After the 2024 US presidential election, the polls are back on fire. After the 2020s in a little surprise extended endingthe results came quickly on November 6, returning former President Donald Trump to the White House.
At last count, Trump collected it 312 electoral votes to 226 for Democratic candidate Kamala Harris. As some votes continue to be counted, the broad trends that won Trump the election are also coming into focus. echo scholars of public opinionAuthored by Duncan Watts of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania Everything is obvious once you know the answerhe believes that Trump benefited from a broad trend to the contrary it has been seen in elections around the world; that sentiment drew enough undecided voters to his fold to win the swing states necessary for victory.
“The explanation that seems most plausible, because it’s the simplest, is simply that incumbents around the world are losing elections almost regardless of ideology,” says Watts. “This is consistent with the ‘crooked bottle’ theory, when voters are mad. They just vote for the incumbents. They don’t know why, and they don’t care.”
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This still leaves broad questions as to why US voters acted as they did. By many objective measures, the US economy outperformed almost every other developed country in the past two years, making it the “envy of the world.” Why didn’t US voters seem to notice? In an interview american scientific Watts delved into these election-year puzzles.
This interview has been edited and shortened for clarity.
Where do rogue voters get information about candidates? Are they in echo chambers? Or not even hear the echoes?
Very roughly, you have two categories of information consumers. The first is to get its information from the traditional mainstream media. And we know from our consumption research that the largest source of news for most Americans is television, far and away, compared to other news sources compared to online and social media news consumption. Even online, conventional media are very dominant.
But all that being said, there is a very large and growing second population of Americans that doesn’t seem to be consuming any of what we call formal news. Where we see this mostly is on television, where the number of Americans consuming relevant news has been declining rapidly over the past decade, so that tens of millions of Americans, by our measurements, do not consume appreciable news.
Are those voters well informed about the candidates’ positions, as a result? Did Trump voters really like the idea of mass deportations and tax cuts for millionaires?
At least for the first group the mainstream media has a lot to answer for because the voters were not informed. That was true in 2016, and it was true this year as well. Before the election the focus of the corporate media was almost 100 percent on the horse race, like a sports competition, not as an existential decision about the future of democracy, or even less on the details of policies. You wouldn’t know what Biden did, you wouldn’t know what Harris planned, and you wouldn’t know what Trump planned if you read it. New York Times or Washington Post or other news outlets, although maybe cable did a little better on the issue of democracy.
So what information drives voting decisions? Do people simply vote their gut?
However, it is not about the facts. Over the past eight years, there has been a lot of focus on fact-checking, disinformation. And in the research world, disinformation is almost universally defined as false information. “Here is some false information.” Here is some true information.’ When do people prefer the former and how do we get them to prefer the latter?
And I think that’s all a red herring. Not that there is anything wrong with it. Lying to people is bad. We’d rather people use straight facts to talk about the world.
But I would say two things about it.
First, most things you may hear or read are neither true nor false. Strange as it may seem, it is surprisingly difficult to go from sentence to sentence and answer the question: is this true? Some statements are obviously true or false, but most are somewhere in between. So the focus on total falsity, while understandable, is a lot of effort devoted to something that is quite rare. Not that the news isn’t misleading. It is often! On the contrary, you should not lie to people to deceive them.
The second thing I would say is that people don’t really respond to the facts. What people respond to are stories, narratives. And I think this election was like most elections win and lose in narratives. “Illegals are raiding the border and taking away our jobs, raising prices, etc.” I mean, what does that even mean? Is it true? Is it a lie? Is it even a factual claim?
I would say no. Rather, it is a story, a narrative. It is a framework that helps people make sense of the world. Perhaps more importantly, it gives them something to feel guilty about and mad about, which spurs action. But it is not true or false to prove.
Narratives like this—”crash inflation,” “open borders,” “boys in girls’ bathrooms”—drive emotions. And emotions drive behavior, including voting behavior. Reality is unfortunately irrelevant.
On a remote level, I believe that reality affects people’s consciousness, but only indirectly. The thing that directly affects this awareness is the perception of reality, and narratives shape perceptions much more than facts.
What, if anything, should be done about this?
Here is a prediction. Everyone has said that the economy is doing terribly. I bet it will flip. You take a poll today, and you’ll see that people are much more optimistic about the economy, even though nothing has changed. Trump is not yet in power and suddenly people will say, ‘Oh, the economy is great.’ Inflation will disappear as a problem. Prices won’t go down, prices will still be higher than they were four years ago, but everyone will stop caring. Reality is surprisingly irrelevant.
How to help voters? First, recognize that what they really care about is the story. So, to be successful, politicians must be good at crafting stories. And right now, Democrats are worse storytellers than Republicans.
The fight the Democrats have had is about politics. Let’s try to figure out what people need and then find ways to help them. Honestly, I think it’s good government, but I don’t think it’s how you win elections. To win the election, I think the voters have to be given a better story, and that’s a completely different battle.
This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author(s) are not necessarily their own. American scientific.
