The past week, I’ve been debating whether or not to repost Peter Savodnik’s incredible profile of some voters and their reasons for casting a ballot for Donald Trump. I was still going back and forth on it yesterday when I overheard a political conversation that — put mildly — didn’t do it for me, so the article’s getting reposted.
I won’t go into the details of the conversation, but the gist of it was “Trump voters are scary.” Now I didn’t see what this person did, so maybe the specific people she saw were indeed frightening. But I know enough people who are voting for Trump to know “Trump voters are scary” can’t be a blanket statement, the same way I know enough people voting for Harris to know “Harris voters are radicals” can’t be a blanket statement. Our political parties aren’t populated by two-dimensional Bond villains. They aren’t populated by lemmings either.
It’s that last point I want to focus on, and particularly regarding those voting for Trump. Earlier this year, a journalist said something that I haven’t been able to shake. Speaking at a roundtable, he said, “What Democratic strategists fail to understand is a lot of people who vote for Trump don’t like him.” The implication, of course, is those voters like the Democratic candidate even less. Why would that be? (The journalist said this long before Harris entered the race, so accusations of widespread racism and sexism need not apply.)
Democratic strategists and leadership can’t keep blaming the other side for their own lack of popularity. They have to look inward. They have to see they can’t call inflation transitory when it’s clearly not. They can’t say the border isn’t an issue when it clearly is. They can’t botch an Afghanistan withdrawal and hold no one accountable. They can’t say their guy is fit to run for office and then dump him with barely three months to go because they’ve been found out. And they can’t demonize the other side’s voters (calling someone uninformed, misinformed, deplorable, etc. is far different than calling someone a Marxist or a radical). These are all unforced errors. Far more important, they’re an insult to voters, putting the lie to national Democrats portraying themselves as the adults in the room. Are they better than national Republicans and Trump? That’s for voters to decide, but Democrats haven’t helped themselves the past four years, and the polling shows that. How else can a man who tried to steal the last election be on the verge of winning this one?
We’ll see who wins tomorrow, but if Trump prevails, it won’t be because he beat Harris. It will be because Democrats beat themselves.