How could they vote for him?

 

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.