How Did Donald Trump Earn Over 74 Million Votes? (Part I)

“Lying is thinking or speaking about things that one does not know; this is the beginning of lying. It does not mean intentional lying - telling stories, as for instance that there is a bear in the other room. You can go to the other room and see that there is no bear in it. But if you collect all the theories that people put forward on any given subject, without knowing anything about it, you will see where lying begins. Man does not know himself, he does not know anything, yet he has theories about everything. Most of these theories are lying.” - P.D. Ouspensky

Like so many people across the United States who voted against Donald Trump, I sincerely struggled to come to terms with the idea that some 74 million people voted for him this year. More people voted for Donald Trump this year than any other presidential candidate in US history with the exception of Joe Biden. How could it be, I wondered, that so many Americans voted for Trump when I saw him as a nightmarish disaster?

Frustrated by a lack of understanding and blessed with the privilege time, I’ve spent countless hours over the past few weeks scouring books, articles, and podcasts for the best explanations for how Trump could possibly have earned even more votes than he did in 2016. What I’ve put together here is my best attempt to summarize what I’ve come across. Although it’s unlikely you’ll find many insights here that are unavailable in other sources (although you may find a few), what I hope to offer is at least personal, sincere, and somewhat more comprehensive than the sorts of analyses I’ve come across.

I recognize that a great deal of our inability to understand our country in 2020 comes down to lots of folks writing and talking about things of which they're ignorant and passing it off as informed. While I’m sure that I’ll make that same mistake at times in these posts, I’ve attempted to curtail this by basing most of what I’ve written on the analyses of journalists and researchers who’ve spoken extensively to Trump voters and by dialoguing with Trump voters online myself. This definitely won’t protect me from speaking falsehoods and missing key elements, and so I put forth this effort with great humility. I offer this analysis as part of an important conversation rather than some definitive guide to reality.

Before really getting into it, I’d like to share a few assumptions I have about people that have guided my research. 

Assumptions

First, I assume that we all have a tendency to commit what psychologists call fundamental attribution error. Fundamental attribution error is our tendency to explain our own behavior, or people we see as being part of our in-group, with more compassion than others’ behavior. We overemphasize what we see as flaws in others’ character and underemphasize environmental factors that might be working on them. On the other hand, we do the opposite when we try to explain our own bad behavior - that is, we overemphasize how it’s not our fault because this or that thing happened, and we underemphasize questions about our character. 

As a brief example, if we notice a coworker is consistently late to meetings, we might imagine it’s because they’re simply lazy or don’t care enough about their work. We forget to imagine that there might be factors outside of work that cause them to be late. On the flip side, if we notice that we’re consistently late to meetings, we’re quicker to remember that we have to catch the bus every morning when other people get to drive. The idea that our tardiness is a function of some inherent flaw inside ourselves is not as often our first explanation. 

I think fundamental attribution error is pretty common in our conversations about politics. It seems to help us turn people “on the other side” into caricatures against which we compare ourselves favorably. This is extremely unhelpful if the purpose of having conversations is to increase our own ability to understand things.

Secondly, I assume people are doing the best with what they have. I don’t believe anyone is capable of behaving in ways that are beyond their level of awareness, and I seriously doubt the long-term effectiveness of attempting to change others’ behavior through shame and blame. Don’t misunderstand me, though. I’m not saying I don’t believe in holding people accountable. Quite the opposite. I just think there’s a difference between blame and accountability.

I actually think that authentic systems for accountability, rooted in democratic processes, are our best hope for creating a just society. I worry that the overwhelming majority of citizens in the United States lack access to such systems. And if we’re going to work toward the possibility of creating them, we have to start with raising our own awareness, not by looking for who we can blame for things we don’t like, but by seeking to understand the systems and larger causes that create unjust behaviors. Rooted in deeper understanding, our actions become better informed and more likely to create the effects we intend.

Thirdly, I think there is an extraordinary innate intelligence in everyone. I also think everyone carries false beliefs and assumptions. Because of this, I think we’re all holding both important truths and ideas that need to be questioned. My process for listening to people involves trying to hear the truths they’re communicating while making better sense of their false assumptions. Obviously, this is a work in progress, as I carry my own truths and false assumptions.

Lastly, I think it’s important to say that I’ve focused on making sense of trends and systems rather than individuals. I’m not going to truly be able to understand what’s going on in any other person’s world, much less 74 million other people. But I do believe that to the degree that we can find patterns and trends, we might be able to say something useful about widespread feelings, sentiments, or beliefs - and these patterns probably affect people across party lines. Because of that, I see myself more as trying to understand how Trump earned the number of votes that he did rather than Trump voters as individuals. Although they are obviously closely related and are impossible to separate entirely, I think this is an important difference.

Organization

Those things being said, let’s see if we can’t begin to make a little more sense of how Trump earned more than 74 million votes this year.

I’m organizing this analysis into what I hope will become five different blog posts. I’ve outlined the topics of those posts below:

• Is it racism or economic anxiety?
• Going deeper than the racism/economic anxiety binary
• Analyzing our historical moment (short-term)
• Analyzing our historical moment (long-term)
• Moving in a positive direction

Racism vs. Economic Anxiety

As I dug into the question of how Trump earned over 74 million votes, I found a huge amount of people (I think mostly people who live in liberal thought bubbles like me) asking whether this was really about racism or economic anxiety. This won’t come as a surprise to anyone who’s been looking for answers to this question themselves. This debate has been hashed out so many ways over the last four years that reading article after article began to make my head spin. While the discussion sometimes takes a slightly different twist or attempts to show the ways that race and economics overlap, what struck me is how central this basic question has been in forming the foundation of liberal attempts to understand Trump’s success over the past four years.

In the first post of this series, I want to take some time to look at this question, both in terms of how we might answer it, but more importantly, in terms of how framing our thinking in this either/or binary stops us from learning more about Trump’s appeal.

As I read article after article about whether economic anxiety or racism have more to offer us in terms of understanding those 74 million votes, I began to develop a strong intuition that there was something extremely important missing. Part of it did feel like framing the debate this way turned it into a false dichotomy, but I had this sense that there’s more to it than just that. It was like there was a whole other world being kept from us by engaging in the debate this way. I’ll get to that in my second post in this series. For now, let’s look at what happens when we engage in the racism versus economic anxiety debate.

After a lot of thinking, it’s become difficult for me to imagine how to explain racism without talking about economic anxiety and vice versa, and I think that depends on some assumptions I hold about the way our world works. I know some of you are probably with me on this, but for those of you who aren’t sure what I mean, let me put on my history teacher hat and explain briefly.

There is a long history in the United States of people with money and power using the idea of race to divide people without money and power. When powerful elites have felt threatened by a larger and relatively united group of poor folks demanding better living conditions, elites have often used law and policy to offer small privileges to some of those poorer folks who’ve been assigned whiteness, and then imposed even harsher living conditions on people who aren’t seen as white, and especially those who’ve been assigned blackness. A tiny carrot and a very large stick were presented to people who came to think of themselves as white, and horrifically violent injustice was imposed on pretty much everyone else. This strategy is a strategy of dividing people who otherwise might see themselves as sharing common interests. The aftermath of Bacon’s rebellion in 1676 is a commonly cited example of this dynamic, which can be identified in literally every era of American history. Although MUCH more complex than I have space to describe here, this dynamic is widely understood as critical to the foundation of racism. 

In his 2016 book, The Populist Explosion, John B. Judis describes rightwing populists, the sort of politician to which Donald Trump might be compared, as populists who “champion the people against an elite that they accuse of coddling a third group, which can consist, for instance, of immigrants, Islamists, or African American militants… Rightwing populism is triadic. It looks upward, but also down upon an out group.” In other words, it’s helpful to understand that there exists a middle-oriented sentiment among many Trump voters. These voters see their middle position in society threatened by elites who are taking more than their fair share (sentiment that is also widely present among non-Trump voters), but they are also anxious about those at the bottom, who they also see as a potential threat to their middle-status.

Arlie Russell Hochschild also helps us understand this phenomenon in her book, Strangers in Their Own Land. Using her idea of a ‘deep story’ to describe a worldview that we use to make sense of what’s happening in the world, she suggests that many white working-class folks sort of imagine their families, who may have immigrated to this country generations ago, as having waited in line for their turn to access resources since then, assuming they’d achieve the American Dream sooner or later. In the twenty-first century, rather than seeing themselves moving forward in that line, they believe other people who’ve immigrated here more recently are cutting in front of them. A strong example of how a person’s racial identity might interact with economic anxiety, making race and economics impossible to completely separate. 

So if we were asked if racism explains the number of votes that Trump received, we’d have to say yes. Race and racism are so obviously factors. But you might not understand me when I say that because we have tragically different definitions of racism in this country. 

When I say it’s racism, I do mean that there are hurting people out there with explicitly racist attitudes who see Trump as a candidate who will offer them the chance to take back what white privilege they think they’re losing. I also mean that I think there are Trump voters out there who are motivated by this without even knowing it - on an unconscious level, responding to the explicitly racist things Trump does and says and a day-by-day basis. They have internalized in largely unconscious ways a set of expectations about what their life ought to be like because they’ve learned to think of themselves as white.

Still, these explanations do not explain all of how racism is at play in votes for Trump. I seriously doubt that each and every of the 74 million Trump voters are being primarily motivated by conscious or unconscious racism, but that doesn’t mean racism isn’t a major factor in why Trump got so many votes. 

Racism is part of the bedrock of this country. It has its hands in virtually everything, but it also works, and maybe even more effectively, without explicit racists. It is a massive system, composed of smaller systems, churning incessantly to divide us and extinguish the lives of people of color and otherwise marginalized people it deems disposable. 

But we cannot divide racism from neoliberalism - the corporate culture and behavior that sees everyone, including white folks without productive value, as disposable. We can’t disentangle racism from economics, and we can’t change one without changing the other.

The three main problems with announcing confidently that racism is most definitely THE reason people voted for Trump are 1) it demonstrates a lack of appreciation for the reach, complexity, and interlockinng nature of racism, 2) it risks (especially in a low-context communication medium like the internet) being interpreted as saying every Trump voter is a small-minded country bumpkin who’s too stupid to be anything other than racist, and 3) it offers financially-stable, liberally-educated people in big cities an opportunity to imagine they’re growing anti-racist attitudes without having to look more carefully into how they participate in the economy, such as thinking deeply about gentrification, learning about social and environmental injustices perpetuated in the production chains of the needless stuff they buy, or considering how their attempts to make more money in the stock market might serve to bring further pain to poor people in our country and across the globe.

Understood in its larger context, racism explains Trump votes, yes. But you could also write a different story about the complex ways that racism explains Biden votes, and another about how it also explains our country’s largest voting bloc: the nonvoters. As john powell reminds us: Racism is like gravity. Experienced by all; understood by few. 

What about economic anxiety? Yes - it’s economic anxiety. It’s so obviously economic anxiety. But, again, you might misunderstand me when I say this because, again, the influences that the economy has on people are so varied and nuanced that we’re probably thinking of different things when we hear the term. 

One of the most persistent misinterpretations I see is the idea that to experience economic anxiety, you have to be poor. Lots has been made about the fact that Trump voters, on average, tend not to be as poor as a lot of us think. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t a number of poor Trump voters, and it doesn’t mean you can’t have economic anxiety even if you’re middle or upper-middle class. I think the history of right-wing populism in the US shows that a ton of economic anxiety is felt by people who are middle-class but have concerns about their financial future. Of course, these anxieties are deeply tied to expectations of a certain status for white people. 

In listening to Trump voters who express concerns about the economy, many seem to be expressing the same sense of pain and indignation caused by the neoliberal economic practices commonly critiqued by many people who vote for Democrats. And, yes, these concerns often come with fear that unchecked immigration is only going to lessen their prospects of a positive financial future. Is that part of racism? Undoubtedly, and, at the same time, economic elites are, both nationally and globally, pitting poor people against otherly categorized poor people and using race and nationalism to distract each other from addressing corporate behavior. Some white folks learn to believe that Black Lives Matter activists want to destroy society as we know it; some members of the church of social justice mistake white people, rather than whiteness, as a root of our problems. The divisions created by the idea of race continue to distract people who have common interests from seeing and challenging an important source of their pain. We saw it in 1676, and we’re seeing it in 2020. This is the power of racism.

Another reality we often miss when we stick to the term “economic anxiety” is that it often serves as a catch-all for naming a series of important issues: lack of access to quality health care, struggles with addiction crises, degrading public infrastructure, crumbling public schools, etc… All of these are part of economic anxiety, and it’s possible to be harmed by them and anxious about the future without a conscious commitment to racial hierarchy, which also doesn’t mean racism isn’t involved. I think we’ll learn more if we make these issues more explicit in our conversations. We’ll see more clearly how these issues affect both people who voted for Biden and people who voted for Trump, and possibly grow some common ground.

When we assert confidently that either economic anxiety or racism is the true root issue that explains why so many people voted for Trump, we a) misunderstand the complexity and interlocking nature of both issues, b) inhibit our ability to learn more about these incredibly complex challenges, choosing instead to be sucked into an either/or debate in hopes of proving our intellectual mettle, and lastly c) aid and abet a psychopathic neoliberal agenda oriented in extracting as much possible profit from living beings.

Of course, economic anxiety and racism go a long way in explaining why so many people voted for Trump. But, stated so simply, these two issues also mask a host of other reasons that people voted for Trump. Those are the issues I’d like to explore in the next post of this series.