Perhaps out of fear of insulting their audiences, the pundits, journalists, and political consultants engaged in the lengthy post-mortem about Donald Trump‘s horrific victory Tuesday are avoiding the most obvious cause: ignorance. Millions of people who desperately want more progressive policies cast their ballots for a man whose agenda is exactly the opposite of what they want.
Evidenced by the willingness to vote for progressive policies, many clearly aren’t stupid. They can read a ballot and understand the value of a minimum wage raise or protection for abortion.
On Fox News Wednesday, Trump spokesperson Karoline Leavitt insisted, “The American people delivered a resounding victory for President Trump and it gives him a mandate.” His regressive agenda was even given a sinister name — Project 2025 — and published online, where anyone could read the plans to shrink workers’ paychecks, ban abortion nationwide, and decimate access to health care. Yet the polls tell a much different story. In state after state, voters backed both Trump and ballot initiatives that advanced and protected progressive goals. Laws protecting abortion rights were backed by the majority of voters in most states, even deep-red ones like Missouri, Montana, and even Florida — where the initiative only failed because Republicans set a 60% supermajority threshold. In Missouri, 12% of voters backed both abortion rights and Trump. Red state voters also backed initiatives to raise the minimum wage, ensure paid sick and family leave, and even ban employers from forcing employees to sit through right-wing or anti-union presentations. Democrats like Sen. Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, who are strongly associated with these progressive policies, were also able to win where Vice President Kamala Harris failed.
In response, many progressives blamed Democrats. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., said Democrats “abandoned working class people,” claiming that is why Harris lost. It’s a tempting fiction because it allows progressives to feel a measure of control over the situation. We all would love to believe making different choices will lead to better outcomes. But Sanders knows it’s not true. He himself worked closely with Biden to improve labor organizing and reduce healthcare costs. He shared Biden’s disappointment that the Build Back Better plan that would have done even more was killed off by centrists who have since left the party. He knows that Democrats would have done more, if not hobbled by Republicans who control the House. And he knows that, if people were voting on policy, they would vote for Democrats. Trump, after all, will actively dismantle existing policies people like.
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The problem wasn’t Democratic policy or messaging. It’s ignorance. As Heather “Digby” Parton wrote at Salon Wednesday, people backed Trump’s “aesthetics and attitudes” but knew nothing about his policies. Before the election, Catherine Rampell and Youyou Zhou at the Washington Post polled voters about policies without revealing which candidate proposed them. Harris’ were far more popular — even Trump voters generally liked her ideas more, as long as they knew they weren’t hers.
When voters have factual information about the candidates, they prefer Democrats. Polls from earlier this year show that people who consume news from journalistic outlets — newspapers, network news programs, and news websites — overwhelmingly planned to vote for the Democratic candidate. Newspaper readers clocked in at 70% Democratic support, and network news viewers were 55% Democratic. News website readers were only less so because the survey didn’t distinguish between legitimate sites like Salon and bunk outlets like Breitbart, but still: merely being a person who reads stuff makes you more liberal. In states where heavy ad spending helped educate voters a little more on Harris’ plans, she lost less ground than in places where that money wasn’t spent.
The problem is most people simply do not absorb quality information. Instead, increasing numbers of Americans have a media diet that is mostly a bunch of lies, conspiracy theories, irrelevant diatribes and other such bunkum that right-wing propagandists use to deceive people. A study released by Pew Research in September showed people were exponentially more likely to get “news” from social media detritus than legitimate news outlets. And those results almost certainly downplay the ratio of nonsense-to-real news, since most people taking the poll won’t want to admit that they mostly scroll TikTok all day and haven’t read an actual article in eons. Looking at newspaper sales and news site traffic, we can see that the consumption of reality-based news is plummeting.
As Angelo Carusone of Media Matters told MSNBC, “We have a country that is pickled in right-wing misinformation and rage.” Political organizers and pundits don’t want to face that, because it is such a massive, hard-to-wrangle problem. So they critique Democratic “messaging” that no one hears. They try to figure out if there are rational reasons people worry about immigration or fail to notice improvements in the economy. But what has changed profoundly in our society — and also explains the shift worldwide — is the explosion of social media and the dramatic shift towards an all-propaganda media diet for so many people.
What we’re seeing is millions of Americans changing their media environment from boring, fact-based stuff to QAnon conspiracy theories, right-wing influencers who use sex and shock value to hook people, and an infinite number of unsourced memes making outrageous claims. Trump’s constant lies about Haitian immigrants eating pets or kids getting full-blown genital surgery during school hours were obviously false to people living in reality. But to Americans whose brains are fried by listening to disinfo-laden TikTok videos, Trump’s lies just sounded like what they hear on the regular from influencers.
The effect is profound. A new study by Northeastern University researcher John Wihbey shows that Democratic voters consumed more news media than Republicans, but Republicans often turned to “friends and family” for facts instead. Anyone who has right-wing relatives on social media knows what that means: a bunch of fact-free memes and unsourced conspiracy theories. Relatives I once thought of as rational humans are on Instagram constantly spreading conspiracy theories that are so out there they should be self-refuting, but they’ve become so disassociated from reality that they don’t know or care. This also helps explain the ongoing shift of non-college-educated voters to Republicans. The study found “those with less formal education lean more on personal networks” for information and “those with higher education and income favor the news media.” We should not be surprised that people who rely on worse information make uninformed choices.
Adam Serwer of the Atlantic reported from an Atlanta MAGA rally before the election and was struck by how much the voters he spoke with lived in a bubble of ignorance, with all their “information” being conspiracy theories and lies they absorbed from right-wing propaganda. “Their conspiracism serves to distract them from Trump’s actual policy agenda and his authoritarian ambitions,” he wrote. Journalist Lindsay Beyerstein agreed, arguing that ignorance is willful, chosen by people who enjoy the permission not to be troubled by facts.
What’s sad is that Trump and his allies don’t even hide how much they think his voters are ignorant and deluded. Even back in 2016, Trump was raving about how he loves “the poorly educated.” When it looked like Project 2025 might hurt him politically, Trump, shameless as usual, said he knew nothing about it. The architect of it, Russ Vought, admitted to an undercover reporter that Trump is just “running against the brand,” but that he fully intended to use it as his policy agenda. After Trump’s win was secure, his top lieutenant, Steve Bannon, giddy from his recent release from prison, gloated about this on his “War Room” podcast, by promoting a tweet by Matt Walsh: “Now that the election is over, I think we can finally say that, yeah, actually, Project 2025 is the agenda.”
It’s a difficult discussion, because progressives are already constantly badgered by right-wing accusations that they’re an “elite” who “looks down” at Trump voters as ignoramuses. But no one — absolutely no one — has more contempt for the intelligence of Trump voters than Trump or the people surrounding him. They see their voters as a bunch of yahoos who are stupid enough to believe their lies.
The reality is more complicated. In some cases, it’s people who are busy and disconnected, making them vulnerable to the pressures to give up real news in favor of an easily accessed and more pleasant diet of social media garbage. In other cases, as Beyerstein noted, it’s people who long to have their bigotries justified, and so choose lies over facts. Evidenced by the willingness to vote for progressive policies, many clearly aren’t stupid. They can read a ballot and understand the value of a minimum wage raise or protection for abortion. But when they’re just looking at a name on that ballot and have to rely on outside information for context? It’s hard to understand your choices when all the information you’re swimming in is lies.
