Why millions did not know what they were voting for
Party brands and the power of projection.
Is it possible that millions of Americans really didn’t know what they were voting for? Absolutely. A vast right wing media ecosystem used psychological projection to create false equivalence, creating a perfect storm of “He Said, She Said.” The result? People blocked everything out and defaulted to pre-existing brand identities: Trump is a successful businessman. Republicans are good at the economy. Democrats are out-of-touch elites.
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How We Know What We Know
I recently heard an interview with an epistemologist, an expert in how we know what we know, and he said something that really opened my eyes: people believe things that are false for the exact same reasons we believe things that are true.
Almost none of what we know is acquired from direct personal experience. We all believe that things are true because we heard them from sources we believed to be credible because the people we trust told us they were credible. We believe scientists and academics and journalists, not because we are smarter than other people, but because someone we trusted told us that we could trust them too.
Right now, many people are placing blame, and rightly so, on the vast right-wing media ecosystem. They put out hate and lies. We know it. They know it. But they present it to the public as something else entirely: a cohesive alternate version of what is right and wrong. Since the invention of “family values,” they have been peddling a version of morality that millions believe to be true because they heard it from sources they were taught to trust: their parents, teachers, churches and news outlets.
Much of George Lakoff’s work in “Moral Politics” is about the struggle between these competing visions of what it means to be right or wrong. Understanding that struggle gives us a critically important gift: the ability to see that many people who disagree with us are motivated by their desire to be a good person. The political struggle then becomes a mission to convert well-intended people to our version of what it means to be a good person, one based on empathy and solidarity instead of things like self-reliance and purity.
Don’t get me wrong. I know there are people who didn’t vote for Kamala Harris because she is a woman of color, or because they are the kind of people who buy status by sucking up and punching down. I just suspect that those voters were already firmly in the Trump camp.
We will learn more about the electorate as data comes in, but so far, the biggest swings toward Trump appear to be among late deciders and people who don’t follow political news.
People Who Don’t Follow Politics
People who follow the political debate are information seekers, and they are almost never undecided voters. Many millions of voters, including most swing voters, are what I call the passively exposed: they absorb political information subconsciously as they go about their lives. Unlike us, these people do not come “pre-loaded” with trust in any particular sources.
Passively exposed voters are bombarded with massive amounts of political messaging, but they only pay attention to it when it’s time to make a decision.
They don’t believe anything the campaigns say. They may see campaigns more as rival sports teams, talking smack about each other before the big championship. They know that campaigns are not objective sources: they have skin in the game.
Most people are struggling to make ends meet and care for their families. How do they figure out which sources to trust? They don’t. They haven’t got the time.
Why does it take so much time to figure out who is telling the truth? Because our opposition is far more skilled at selling their version of reality than we are at selling ours. Plus, they have dedicated more than fifty years and many billions of dollars toward building the infrastructure to put their version out there where people can’t help but trip over it, whether they are seeking it or not.
Projection and False Equivalency
Our opponents don’t need to win the information wars. They just needed to fight us to a draw. As Hannah Arendt and other experts on fascism and disinformation point out, the purpose of the “firehose of falsehoods” isn’t to convince people that lies are the truth, it’s to make it so that people can no longer tell the lies from the truth.
The Trump years have been a master class in propaganda techniques, but in all that time, I have only run across one debate strategy that is nearly impossible to beat: their use of projection to inoculate themselves against future criticism by creating false equivalence. In other words, they accuse us of doing the things that they are already doing or intend to do in the future, so that when we criticize them for doing it, it just sounds like “He Said, She Said.”
There is not one single thing we have accused Donald Trump and other conservatives of doing that they have not accused us of doing, and most of the time, they accused us first.
Here are just a few examples:
They said we were trying to steal the election before we said they were trying to steal the election (after they actually tried to steal the election.)
They called us socialists for years, even decades, before we ever started calling them autocrats and fascists.
His “Lock her Up” attacks against “crooked” Hillary Clinton pre-date every single one of the legitimate court cases against Donald Trump.
Trump said Hillary had top secret papers. We say Trump has top secret papers. Trump says Biden had top secret papers. Pence says Pence had top secret papers.
They say we discriminate against men, white people, and Christians. We say they discriminate against women, people of color and LGBTQ+ people.
They say we are predators and groomers, that we do surgery on children. We say they want to control women and are causing them to die in parking lots.
They do it proactively:
They said we were weaponizing the government against people and sending armed IRS agents to knock on people’s doors. Trump has every intention of using the government as a weapon against people and sending armed ICE agents to knock on people’s doors.
They do it retroactively:
Donald Trump was legitimately impeached twice. They said it was a politically motivated sham. The Republican House spent a year trying to impeach President Biden. Every time we made the case that their impeachment was a politically motivated sham, we reinforced the idea that impeachment can be, and sometimes is, a politically motivated sham.
And they did it to our media:
The conservative movement has been accusing the mainstream media of liberal bias for so long that the media has bent over backwards to appease conservatives and appear tough on liberals. We’ve been accusing right-wing media of bias for far less time.
Still have doubts? Where should people have looked for the truth? The New York Times and the Washington Post? We all know that legacy media abandoned their responsibility to inform their audiences of the truth, and helped to create this environment of false equivalence.
How Did They Decide?
Defaulting to Brand Identity
When voters can’t rely on the news to inform their decisions, they default to what they knew about the candidates and parties before the campaigns started. Brand identity is simply the running total of news and word-of-mouth that people have passively and even subconsciously acquired over longer periods of time.
What is the brand identity of the Republican Party? That they are good on the economy, fiscally responsible and have family values.
What is the brand identity of Donald Trump? That he is a successful businessman, a billionaire who speaks his mind and doesn’t bow down to anybody. (The producers of “The Apprentice” have apologized for their part in this, but I haven’t forgiven them yet.)
What is the default brand identity of the Democratic Party? That we are out-of-touch, elite, tax-and-spend liberals who are friendly with Wall Street.
What about Kamala Harris? Many people felt that they didn’t know enough about her. Her campaign tried to define her, but so did the Trump campaign. He said, she said.
Kamala Harris did not have a pre-existing brand identity for people to fall back on, so voters defaulted to the Democratic Party brand. As the economy was the top issue for most people, the Republican Party brand beat the Democratic Party brand.
AOC asked her social media followers who both support her and voted for Trump, why they did so. She got a lot of answers like these:
We’re going to be unpacking this election for quite some time. I will dig further into the questions of “How can we turn around the Democratic party brand?” and “Why do people persist in believing that we are bad on the economy?”
For now, I just want to leave you with this understanding: given that many people don’t know which media sources are credible, and that the current media environment is saturated with false equivalency, it is entirely possible that well-intended people could have voted for Donald Trump, not knowing what they were actually voting for.
This matters to me, to be able to hold on to my belief in the basic human decency of (most of) the American people. It also gives me material to work with as we try to craft a path forward and out of this mess. I hope it is of use to you as well.
Don’t forget to give yourself time to heal!
In solidarity,
Antonia
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Contact me at antonia@antoniascatton.com or (202) 922-6647
NOTES
The People Who Don’t Read Political News
By Olga Khazan | The Atlantic | October 29, 2024
Jarrell represents a set of Americans who, out of anxiety, exhaustion, or discouragement, are mostly tuning out campaign coverage yet will ultimately participate in the election.
“For a decade now, people have started talking about news fatigue,” Ken Doctor, a news-industry analyst, told me. “People are tired of being bombarded with the news. And then it kind of matured into news avoidance.” This tendency escalated with the increasing ubiquity of both online news and Donald Trump, Doctor said.
An Overlooked — and Increasingly Important — Clue to How People Vote
Most election post-mortems neglect a key determinant of how people vote — where they get their news.
By Steven Waldman | Politico | November 9, 2024
Great post.
The best takes (imo) on what happened all center around the same thing. A working class that has been left behind, and is tired of losing.
They feel like no one is speaking for them, so they fall for the guy who's Superpower is "getting away with pretending to always win and never lose."
If he can do it, maybe we can too. (Or some such.)
Here's my question:
From what I've personally been able to learn, the solution to climate change, economic inequality, energy independence etc. is all the same solution. A working class, all hands on deck, cooperative effort to build. Millions of new jobs building new infrastructure, resulting in community wealth building and a booming economy.
This is what all of these disaffected working class folks are praying for!
But how do we communicate that to them? What's the message?
Reframing Master, do your thing!! 😃
Great article. Thank you.
The keys to MAGA’s success was riding on the coattails of the “conservative” movement initiated by Lewis Powell in 1972. The advent of massive advertising funding created Fox “News” and Citizens United created massive amounts of dark money fuel for the “conservative” engine. Trump co-opted their machine for his exclusive use.