Americans Didn’t Vote for What Donald Trump Is About to Give Them
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.
As people try to critique Biden’s economic agenda, they should keep this graphic in mind. Incumbents everywhere suffered because of a global inflation surge. Democrats held up better than any of them in part because economic performance here was better than anywhere else. pic.twitter.com/OiElSv1AIm
— Bharat Ramamurti (@BharatRamamurti) November 7, 2024
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.
First, Americans have fucked around with fascism and are now going to find out what it really looks like. And while MAGA vulgarians like Fox’s Jesse Watters think mass deportations will be “hysterical,” in fact they will be traumatic. The first wave is likely to be people already in the justice system; that will enjoy wide popular support. But sooner or later, families will be torn apart. Longtime members of local communities will be arrested and disappeared. And inevitably, there will be scenes of cruelty. Remember, the violent arrest of a single Cuban boy, Elián González, arguably swung the 2000 presidential election. Multiply that by a thousand, and you can foresee a backlash not only of liberals but moderates and even conservatives as well.
Second, America will also find out that Trump’s economic policies are a bunch of snake oil. Tariffs will increase inflation, not decrease it. Opposing a livable minimum wage and breaking unions will hurt workers, not help them. And nothing will bring back the manufacturing jobs of the 1980s because big business depends on those lower wages in Mexico. “Trump will fix it” was one of the candidate’s most appealing slogans. But he won’t.
On the contrary, he will make things worse. One example: the price of eggs again. Why are eggs so expensive right now? Not because of Biden’s failed economic policies — but because of the bird flu and corporate profiteering. Yet RFK Jr. wants to shred the agencies that help prevent outbreaks of diseases like this, and Project 2025 wants to deregulate the poultry industry. This will make the next outbreak more deadly and more expensive. I’m not suggesting that average voters will follow the news this closely, but they will notice the effects.
In the most optimistic reading, swing voters may finally stop falling for the Republican shell game of populist/nationalist/religious rhetoric and plutocratic policies. This was the greatest innovation of Ronald Reagan: Appear populist (cowboy hat, family values) but act plutocrat (massive tax cuts for the rich, shredded social safety net for everyone else). George W. Bush did it too, and now Donald Trump. (Bernie Sanders talked about this in a video from 2003 that is currently going viral.) It’s populist rhetoric, but plutocratic, anti-worker hyper-capitalism.
So what happens when the emperor is revealed to have no clothes — or even worse, the garb of the same financial “elites” he claims to be against? Obviously, the MAGA faithful will stay with Trump no matter what — after all, his failure to bring about revolution in 2017 spawned the QAnon conspiracy theory, which said he was really about to do it, any day now. But the economic voters that gave him his victory could abandon Trump if he can’t deliver results. And he cannot. While Trump is busy trying to throw his enemies in jail, he has no plan — not even “concepts of a plan” — for the kitchen-table concerns that actually put him into office. Maybe, just maybe, voters will see they’ve been conned.
That is the best we can hope for.
More from Rolling Stone
Best of Rolling Stone
Sign up for RollingStone's Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
