Forging a Way Forward

Donald Trump’s re-election is a concussive blow to all who believe in and support an inclusive democracy, the separation of church and state, meritocracy over cronyism, and institutional checks and balances over authoritarian rule.

As we emerge from the fog of knowing that half of our countrymen chose a liar, convicted felon, insurrectionist, and ally to foreign dictators to run the government, it’s natural to ask the question: How did this happen? Actionable answers are vital to forging a way forward.

No Mandate From the Voters

First, let’s understand what happened. Trump won the election without winning a majority of the popular vote (exactly 50.0% as of this writing) and just somewhat more votes than his 2020 total. Kamala Harris received 2.6 million fewer votes than Trump out of more than 153 million votes cast – a difference of less than 2% of the total vote. Trump’s win is in no way the mandate from the people that he claims or that this electoral college map would suggest:

For a better visual illustration of this year’s vote, the Washington Post’s designers cleverly developed a map that depicts the distribution of individual votes as red and blue grains of sand. The accumulated piles of “sand” show a much different picture:

If the map looks a little muddy, it’s because the concentrations of red and blue are far more mixed than on the electoral map, which portrays a sharp contrast and clarity of all-or-nothing electoral college votes.

Now, the visual evidence bears out the conclusion that the country is almost equally divided on the question of who we want to lead us.

The False Narrative

No matter how many times Trump voters have been told that there is no evidence that the 2020 election was stolen, they continue to claim otherwise. Despite the evidence presented during the televised hearings of the January 6 Committee, Trump loyalists insist there was no insurrection. And Trump supporters disregard the warnings that he is a fascist and a threat to our democracy, warnings that come not just from Democrats but from many Republicans and military leaders, including some who were members of his first administration.

Instead, according to an AP survey of 120,000 voters, one-third of Trump voters claim that it is the Democrats who are the threat to democracy; they told AP the democracy issue was the number one factor behind their vote.

A 66-year-old tea party activist interviewed by the AP said, “We had tyranny under the Biden-Harris machine.” She also believes that Biden used the Justice Department against his political adversaries, an allegation that an investigation by the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee, begun in January 2023, did not substantiate.

Still, misplaced concern over the fate of democracy lagged behind inflation and immigration as the primary motivation for Trump voters. On inflation, voters were undoubtedly influenced by Trump and his surrogates, who repeatedly cited the high cost of eggs as evidence of the inflation caused by President Biden’s economic policies. This assertion obscured the primary factor, which was the bird flu that sickened millions of chickens across the country, causing a shortage in the supply of eggs. Voters believed the MAGA lie and not the farmers whose livestock were decimated.

Voters also chose to ignore Trump’s unofficial veto of the very conservative bipartisan border bill negotiated by the GOP’s James Lankford (OK). Instead, they focused on Biden’s failure to act on the border in his first three years.

We’ve documented elsewhere how Republicans have, for more than 40 years, tapped into the anger simmering among Americans who have felt left behind and/or betrayed by the federal government and the media. That anger has multiple sources, among them the loss of Jim Crow, perceptions of government-supported repression of religious expression, fear of immigrants, the real loss of jobs, homes, and the ability to provide for loved ones, and special interests on the Left that ignore the existential struggles of what seems to be a forgotten class. Over decades, the GOP successfully turned that anger into a united and engaged populist movement distrustful of Democrats, the media, and the federal government, blaming them for their loss of economic and social dignity and status.

Trump’s return to the White House means he will further dominate the national narrative, making it even more difficult for evidence-based truths to be heard and believed as owners of national media like the Washington Post’s Jeff Bezos bend further to Trump rather than risk his retaliation.

A Way Forward

Breaking through Trump’s false and distorted narrative is a critical step to renewing a problem-solving culture that honors the revolutionary commitment to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all.

Voters want a message of hope and reassurance that our democracy can give them a fighting chance to improve their lives. Barack Obama proved that in his first campaign, as did Harris during the first two months of hers.

In an interview with CNN, Frank Luntz, the Republican pollster and frequent guest on television news programs, cited the first 60 days of the Harris campaign as the “best of any presidential candidate in modern history”. His reasoning: she was telling the electorate why she would make a good president.

Luntz, who first achieved notice in the 1990s for shaping the language Republicans used to vilify their Democratic opponents and cast doubt on climate science, knows a thing or two about what makes the electorate tick. In his view, when Harris pivoted to telling voters not to vote for Trump because our democracy was at stake, “that’s the moment everything froze” – her poll numbers, which had been steadily rising, stopped going up.

Luntz makes a good point that has deeper strategic implications. Just as the Right achieved its goals through an unrelenting 40-year-long narrative that undermined faith in the institutions vital to a government responsive to the needs of all people, Americans now need a comparably unwavering narrative that highlights efforts to address those needs.

While Trump has fed his public fictional stories of immigrants eating cats and dogs – stories that may resonate less once he begins to govern, we can all tell and share more stories like that of Nate Hine and his wife Nellie Pennington, foster parents in Vermont who have much to say about poverty and the child protective system. And Holly Martin, who started the Chattanooga Sustainable Food Center in a food desert to serve the less privileged and more impoverished residents of the city while also supporting local farmers. And Kendra Abkowitz, who leads efforts in Nashville, hard hit by extreme weather events in recent years, to make the community more climate resilient and sustainable.

Cathy Giessel, the popular Republican state senator in Alaska, and Ty Seidule, retired army general and historian, offer two more stories worth sharing. Giessel was primaried by her own party for being too bipartisan in her efforts to govern and make Alaska better. She was re-elected in 2022 after the voters chose to implement open primaries and rank choice voting, two fixes for elections rigged for party control and dominance.

Seidule recognized that in the South where he grew up, the losers of the Civil War got to write its history. He helped shepherd an effort to correct that legacy.

Stories such as these reflect the deep personal engagement of Americans who believe in confronting problems in their communities with the ideas and resolve to solve them.

In a post-election conversation with Jon Stewart, historian Heather Cox Richardson spoke of the human need to build communities and take care of the people we love even as the country abandons democracy as we’ve known it. She closed with this thought, “We can all do the right thing even when it feels like the walls are closing in.”