Mere hours after it became clear that Donald Trump was going to beat Kamala Harris for the presidency, the blame game began. And there is certainly a lot of blame to go around: On Joe Biden for not stepping back sooner; on Democrats for so thoroughly losing touch with working-class voters; on progressives for many years of overemphasizing identity politics and the language of social-justice academia over the material needs of average Americans. Voters were obviously frustrated with the economy, immigration, and a general sense of disorder. There is no singular explanation for why Trump won – except, of course, he got more than 270 electoral votes, and in this case, most of the total votes as well.
But too many of the election postmortems have treated the results of this race as a kind of up-and-down vote on Democrats, as if Trump’s victory is entirely about Democratic shortcomings. The truth is that voters who turned out on Nov. 5 were also voting for something, and for someone. That person was Donald Trump – a man who has not exactly been shy about his priorities, his bigotries, and his character, a convicted felon who has also been found liable of sexual assault.
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Comparing 2020 to 2024 is telling. Four years ago, when Biden beat Trump, the general media narrative was that Democrats had done the right thing by choosing the moderate white guy. Democratic Party leaders seemed to agree, and the party’s left flank became increasingly marginalized. Republicans, by contrast, had run a candidate who lost the popular vote twice in a row and had just been bested by a gaffe-prone man who had never inspired much in the way of voter excitement, and their reaction was to triple down on Trump. There were no big public postmortems and mea culpas. If anything, Trump only gained power, taking over the RNC (his daughter-in-law became its co-chair) and leaning harder into MAGA politics. Trump’s GOP didn’t remake itself to be more appealing to the median voter. They may have professionalized their organization a bit more, but their core message stayed the same. They bulldozed forward and assumed voters would come to them.
Voters did. Exit polls are notoriously unreliable, but they do seem to show that Trump retained his support from white working-class voters, and especially from white men and white women without college degrees. He also made significant gains with voters of color (and Latino men in particular), the continuation of a shift that was clear in 2020 to anyone who was watching. This is despite the cloud of bigotry that surrounds Trump and his team and the well-publicized chaos and cruelty of his first administration. It may be true that these voters are rejecting Democrats, and preliminary data suggest that turnout in some Democratic strongholds was down. But millions of voters didn’t stay home. Despite Jan. 6, four criminal indictments, and Trump not making many major changes in his policy positions or campaign strategy after his 2020 loss, they got out and they voted for him.
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This is not to argue that Democrats should simply press forward and ignore what is clearly deep voter satisfaction. It is to say that Trump has been a looming presence in American political life for a decade now, and voters have some idea of who they’re putting in charge. Consider that Americans turning 30 next year have never been able to vote in an American presidential election in which Donald Trump was not a candidate. He’s not a blustery newcomer; he’s an institution, and at this point, he is the Republican Party. He trumpets his loosely drawn policy schemes – mass deportation, tariffs on Chinese goods – at every rally and on every media appearance. Given that America’s lowest-information voters tend to be Trump’s core constituency, it wouldn’t be surprising if many of them didn’t know, say, the minutiae of Project 2025 or the plan to dismantle the administrative state utilizing a unitary theory of the executive. They also may not have any idea about what his tariff plan might do to consumer prices, or that the Affordable Care Act and Medicaid are now on the chopping block, or what his mass deportation scheme would mean for things like construction costs and economic productivity – not to mention the price of food. But it’s hard to imagine that voters are ignorant about his headliner policies, including tariffs and immigration. And at some point, if voters choose not to learn much about the people they’re electing to power outside of a general vibe, that’s not the fault of Democrats or liberals. It’s certainly Democrats’ and liberals’ problem – but I’m not sure they’re the primary ones causing it.
It is true, of course, that given the fractured media environment, not everyone is getting the same information or analysis of it. And when you win half the votes in the country, it means that all kinds of people elected you. There is no singular story of the Trump voter. But even if every voter doesn’t know every policy detail, it’s hard to imagine that a critical mass of people who cast their ballots for Trump don’t, like everyone else, see Trump’s vanity and venality and strongman aims.
The dark truth is that a lot of voters seem to want a strongman in charge, so long as that strongman seems to be working in their interests – and against those they deem enemies, or at least disposable.
That Democrats did better downballot is another data point in support of the argument that voters were voting for Trump, and not just against Democrats. It is undeniably true that the Democratic brand is tarnished, and that Democrats need to figure out how to resume appealing to a broader swath of the American public. But Democratic unpopularity doesn’t fully explain the election results. Voters liking Trump and wanting him in office is very clearly a big part of the story.
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When Americans think of authoritarian leaders, we may turn to history: To Hitler in Germany, Franco in Spain, Mussolini in Italy, Stalin in the former USSR. The narrative about these leaders is that they seized power and terrorized their nations (and, certainly in Hitler and Stalin’s case, well beyond their borders); these authoritarians, the story goes, were essentially forced on their own people, who were victims of their regimes. In truth, though, authoritarians – including history’s most notorious – often enjoy significant support, at least for a period. Globally, authoritarianism remains pretty popular, and it’s more popular in the U.S. than in many comparatively wealthy nations. The core authoritarian voter is both right-leaning and has lower levels of education – two characteristics of the core Trump voter. And a broader authoritarian worldview has been predictive of support for Trump.
The idea that voters were simply rejecting Democrats and getting hoodwinked by Trump doesn’t track with the facts.
It also doesn’t track with history. The American South was essentially an authoritarian state until quite recently, as Black voters were legally and then practically barred from political participation. The states of the Confederacy have been the most stubbornly authoritarian and anti-democratic in America. As Democrats flipped from supporting Southern authoritarianism to trying to dismantle it, white Southern voters flipped from Democrat to Republican. This was not an accident; it was a policy preference. The same holds true here – and authoritarian preferences, or least tolerances, seem to have extended far above the Mason-Dixon.
There is a kind of condescension that many liberal political analysts and talking heads heap onto conservative voters, and it’s not the coastal elitism we hear so much about. It is this exactly dynamic: An assumption that these voters have chosen badly and simply don’t know what they’re choosing; that Democrats have lost them, not that Republicans – and Trump specifically – won them over.
Trump voters have agency. They have lived through three Trump election cycles, and have had more exposure to the man than to just about any other politician in America. To a one, they got up off their couches to vote for the guy, showing up at their local polling station or at least walking to their mailbox.
But that agency doesn’t mean that we have to accept a lurch toward authoritarianism just because some voters within a democratic system are OK with it. It also doesn’t mean these voters’ views are static. Right now, they’re buying what Trump is selling, and it’s worth Democrats’ time to figure out not only what appeals about that, but how they might better sell their own core values. The job isn’t for Democrats to chase Trump voters by contorting themselves beyond recognition to appeal to conservatives. It is to convince more of the public that liberal values and ideals – democracy, fairness, opportunity, equality, a strong social safety net, and so on – should win out over a conservative politics of fear, control, isolation, and lack of support. And the job of media outlets and political analysts is to be curious about Trump voters and honest – with themselves and the public – about what these voters actually cast their ballots for.
