the result of one of them has almost certainly set fire to American democracy. It’s the stuff of 1984 nightmares but here we are.

HeHateMe337 on November 9th, 2024 at 14:10 UTC »

Trumpers say the 2020 election was stolen. Why didn't the Democrats steal this election?

TerribleJared on November 9th, 2024 at 13:35 UTC »

Weve lost the plot of truth. People believe what is convenient and have developed extremely short memories.

Also, i hate to be harsh but we have a largely consequence-less society now. They don't care that trumps a rac/pist because theyll get exactly zero flak for not caring. As long as they win.

Well, people like myself have started drawing boundaries. A lot of parents lost their kids over the past few days. Maybe they shouldnt have been so fkn stupid.

For reference, Romney, McCain, and others were not my pick but my parents supporting them didnt really bother me. At least it was policy and not cultural hatred.