Electoral Complexity

How to make sense of the 2024 Presidential results?

A sick two-year old sunk my plans to finish my series of posts on globalization. I thought I’d leave you all with some thoughts about last week’s election.

The results didn’t come as a surprise to me. I’d been mentally preparing myself during the last year for an eventual Trump victory. Most long-time followers of presidential campaigns wouldn’t have been surprised either, had they been paying attention.

Joe Biden was long considered a politician for whom vice presidency was the best he could hope for. His earlier runs for president ended in an embarrassing plagiarism scandal. If it weren’t for Donald Trump’s 2016 win, the COVID pandemic, and a deep-seated yearning for a return to normalcy, there would have never been a Biden presidency.

Even during his 2020 run there were worries about his future cognitive fitness. Biden had even promised to be a one term president, a promise he forgot when just about everyone seemed to think that a post-January 6th disgraced Donald Trump would just fade away into obscurity.

All of that wouldn’t have been a problem had Biden picked a stronger running mate. For all her positive qualities, Kamala Harris was one of the weakest candidates in the 2020 primary. As vice president, she was invisible. And she struggled to turn her post-nomination honeymoon period into real political momentum, which some argue was due to a reluctance to clearly distinguish herself as a politician from Joe Biden. Given that millions of registered Democrats stayed home, the election outcome was less a vindication of Trump’s political vision than a reflection of the widespread lack of enthusiasm for Harris.

But the Democrats running otherwise weak presidential candidates doesn’t totally explain the election results. Donald Trump has survived and thrived in the midst of legal woes and while using political rhetoric that would have sunk anyone else’s campaign.

Democratic pundits have been left scratching their heads. Their old answers for Trump’s success don’t seem to be working. Americans’ supposed racism doesn’t appear to explain it, given that the soon-to-be again President won the most diverse electorate for a Republican since the mid-20th century.

Other observers want to blame misinformation. But this is a weak explanation, since we already know that most voters’ perception of reality is skewed by partisanship (and that the vast majority of us are “low information” voters, if we’re honest with ourselves). And as Dan Williams has argued in his article series on disinformation, there’s little evidence that misinformation is growing or is widespread and impactful as the prevalent media narrative implies.

As I’ve pointed out in this Substack, the usual story about misinformation gets the causality backwards. People are receptive to, or even explicitly seek out, questionable sources of information when official or establishment institutions no longer seem reputable. Pleas from major newspapers and magazines to vote against Trump to prevent a slide into autocracy fall on deaf ears, for a sizable portion of the public sees it as a leftwing attempt to manipulate them.

Given the overwhelming complexity of the world, we all fall back on heuristics to try to make sense of it. Invariably this means deciding which experts and observers we are going to trust to simplify the muddle for us.

My argument since Trump was first elected in 2016 has been that the left has largely forgotten about the importance of being trustworthy, much to their detriment. They have become the party of experts who say they believe in and govern according to (their vision of) science.

The right has organized themselves around the model of populist common sense, which has allowed them to depict their opponents as out-of-touch technocrats, as elitists who care more about what different indexes and measurements say about the economy than listening to citizens’ talk about their struggles. It hasn’t helped that Democratic politicians and pundits have continued to say things that seem to reveal their loathing for a large segment of the electorate (appearing to call them “deplorables” or “garbage”).

But some of the most harm may have been done by culture waring, specifically the notion that citizens who don’t share the left’s moral views on immigrations, trans issues, or the police must be suffering from a cognitive limitation. Some “-ism” is responsible for their thinking, not reason. It’s just their white fragility or transphobia talking. Consider how a Black pundit’s recently uttered reservations about transstudents in girls’ sports got shouted down with “listen to the American Medical Association.”

Likewise, I can’t forget how one prominent journalist dismissed parental worries about implementing the 1619 Project or contentious academic ideas about gender identity into the classroom: “professional K-12 educators, not parents, are the experts in what to teach.” Whatever one’s opinion on those curricula may be, they are not above America’s hundred year tradition of democratic, parental input into schooling.

It’s condescending enough when economic and science get used to effectively tell citizens to shut up and get in line, it’s even worse when ideas from the humanities and social sciences get used to do so.

Don’t get me wrong. I largely share the leftwing political commitments of other highly educated professionals. But, having spent the last decade trying to understand how things actually get done, I recognize that top-down, expert-driven politics almost never works, even if people have their heart in the right place. The left has to actually work to persuade skeptics and current opponents, and that means letting them have their own opinions.

The most tragic part is that none of this should be news. When I teach classes on politics, I use Deborah Stone’s book, The Policy Paradox. She outlines how major political debates aren’t always about data, numbers, and rationality but also metaphors, stories, and vibes. As my fellow Taming Complexity writer Michael Bouchey noted for immigration, we could have had a bipartisan “clumsy” solution that married rational policy with potent symbolism: allocate money for a border wall and reform the immigration system at the same time.

America’s two parties ought to be drawing upon both the rational and irrational parts of politics, but instead they’ve each colonized exactly one half. The result that we now have two political sides that largely speak in completely different languages and find each other increasingly incomprehensible. Until we rediscover balance, the United States will oscillate between uninspiring, elitist technocrats and acid spitting populists for the near future. And our democracy will suffer.