Last month's election was not a grand revelation about America

Not only pundits but the US electorate itself characterized last month’s presidential election as the Most Important Of Our Lifetimes, so it oughtn’t be surprising that Donald Trump’s victory has unleashed much commentary about how his latest win reveals a grand truth about America (or indeed humanity as a whole) and its hatred, misogyny, racism, and so on.

Stephen Colbert joked about switching his “I Voted” sticker for an “I am questioning my fundamental belief in the goodness of humanity” sticker:

Meanwhile, over on new media, 57-year-old TikToker sweeper698 posted a video with a million and a half likes, in which he declared that this year’s election had made him feel more heartbroken than he ever had before, because this election “invalidates everything [he] ha[d] ever been taught” about how to live life and what to teach his kids.

And here on Substack, Deborah Brasket declared “American exceptionalism” “dead”, mourning her vanquished “belief” in America as a “city upon a hill”, “beacon of light around the world”, “haven for the oppressed”, and so forth.

Le Monde’s San Francisco correspondent Corine Lesnes interviewed Kimberly Ellis, SF City Council’s head of the Department on the Status of Women and legal expert, who “is understanding that”

whatever narratives or stories we may have or may have wanted to believe with respect to what America was or is –the outcome of this election, for better or for worse – for many people, it is for worse – this is what this country is at this moment in time. And that was a very sobering realization.

Alon Pinkas wrote in Haaretz’s article “Trump's Win Reveals the Inconvenient Truths About America” that

Like it or not, this is America. This is the new America. Love it or hate it, embrace it or reject it, this is contemporary America.

Christina Cauterucci wrote in Slate that “Americans Just Voted to Burn It All to the Ground”, with “no excuses” or “sliver of plausible deniability” this time. The Nation presented an article by Elie Mystal condemning Trump and the US under the headline “There’s No Denying It Anymore: Trump Is Not a Fluke—He’s America”. On X/Twitter, John Cusack suggested that “the country would choose to destroy itself by voting in a convicted felon rapist and Nazi”, and Yvette Nicole Brown declared America “done”.

Two themes run through these reactions to Trump’s victory:

1. Trump’s victory is a phenomenon primarily of the present, “the new America” “at this moment in time”, revealing something new about America.

2. Trump’s victory this time is what shows that his 2016 win wasn’t a fluke.

Both of these notions are fallacies, perhaps emotionally comforting but ultimately misleading and wrong, and should not be allowed to harden into conventional wisdom.

To be sure, I think most of the people I’m quoting are guilty of just one of the two fallacies. For example, Mystal relies on Fallacy 2 but explicitly avoids Fallacy 1, pointing out that Trump “is, and always has been, a mirror” and “how America sees itself”, as opposed to a weird anomaly. Still, both fallacies are fallacies, and both should be rejected as such.

Naturally, if I’m going to flatly declare ideas “fallacies”, it’s on me to explain why.

The simplest way for me to do that is to remind the reader of the 2020 presidential election, when Trump won 74.2 million votes, 11.2 million more than he won in 2016 (63.0 million). If Trump was a fluke, how did he add millions and millions of voters to his tally when he ran a second time? It’s not a matter of simple population growth; despite losing in 2020, Trump gained vote share: he went from getting 46.1% of the votes in 2016 to 46.8%.

The results of the 2020 election already overturned, years ago, any hypotheses about Trump’s 2016 victory being a fluke or Not What America Really Is. Whatever happened in 2024, Trump’s growth in votes had made clear years earlier that Trump’s base was not a fragile sandcastle or fleeting will-o’-the-wisp, but durable and capable of expanding. I wrote in 2021 that “Trump has wrapped the Republican Party around his finger in the last 6 years, and it shows in the election returns”, in a postletter I literally titled “Donald J ain't going away!!”.

The 2020 election’s results indicated that Trump’s original voters were mostly willing to return him to office after witnessing him in action as President. So this year’s election results were not necessary to learn that; they merely underscored these years-old conclusions.

I am irritated and disturbed by writers stepping around the 2020 presidential election in their hand-wringing about the 2024 election, as if the 2020 election didn’t happen.

Cauterucci’s Slate article began with a paragraph about the 2016 election, then leaped forward 8 years in a single paragraph break, opening the second paragraph with “This time around, there were no excuses”. The article did allude obliquely to 2020 and its election, referring to Trump being “the one holding the reins when a pandemic took hold” and to the January 6 Capitol rioters being “there when he [Trump] refused to admit that he’d lost the election”, but the string “2020” appears nowhere in the article and the article simply lumped the events of November 2020 and January 2021 together with Trump being found guilty of 34 felonies and “liable for sexually abusing E. Jean Carroll”.

Elie Mystal’s article elides 2020 and its presidential election even more effectively, to the extent that it could’ve been run in a magazine after the 2016 presidential election and made about as much sense. Admittedly, its reference to “JD Vance, and a few white South African billionaires” might have come across as something of a non sequitur back then, but pretty much every other dramatic, apocalyptic sentence of Mystal’s piece would work better as a reaction to Trump’s first electoral victory. Here and now it comes across as reheated and belated. “Yes, yes, yes…but where have you been for the past 8 years?” is my first reaction.

These are not the only ways that public figures have neglected 2020 (or 2016) in their 2024 postmortems. Another angle that I’ve seen is assorted pseudo-contrarians, centrists like Thomas Friedman, and Democratic Party-attached pundits, strategists, politicians, and partisans jerking their knees about how Woke™ supposedly sank Kamala Harris. I may write more on this later,1 but for now I note only the key point: the Woke™ Sank Harris argument relies on forgetting Biden and Harris’s victory in 2020, when they and the Democratic Party were far more Woke™, far louder about it, and won big: the Biden-Harris ticket got 51.3% (81 million) of the votes in 2020, versus 49.7%–49.9% (77–78 million) for Trump and Vance last month.

At the same time, those vote shares are not so far apart. There is change, but also continuity. Last month’s election was not a revelation but an incremental shift from November 2020, which was in turn an incremental shift from November 2016. The misogynistic/racist/etc. America of today is mostly the misogynistic/racist/etc. America of 4 years ago, which was in turn mostly the misogynistic/racist/etc. America of 8 years ago. The consequences of this latest election are likely to echo the consequences of Trump’s 2016 victory, and when trying to explain the causes of Americans’ voting behavior this year, the first places to look ought to be the elections of 2016 and 2020.

A month ago I stayed up late transcribing vote totals from the minority of counties that were reporting near-complete (98% or more of the expected votes counted) results, to try to anticipate which way the election was going. Once it was clear that Trump would win, I stopped, but not before harvesting results from 147 counties in 13 states (mostly Georgia, Indiana, and Kentucky, ‘cause they tended to report early). Across that sample of counties, Harris and Walz’s vote share had a correlation of +0.993 with Biden and Harris’s vote share in 2020: virtually perfect. If I’d simply predicted that each county’s Biden-Harris share in 2020 would be its Harris-Walz share in 2024, I’d be wrong by just 1.6 percentage points on average across those 147 counties.

On a county-by-county level, this election looked a lot like the last one, and I’ve seen little solid reason to assume that voters’ thought processes were uniquely radical and unusual this time. Instead of making grand new claims about old hatreds, I propose treating this election as another big slice of data to be explained through a suite of conventional mechanisms: not just race and gender and other dimensions of identity, but simple partisanship, voting on the issues, and economic voting on the basis of (un)employment, income, inflation, and so on.

NBC News, of all places, took an interesting step in this direction just 5 days after the election, with a report that counties with the “most difficult housing markets saw” the greatest shifts “toward Trump” — consistent with an earlier working paper suggesting that spikes in interest rates help explain depressed consumer sentiment despite rising wages and low unemployment. And now that county-level vote tallies for this election have finally been scraped together and publicly shared online, I hope to contribute an analysis or two in this direction. Watch this space.