a kakistocracy, if you can keep it.

How to interpret the dark omens of the 2024 presidential election

Inside this issue:

• The system works, I guess

• The war for the working class

• Total information collapse

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The system works, I guess

For the record, I do not think the point or purpose of democracies is to make good decisions.¹ The point and purpose of a democracy is to make widely accepted decisions. Elections aren’t designed to make governments smarter, they are designed to leash them to the will of the people — for better and for worse.

In that sense, the 2020 election (whose results large segments of the population did not accept) was a failure and the 2024 election (whose results are generally undisputed) was a relative success. There will be no insurrection in January. To the extent that democracy is a tool for preventing violent revolution, it is working (for now).

Of course, the damage done to America’s electoral credibility in 2020 has not healed. Now that Trump’s Republican party has demonstrated the political viability of election denialism it will be a permanent fixture of American politics. Politicians of all stripes will learn to reject results they don’t like and election denial will get more sophisticated over time. It remains to be seen how effective those attacks will be in subverting elections and how corrosive they will be on public confidence in democracy — but personally I find it deeply troubling.

For now, only Trumpublicans are actively contesting election results and the 2024 results unambiguously favor Trump, so they probably won’t be contested.² It would be difficult to overstate how universally the voters chose Trump. Relative to his loss in 2020 Trump’s performance improved all over the country and in almost every demographic. He performed better in urban counties, suburban counties and rural counties. He got more popular with women, Hispanics and independents. He outperformed his 2020 results by 13 points in Uvalde county.

America overwhelmingly and with startling consistency voted to return Trump to a second term as president. So, what does that mean?

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The education / income polarity of the two parties has almost completely reversed over the last few decades.

The war for the working class

As with any election we are immediately awash in narrative takes about what happened, most extremely shallow. There are recriminations about the Harris campaign itself, of course — should she have gone on Rogan’s podcast? Should she have done more about Gaza? Should she have picked Shapiro as her VP? Should the Democrats have nominated someone else?

I don’t see any convincing evidence backing these criticisms. By all apparent indicators Harris seems to have run an extremely competent campaign. She raised ~3x as much money as Trump did, even without selling sneakers or bibles. Both Harris and Walz ended the campaign with strong and improving favorables. Her policy proposals were popular (when voters didn’t know which party they came from). She performed ~3.6 pts better on average in battleground states than the country overall, suggesting her campaign had a meaningful tactical impact in the places she campaigned the hardest.

Harris’s campaign also outperformed other incumbent parties globally. Incumbents lost elections and/or vote share this year in every single developed country, the first time that has happened in over 100 years of record keeping — basically the entire history of democracy. Against a worldwide rejection of governing parties there is only so much that message discipline and solid ground game can accomplish.

You might also wonder if Trump’s victory is a triumph of white supremacy. There’s no doubt that the Trump campaign leaned heavily on racism, but there is also no denying that Trump’s 2024 coalition was the most multiracial it has ever been. Trump got 55% of the white vote (compare to 58% in 2020 and 57% in 2016) and Harris got 43% (compare to Biden’s 41% or Hillary’s 37%). Trump is a racist with uniquely multiracial appeal. Racism alone does not explain his success.

Another popular theory (articulated here by Bernie Sanders) is that Democrats have abandoned the working class.³ That’s an incredibly strange take! Biden was the most working class president of my lifetime. He secured billions of dollars to support union pensions. He oversaw an economy with the lowest unemployment in decades, strong wage growth and where median household net worth grew by ~37%. He literally walked a picket line! If anything this administration was uniquely sensitive to the needs of working class Americans.

The more accurate — and more interesting — truth is that the working class abandoned the Democrats more than the other way around. The political landscape of 2024 is such that affluent, educated voters support progressive taxation and welfare and low income, low education voters support tax breaks for billionaires. The overarching political question of our time is: why?

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Total information collapse

Unfortunately, the simplest and most compelling explanation for why low income and low education voters are voting against their self interest is that they are also low information voters. People with mistaken beliefs about the world were significantly more likely to support Trump.

Republicans may or may not be ignorant, but ignorant people do vote Republican.

All the other causal stories about this election flow back into this one. Voters were angry about inflation because grocery and gas prices were easier to understand than wage growth and unemployment rates. They were angry about immigration because it is easier to imagine an foreigner stealing your job and eating your cat than it is to understand immigrant crime rates or the geopolitical leverage America gets from high-skill immigration. They trusted Trump because he was a "business guy" they remember from television.

This is why 2020 election denial is now a litmus test among elected Republicans. Their coalition critically depends on the support of people with low resolution models of the world that are easy to manipulate. They have completely abandoned any attempt to persuade people in favor of

1. Long time readers may have already picked up on this philosophy through subtle context clues like this July 2020 post titled "Democracies are not for making good decisions"

2. If Trumpublican electoral skepticism was sincere the 2024 results would quiet their fears — but it was never sincere, it was always strategic. That’s why Trump and his followers were noisily complaining about election malfeasance right up until it became obvious Trump was winning and then immediately stopped. They don’t actually care about election integrity, they just view it as one of the tools available for seizing power.

3. Fun fact! Bernie actually underperformed Harris in Vermont. I like Bernie but he is completely out of pocket on this one.