Posted on by rjonakait

Twelve Ways to Win

In the last post, “77 Million,” I wrote that the real story of the last presidential election was not the switch to Trump, which was not large, but the “lost votes,” the many who had voted for Biden but did not vote at all this year. A story in a Pennsylvania news source neatly illustrates the point. A Philadelphia district that is overwhelmingly Black had shifted to Trump, but in that district Trump had gotten only three more votes than he had in 2020. Harris, however, had received 81 fewer ballots than Biden had four years earlier.

After the previous post, a friend said that he agreed with my analysis but wondered what my explanation was for the lost votes. I thought more about that and realized that I did not have a single overarching explanation but only a collection of partial possibilities. Here are some of them.

One. Donald Trump is a remarkable politician. His dominant qualities—liar, ignoramus, bully, fearmonger, bad economist, embarrassing dancer—should make him a laughingstock, but despite these characteristics, or perhaps because of them, he connects deeply with a broad swath of Americans. They are devoted to him like teenage girls to a K-pop boy band. There’s a major difference, however: American devotion to him has not been a passing fancy; we don’t seem to grow out of it. Other presidents—Reagan, Clinton, Obama—had devoted admirers, but not like Trump. To me the attraction is inexplicable, but I recognize his draw.

Two. Americans have short memories, and Trump benefited. In 2020, almost all voters held strong and accurate images of the Trump presidency. Despite the pandemic, the economy was about the same as it was under Obama, with some indicators stronger and some weaker than in the previous four years. (E.g., inflation was low under Trump, but it was even lower under Obama.) However, all was not well in the country. Crime had started to increase under Trump which was disturbing. Life expectancy had started to fall even apart from the pandemic. The border was a problem, and Trump had failed to fix it. Even Obama had deported more people than Trump had. Trump’s wall seemed a joke. His attempts to erase the Affordable Care Act were disturbing. Deficits skyrocketed. He played footsy with dictators, which was disturbing. His many grift-like actions were disturbing. A lot of things were disturbing, but that was all forgotten four years later. Moreover, of all the bad things that were predicted to happen because of his four years did not happen. For example, Biden continued the China tariffs that liberals had decried ruinous. Biden continued Trump border policies that were labeled ineffectual and heartless. More and more politicians supported the border wall. Trump was still the same Trump, but to many he did not look as bad as he had in 2020.

Three. Americans are not only forgetful; they are ignorant. Americans want simple answers, and Trump benefited. The border problem has many causes. We need a reform of our immigration laws. We need more border agents. We need more immigration judges. The problem is fueled by criminal gangs and political unrest in various countries. The problem is exacerbated by poor economies in various countries. It is intensified by the wider spread of media coverage that tells more and more people that they can find a better life if they can get to the U.S. And so on. Americans don’t want to confront such complexities. They don’t want to concede that the problem has been years in the making. They want a simple answer. And to many, the border problem is simply the fault of the Biden-Harris administration. (When conservatives refer to 2017 to 2021, they never say the Trump-Pence administration.)

More simplistic thinking follows: If the border were tightened, for example, we could tackle our fentanyl problem. (We have already forgotten that Trump promised to solve the fentanyl crisis when he ran in 2016.) Inflation. Well, inflation was the consequence of many complex events, but Americans didn’t want to understand that. Neither did we want to know that many developed countries had a worse inflation problem than we had, and that perhaps our inflation, bad as it was, was not so bad. Americans did not want to hear that gas and oil trade in an international market, that supply chains are international, and that the U.S. government does not control these markets. Instead, we want a simple answer, and that answer was that inflation was the fault of the Biden-Harris administration.

Four. Fear sells, and Trump benefited. Many campaigns have tried to make the electorate fearful about the consequences of the other side’s actions. In the first election I paid attention to, JFK stressed a “missile gap” at a time when nuclear concerns were high. (That gap seemed to disappear once he took office.) This year Trump and his acolytes did a much better job of spreading fear than the other side—fear of crime generally, fear of immigrant crime more specifically, fear of immigration, fear of fentanyl, fear of transgender people. That last fear should not be underestimated. For most of the election season, I was in Pennsylvania, a swing state for the presidential election with a closely contested Senate seat and several close House races. It seemed as if every third political ad — and the ads ran nonstop — by those on the right brought up Democratic support for trans people. They damned Harris for supporting government payment for gender-transforming operations. They hinted that Democratic candidates were going to allow trans people to play girls’ sports and use girls’ bathrooms. This country may have become more accepting of gays, but many, many Americans see trans people as unsettling and dangerous. Trump and his supporters benefited.

Five. The media has had a fixation on Trump, and Trump benefited. News sources, including, or perhaps especially, liberal ones reported at length whatever Trump was doing or saying. This was not totally surprising. In the run-up to the election, Trump was on the receiving end of multiple lawsuits including his conviction of 34 felony counts in New York. Nevertheless, this coverage overwhelmed coverage of Biden’s accomplishments (how many of us can summarize what is in the Inflation Reduction Act?) and explanations for problems like rising prices or the border. Since memory-impaired Americans seemed less concerned about the bizarre and dangerous behavior of Trump in 2024 than they were in 2020, the media did Trump a favor by focusing on him and not other things.

Six. We don’t know how to handle misinformation, and that benefited Trump, too. A higher percentage of misinformation came from the right than the left, and listeners ate it up.

Seven. Liberals and Democrats are poor at messaging. Who named it the Inflation Reduction Act? I know. I know. It was meant to reduce inflation, and it certainly did help. But it was hard not to hear it as a laugh line when the cost of milk and eggs and gas and mortgages was unusually high. Why didn’t they change the name and start focusing on all the good the Act accomplished?

Eight. But perhaps the chief cause of Trump’s (narrow) victory came throughout Biden’s term. While Americans were concerned about the border and inflation, Biden seemed indifferent to those problems. He might have been able to do little or nothing about them, but he should have appeared more concerned about them. He did not. And Trump won.

Similarly, every third ad against Harris I saw featured her being asked what she would have done differently from Biden. The response was the blank look of a doe in the headlights with the answer of “nothing.” It was powerful each time, and I saw it many, many times. Such a question had to be anticipated. How could she not have had a better immediate response? (Later on — too later on — she did.) There was also the never-ending clip of her crowing about the success of “Bidenomics.” Democrats should have been ready to explain what they were hoping to accomplish and what they had accomplished. They did not. And Trump won.

Nine. In the eyes of many Americans the Democratic Party does not stand for anything, and Trump benefited. Worse: Democrats were seen as the party that stood for trans rights, defunding the police, DEI, and critical race theory. But what else? For many, Democrats didn’t stand for anything that benefited “ordinary” people. Biden’s support for the United Auto Workers made no dint in this perception.

Ten. Covid hurt Trump in 2020. It helped him this year. His inconsistent and bizarre reactions to the pandemic were fresh four years ago. Now many have selective memories of that time. Unless personally affected, few seem to remember that one million American died. Instead, today Covid is remembered by many as a time of unnecessary school closings that harmed kids and strained parents; of unnecessary face masks; of governmental overreach on vaccines and social distancing. These are all reasons to distrust the government, and Trumps surrogates did a great job of reminding us of this distrust. At the same time, some see the Democrats as the ones who believe in big government of the sort that made Covid more hellish. Trump benefited.

Eleven. Many are not ready for a woman to be the Commander-in-Chief. We cannot discount that this country continues to have a strong strain of misogyny. Trump benefited big time from it.

Twelve. What do you think contributed? I’d love to hear them.

Posted on by rjonakait

He Is a Tool

Driving back from a funeral, the spouse spotted a flatbed moving a forklift-type device bearing the logo “mytoolsrental.com.” She said that sounded like a gay prostitute. She, of course, was not thinking of a conventional definition of “tool” but its slang as synonym for the male sexual organ. Her comment made me think about the many terms for “penis” but also how often that slang has been turned into a derogation. He is a “tool” or a “dick.” Some such terms seem to have lost their origins as a genital description and live on only as deprecatory or belittling terms—think “dork” or maybe even “prick.”

I can’t document this, but men most likely originated the slang words for penis, as they probably also did for the many terms for the female genitalia. However, men of a certain sort were also the ones who expanded sexual slang into words of derogation. I wondered why the testosterone-fueled who might brag about their sexual prowess and organs would turn terms for their proudly possessed penis into something that was meant to be an insulting description.

The spouse responded that not all penis equivalents are used to demean and cited “willy,” which always seems slightly humorous. I then thought of the neutral-sounding “Johnson,” and cock sometimes seems to be a praiseworthy term. And surely there must be others that aren’t derogatory. (Surely you, too, have such meaningful conversations with your partner.)

At first I thought, a comparable female term to the male ones is “cunt.” She has a cunt, or she is a cunt. But “cunt” is always harsher than the male terms. “He is a dick” is not a compliment, but it is only slightly risqué in my polite circles where “She is a cunt” is strictly off limits. “He is a prick” refers to behavior. “She is a cunt” might be triggered by behavior, but it is not simply describing conduct. It is misogynistic. “You’re a cunt” seems to be saying “You are only a cunt. You are only a woman and women are only cunts.” It tries to reduce a woman from a person to her sexual organ, and that organ, that woman, is only for fucking.  

There are, of course, perhaps as many terms for female genitalia as for male ones, but perhaps the only other one that has become a derogation is “pussy.” While the derogatory “cunt” is just used for women, the “pussy” is invariably used to describe a man meaning he has some stereotypical female characteristics, such as lacking daring. If a male term is applied to a woman—she is a “dick” or “prick”—it does not so much imply some stereotypical male characteristic as it unsexes the woman and means she has the nongendered characteristics of a jerk.

And I can’t help but feel that men have transformed the slang terms for their sexual organ into derogations out of a certain insecurity, knowing that somehow a penis, perhaps especially an erect one, is always somehow ridiculous and vulnerable. (“Boner,” I almost forgot “boner.” It, of course, is an erection, but it is also a blunder, a giant mistake. Perhaps the second comes from the first. I have been told that young males sometimes have gotten a boner at an inopportune time—during a school assembly, a glimpse of a friend’s mother’s breast, etc. In other words, the boner was a boner. On the other hand, a bone-headed person makes boners. I think I need a linquist.)

I would like to draw some deep meaning from these ramblings, but I don’t have one.

Posted on by rjonakait

What Trump Revolution? (continued)

Many of the analyses of why Trump won are based on the premise that the 2016 election produced an enduring, seismic shift in the electorate.  An anecdote in Eliza Griswold’s book should make us rethink whether there truly was such a Trump Revolution. Amity and Prosperity is the story of a rural family in southwestern Pennsylvania and the problems they face when fracking starts nearby. Stacey, the main character, “didn’t buy the Trump craze” in 2016. Although she had had troubles with the EPA, she thought it should exist. She doubted that fracking could save Appalachia. Trump, to her, was just another pandering politician. On the other hand, she did not like Hillary Clinton either. She thought that Clinton was corrupt and no better on fracking than Trump. Stacey voted for the Green Party candidate, Jill Stein.

So, did Trump actually attract a new crop of voters to the Republican candidate? The answer seems to be yes. Many counties, like Stacey’s, swung from Obama in 2012 to Trump four years later. But perhaps many of the new Republican voters were not swinging to Trump as much as they were swinging away from Clinton. It turns out that for large swathes of previously Democratic voters she was not an attractive candidate. Some of those voters stayed home; some voted for Trump; and some voted for a third-party candidate. Why the antipathy for Clinton? Many reasons have been given. Some of her supporters claim that it was because she is a woman. Perhaps that was part of it. I once said to a friend who wanted to sit out the election because he liked neither major candidate, “Assess how you feel about Bill Clinton. Is your assessment of Hillary Clinton lower? If so, why? Her policies are similar to his and she has had more experience than he had when he ran for President. How much of the lower assessment is merely because she is a woman?” He pondered and just replied that for whatever the reason, he was not as enthusiastic about her as he had been for Bill. (He did end up voting for Hillary because he came to believe it was most to stop the Donald.)

I was not an enthusiastic supporter of hers, and I hope her gender was not the reason. I would like to think my lack of enthusiasm had good reasons, but I am not sure that another phenomenon did not affect me as well as many others. Hillary Clinton has been regularly attacked by the right wing for a long time, at least since her husband ran for the presidency a quarter-century ago. Few modern public figures have been vilified as much and for as long as she has been. This drumbeat of castigation surely affected many, and I wondered if I were truly immune. As Pierre Augustin Caron de Beumarchais has been quoted as saying, “Villify! Villify! Some of it will always stick.”

No matter whether those who distrusted Clinton had good reasons or not, many in 2016 found they could not vote for her, and at least some of them voted for Trump. If, however, these Trump votes were not as much affirmative votes for him as votes against Clinton, they don’t seem to herald an enduring Trump Revolution.

On the other hand, much reporting indicates that many previous Obama voters were affirmatively attracted to Trump and that is what made for the Trump Revolt. The implication is that something historic was going on, but that assumption should be questioned. Doesn’t something similar happen every time the White House changes parties? When Kennedy succeeded Eisenhower, at least some Ike voters did not vote for the 1960 Republican candidate. Similar electoral movements have occurred when Nixon, Carter, Reagan, Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama were elected president. Was the Trump election really different?

We also know (although he may not want to believe it) that Trump did not even get the plurality of the vote. Whatever the revolution, it was not a majority one. And even if it is true that he attracted many voters that had not before voted Republican, we should also realize that he drove away many voters who could have been expected to vote Republican.

Compare 2012 and 2016 election results. (Different sources do not always give the same nationwide vote totals, but, for consistency, I am using figures from the Federal Election Commission website.) In 2012, Mitt Romney got 60,932,152 votes. Four years later, Trump received 62,984,825. Trump got two million more votes than Romney but that does not mean that he made great inroads into previously Democratic voters.          Instead, about 7.5 million more people voted in 2016 than 2012. With more voters as the country’s population increased, it is not surprising that Trump got more votes than Romney. More interesting than the vote totals for Romney and Trump is the percentage of the vote for each. Romney received 47.21 percent of the nationwide ballots, while Trump got 46.09 percent. In other words, there was no dramatic swing to him compared to the previous election. Analyses I have seen expend a good deal of effort dissecting the voters Trump attracted; they also ought to equally examine the voters Trump drove away. For example, The Great Revolt: Inside the Populist Coalition Reshaping American Politics mentions that “Trump’s margin was weaker than Romney’s in 86 of the 100 most educated counties—a fact that held true regardless of the jurisdiction’s normal partisan leanings.” But the authors set out only to interview voters in some swing states who shifted from Obama to Trump when there were at least as many voters who swung away from him. If that first group constitutes some new populist coalition, how should we label the at-least-as-significant second group?

(concluded October 12)