Pretty sure all three are true. But 2 is the biggie. Because it’s application is so wide. People are confused by, upset by, outraged by Trump. And they don’t know what to make of or do with those feelings and the easiest course is vent about Dems. Full stop. 2/3 of contemporary political commetnary.
Absolutely correct. The “bad vibe” election, expertly exploited by Trump, was caused by Trump himself. He persuaded his own followers that the country was in the worst shape it’s ever been including the Great Depression and that the previous election had been stolen from them. Democrats were upset and frustrated that he was out there lying about all this. Bad vibes all around. In the end, the election was decided by the small slice of voters who just felt the vibes and had no idea where they were coming from. They just went with the general vibes they heard and felt in passing and believed it was necessary to throw the bastards out.
Here’s an excerpt of the National Journal piece:
Explaining a Harris win would have been easy: Voters rejected Trump and his ilk, just as they did in 2020. A Trump win seems more difficult to explain. Everyone knows who he is now! Surely the majority would reject him, even if he won the Electoral College. But instead, Trump not only won the Electoral College, he won the popular vote.
And now we get a zillion media think pieces on what Democrats did wrong and what the ideological fights are between the center and the Left.
[…]
The explanations are not cut-and-dried; they never are. But it’s also not difficult to see that swing voters rejected an administration they felt didn’t help them. As for what they knew about Trump—well, I hate to break it to you, but the vast majority of swing voters only pay attention to politics long enough to cast their ballots. They are not watching rallies. They are annoyed by political ads and ignore mailers. This is why searches of “did Joe Biden drop out” surged on Election Day.
Logically, voters who didn’t even know who was on the ballot were probably unlikely to cast a ballot for the candidate they didn’t know (Harris). They did know Trump, and they knew their perception that the economy was better—mostly because prices were lower—during his term.
Those swing voters who did know enough to have the right candidates in mind, but not much more, went with a gut feeling of some sort. In an environment where the current administration is unpopular and people think the country is on the wrong track, that vote wasn’t going to Harris. Plus, isn’t Trump a great businessman or something?
These are the stories you only rarely see in the media. It is uncomfortable to learn how swing voters actually make decisions. It is also uncomfortable to think about how much money was spent trying to sway their decisions, when they came down to a gut feeling or something they only saw in passing. We spend a lot of time and money trying to catch them in passing.
Eventually, more data will help us sort out what happened. In the meantime, all of the media explainers would do well to consider that there might not be some grand theory of what happened. Maybe we just have a low-information swing electorate that is busy living their lives and votes on a whim. It’s just not what we want to see from inside our political bubbles.
The consequences of all this are profound. As with so much else, Trump has exposed the flaws in our democratic system as well. Flood the zone with bullshit and the people who don’t pay attention until the day they vote will probably go your way.