It’s not just swing voters who will decide our fate. It’s nonvoters.
Those of us who simply couldn’t believe Americans were crazy enough to elect Donald Trump in 2016 got a rude awakening. The MAGA types are loud, but not that numerous. Michael Tomasky this Presidents’ Day considers the other voters we didn’t see coming then who will again decide this year’s presidential election. He invites the Biden campaign and us to step outside our political bubble and get inside their heads:
Last week, NBC produced a poll showing that respondents were remembering the Trump years comparatively fondly. No, don’t roll your eyes and tongue-cluck these people. It’s vital that we ponder this.
Respondents were asked of Biden and Trump whether each man had done about the kind of job they expected, a better job, or a worse job. For Biden, the numbers were 14 percent better, 44 percent as expected, and 42 percent worse.
For Trump? Prepare yourself. It was 40 percent better, 31 percent as expected, and 29 percent worse.
We can rationalize that away or deal with it.
But the numbers are the numbers, Tomasky advises. Yes, the pre-pandemic economy under Trump was not bad, but it’s been better under Biden. Median household income went up, as it did under Obama, but most of the Trump increase went to the top quintile. “This is what Bidenomics is changing—a transfer of some of that wealth back to the middle. Which is why rich people hate it so much.”
Trump’s overall job numbers sucked. The stock market tanked and the deficit soared.
But voters don’t seem to blame Trump for the pandemic. No matter how poorly he handled it. No matter that he lied about its severity. No matter that a 2021 study found that Trump’s mismanagement accounted for 40 percent of pandemic deaths.
That’s the kind of stuff highly informed voters may know. But those aren’t the voters I’m talking about it. Your average swing voters, if they ever knew this stuff, have long since forgotten it and have probably settled on the view that Trump was doing pretty well and the pandemic wasn’t his fault and he did what he could. Many, in fact, may credit him for presiding over the creation of life-saving vaccines, and that’s fair enough: Operation Warp Speed kicked off under his watch.
There’s one final uncomfortable reality that we have to come to terms with, which is that for these voters, Donald Trump is not a moral monster. He’s just not. He’s embarrassing. He’s a little wild with his rhetoric at times. They wouldn’t necessarily want their sons to be like him. But they think he ran the country pretty well. It may be hard to believe but this opinion is widely shared. Go read the story describing the results of that NBC poll I linked to above.
What to do about it since the various prosecutions of Donald “91 Counts” Trump don’t seem to be eroding his popularity?
It is simultaneously true that those voters don’t like Trump. But they forget the specific things they don’t like. Here it is important to remind them. Remind them of everything. Not the things that offend liberals, like his racism and sexism. It’s fine to sprinkle some of that in there, but don’t assume these people share our values and will be as offended by all that as we are. They won’t be. Remind them instead of Trump’s idiocy. Buying Greenland. Sharpie-ing up that hurricane map. Getting the Boy Scouts—the Boy Scouts!—to boo Obama and talking to them about rich people having sex on yachts. Advising that people inject Clorox. Tossing paper towels to hurricane victims. And so on and so on.
Remind them of just how relentlessly he was in our faces, every hour of every day. It was exhausting. Your average person surely doesn’t want that. And remind them of his betrayals of normal American values. His love of Vladimir Putin. His disparaging of the military. Even more, his disparaging of service members and veterans. That John Kelly story. Kelly has confirmed all that now, on the record. MAGA people may not care that Trump thinks people who gave their lives for their country in battle are losers. But surely independent voters in the Milwaukee suburbs do—or will, if someone reminds them, and reminds them, and reminds them.
By the way: I think also that these voters can be made to care about democracy being at risk. Fascism may be an abstraction to them. But January 6 was no abstraction. They saw it. They understood what it was. They don’t approve. Democracy can and must be part of the argument to swing voters.
These voters, Tomasky concludes, “don’t remotely see Trump in the wholly negative terms that we do.” They need reminding.
I’m going to sound like a broken record before this election is over. While it’s necessary to persuade existing voters to swing left in November, it’s as important to get nonvoters to go to the polls. Such as left-leaning unaffiliateds who don’t even get asked to vote because they have poor voting records and are harder to identify with Democrats’ Death Star database. (“Don’t be too proud of this technological terror you’ve constructed,” keeps replaying in my head. ) I’m talking about voters under 45 who lean left but sit out elections. These are registrants, particularly the young ones, who don’t need persuading of anything more than to vote at all.
Are there issues about which they care strongly? Do they know they’ll need a photo ID in 2024 because THOSE GUYS don’t want them voting? Offer nonpartisan information on the where, when, and how of casting their fall ballot. Will you exercise your freedom this fall? Save democracy? Make history?
Or stop the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) from collapsing within their lifetimes, flooding the East Coast and reducing food production here and in northern Europe? The MAGA GOP will do nothing to help. Democrats will at least try.
But convincing sometimes voters that their futures depend on what they do this fall requires campaigners in North Carolina, in Arizona, and maybe Pennsylvania to change the way they are accustomed to doing business.
A friend reminded me yesterday of the recent Cosmopolitan article about what it could take to get disillusioned Gen Z voters off their couches.
Even if all your choices suck, you still have a choice. Choosing to do nothing is a choice. This is what it means to be an adult: Adulthood, like citizenship, is not guaranteed to be fun and exciting. It hasn’t been for me. Maybe we talk about which choices on the table are most empowering for young people. A sense of control is what people most desire amidst threat and chaos. Right now their control is being stripped from them.
Doing nothing means those who mean to deprive us of any choice win because we let them without putting up a fight.
An analogy I use is finding yourself in a kayak in a chaotic, rushing river and being battered against the rocks. You can sit there and get beat up and risk drowning, or you can paddle. Your choice. You might even find learning to read and navigate the rapids much more fun and less bruising than doing nothing but complain you’d rather be somewhere else. Or have different choices.
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