In the aftermath of the 2024 US presidential election, polls are once again under fire. In a small surprise after the long end of 2020, results were quickly released on November 6th, returning former President Donald Trump to the White House.
In the final tally, Trump received 312 electoral votes to Democratic candidate Kamala Harris’ 226. While some votes are still being counted, larger trends in Trump’s victory are also coming into focus. Duncan Watts of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, who agrees with the opinions of public opinion experts, says, “ Everything becomes clear when you know the answerbelieves that Trump benefited from the broader anti-incumbent trend seen in elections around the world. That sentiment attracted undecided voters to his count and won him over in the battleground states he needed to win.
“The simplest and most plausible explanation is simply that incumbents around the world continue to lose elections, with little regard for ideology,” Watts said. “This is consistent with the ‘durious voter’ theory that voters are just angry. They just vote out the incumbent. They don’t really know why and they don’t really care. No.”
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This still leaves open the question of why American voters acted the way they did. By many objective metrics, the U.S. economy has outperformed nearly every other developed country over the past two years, making it the “envy of the world.” In a conversation with Why Didn’t American Voters Realize? scientific american, Watts delves into these election-year mysteries.
This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Where do so-called disgruntled voters get their information about candidates? Are they in an echo chamber? Or maybe you can’t even hear the echo?
Very broadly speaking, there are two categories of information consumers. The first way is to get information from traditional mainstream media. And consumption research shows that television is the number one source of news for most Americans, with online and social media news consumption five times higher than any other news source. Even online, it is heavily dominated by traditional media.
But that being said, there is a second, very large and growing population of Americans who don’t seem to consume so-called official news at all. We see this primarily on television, where the number of Americans who watch important news has declined sharply over the past decade, and by our measurements is in the tens of millions. of Americans don’t watch any news of any value at all.
As a result, are these voters well-informed about the candidates’ positions? Did the people who voted for Trump really like the idea of mass deportations and tax cuts for billionaires?
The mainstream media has a lot to answer for, as voters were left uninformed, at least for the first group. That was true in 2016, and it’s true again this year. Before the election, corporate media’s focus was almost 100 percent on horse racing, like a sports contest, and not on existential decisions about the future of democracy, much less policy details. After reading this article, you won’t know what Biden accomplished, what Harris planned, and what Trump planned. new york times or washington post Or maybe Cable, like other news organizations, was a little better on democracy issues.
So what information influences voting decisions? Do people just vote with their gut?
Whatever it is, it’s not about the facts. For the past eight years, the focus has been on fact-checking and misinformation. And in the research world, misinformation is almost universally defined as misinformation. There’s a huge amount of research on “this is misinformation.” Here is the real information. ” When do people prefer the first thing, and how do you get them to like the second thing?
And I think that’s all kind of dangerous. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s bad to lie to people. We want people to use true facts to talk about the world.
But I would like to say two things about it.
First, most of what you can hear or read is neither obviously true nor false. It may sound strange, but it’s surprisingly difficult to read a news article sentence by sentence and answer the question, “Is this true?” Some statements are obviously true or false, but most are somewhere in between. So while it’s understandable to focus on outright falsehoods, a lot of effort goes into something that’s pretty unusual. That’s not to say the news isn’t misleading. That’s common! Rather, it means that you don’t have to lie to mislead people.
The second thing I want to say is that people don’t really respond to facts anyway. It’s stories, stories that people respond to. And I think, like most elections, this one was won or lost by the story. “Illegal aliens are pushing into our borders, taking our jobs, and raising prices.” What does that mean? Is it true? Is that a lie? Is that a claim based on fact?
I would say no. Rather, it is a story and a story. It’s a framework that helps people understand the world. Perhaps more importantly, it gives them something to blame and something to be angry about, which spurs them to action. But it is not an obvious truth or falsehood.
Stories like “rampant inflation,” “open borders,” and “women’s bathrooms in men’s bathrooms” move emotions. And emotions drive behavior, including voting behavior. The reality is sadly unimportant.
I think that on a distant level, reality influences people’s consciousness, but only very indirectly. It is our perception of reality that directly influences our consciousness, and stories shape our perceptions much more strongly than facts.
What should I do if something happens regarding this?
Here’s a prediction. Everyone says the economy is in terrible shape. I’m sure it will turn over. If you conduct surveys today, you’ll find that people are much more optimistic about the economy, even though nothing has changed. Trump isn’t even in power yet, and suddenly people are going to think, “Oh, the economy is great.” Inflation will simply disappear as a problem. Prices aren’t going down, they’re still higher than they were four years ago, but no one will care anymore. Reality is surprisingly irrelevant.
How do you help your constituents? First, recognize that what they really care about is the story. Therefore, for politicians to be successful, they need to be good at crafting stories. And right now, Democrats are worse storytellers than Republicans.
The battles Democrats have been fighting are about policy. Figure out what people need and think of ways to help them. Actually, I think that’s good governance, but I don’t think that’s the way to win elections. I think in order to win elections we need to give voters a better story, but that’s a whole different battle.
This is an opinion and analysis article and the views expressed by the author are not necessarily those of the author. scientific american.
