The problem is the idiot vote

This is a followup to my earlier post about David Shor’s data on the 2024 election.

Those data indicate that possibly the biggest of all the problems the Democrats had to deal with last fall was that, compared to 2020 in particular, people who aren’t engaged with politics generally broke hard for Trump:

The story of this election is that people who follow the news closely, get their information from traditional media and see politics as an important part of their identity became more Democratic in absolute terms. Meanwhile, those who don’t follow politics closely became much more Republican. . .

I just want to stress that this is a new problem.

This problem didn’t exist four years ago. It’s not just that the New York Times readers are more liberal than the overall population — that’s definitely true. It’s that they’re more liberal than they were four years ago — even though the country went the other way. And so there’s this great political divergence between people who consume all the news sources that we know about and read about versus the people who don’t.

As a result of these changes, we’re seeing the reversal of a decades-long truism in American politics. For a long time, Democrats have said, and it’s been true, that if everyone votes, we win and that higher turnout is good for Democrats. But this is the first cycle where that definitively became the opposite.

I have some numbers here: If only people who had voted in 2022 had voted, Harris would have won the popular vote and also the Electoral College fairly easily. But if everyone had voted, Trump would have won the popular vote by nearly five points. And generally what you see now is that every measure of socioeconomic status and political engagement is just monotonically related to your chance of liking Trump.

[This means] that the lower your political engagement, education level or socioeconomic status, the less engaged you are in politics, the more Trumpy you are. And that just wasn’t true four years ago.

If you just look at the demographics of the people who voted for Biden last time and stayed home this time, they’re generally less educated, fairly politically disengaged and much less likely to watch MSNBC and more likely to watch Fox. Frankly, they resemble the voters who trended away from us. . .

My optimism about the 2024 election was based on the assumption that, as the Ariana Grande Theory of Politics voters finally got engaged with the process, they would swing toward Harris because they would be reminded/learn for the first time that Trump tried to overthrow the government, had been convicted of dozens of felonies and was charged with a bunch more, etc. This turned out to be totally wrong: the AGTOP voters simply didn’t care about any of that stuff. What they cared about was inflation, which they blamed Biden and by extension Harris for, because these people are ignorant morons. I mean it’s almost literally that simple.

What the marginal voters who decide elections in Our Stupid Country absolutely DON’T care about are any abstractions like “destroying liberal democracy through authoritarian lawlessness,” which is a phrase made up of a lot of big confusing words that might as well be the blah blah blah Ginger in the Gary Larson cartoon.

One thing that the Biden people always believed was that this election would be very heavily about democracy itself. This is something I was told by top Biden strategists. I don’t see democracy on here or Jan. 6 and the stability of the system. Did you test those, as well?

We did. But we did a survey where we just asked people: What’s more important right now — preserving America’s institutions or delivering change that improves people’s lives?

It was 78 to 18: delivering change that improves people’s lives. One of the hardest things about being a political consultant over the last eight years is that every day Trump does terrible things — things that I think are objectively awful and scary and that [expletive] me off. Things he says, like: I’m going to prosecute my enemies.

Then we do a bunch of tests, and voters really don’t want to hear about it from us. I think Trump would do better if he didn’t say those things, for sure. But voters want politicians to talk about concrete ways that they are going to improve people’s lives.

“Improve peoples’ lives” is obviously a technical term here that means “bring grocery prices down,” rather than “not go full fascist.”

I guess you go to political war with the electorate you have rather than the electorate you wish you had, but JFC.