Millions of Americans just voted against democracy, and themselves

Trump's victory this time cannot be blamed on people not knowing him or on Democrats. Voters embraced the authoritarian's cruelty. It will be trained on many of them.

In 2016, when Pennsylvania was called for Donald Trump and he won the election in the early hours of the morning, I had tears in my eyes as I lay in bed and posted on social media that we would fight. It was a complete aberration, I remember thinking, a jarring anomaly.

Last night, as the returns were coming in, again stunning so many of us, I felt differently.

I didn’t see it as some fluke in the making, as in 2016. Then, Hillary Clinton was hounded by the exaggerated email story, which surfaced again, thanks to FBI Director James Comey, days before the election, only to be a nothingburger. Clinton had not campaigned in Wisconsin at all. There was deep Russian interference from early on in the election.

Trump was a celebrity who had no political record, and a lot of people just voted for him without knowing much about his positions. Many people didn’t vote at all, thinking Clinton would win, because the polling was so out of whack. Third parties took just enough of the vote to pull from Clinton. Clinton won the popular vote, but the injustice of the Electoral College brought Trump to victory.

This time, however, Donald Trump won a majority of American voters in the popular vote. He won after having been a dangerous, brutal president who harmed many people, stripped the rights of Americans, put extremists on the Supreme Court, incited a violent attack on the Capitol in an effort to overturn an election, and mismanaged a pandemic, allowing millions to die. I could go on, but the bottom line: we can’t say people didn’t know him.

So last night, I didn’t cry. I felt anger and outrage, more than anything else, at those millions of Americans who willingly voted for someone who would harm this country and hurt others and even themselves. And I’m still feeling that anger right now.

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Trump was even more cruel, racist, and misogynistic in his 2024 campaign than in any prior campaign. And yet, he won the majority of voters, expanding his rural vote but also cutting into some of the suburban counties and urban counties just enough.

Exit polls are to be taken with a grain of salt, as they're always off and often revised later. But we can look at them directionally rather than precisely. According to those polls, Trump improved upon his 2020 results with Black voters a tiny bit in some places, and with Latino voters—particularly Latino men—by a more substantial amount, in both rural areas and urban areas. And he improved quite a bit with young voters and people voting for the first time.

That was all enough to put him over the top. He started with his floor, his base of support. Unlike losing presidents of the past, who just faded away, very unpopular with their parties, Trump had used the Big Lie to make his base see Democrats, not him, as the losers and, more nefariously, as degenerates who stole the election. This kept his base with him for four years, even after first being jarred by January 6th. They pushed aside the attempt to overturn the election and the violence, already predisposed to forgive him. And stuck with him. Then it just became about adding a few more people here and there.

As a con man, he was able to do that. But we can’t overlook that his base and any new voters backed him knowing 100% what Trump was about. They backed him even though the Democrats had a great, energizing candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris, who ran a pretty flawless campaign—and no, I’m not going to get into the blame game I’m already seeing some Democrats engage in—a candidate who spoke to their needs at the moment regarding the economy, offering actual, detailed plans.

Trump’s misogyny, his cruelty, his racism, and his history of hate were embraced by those voters. You can say many overlooked them, but that’s still an embrace. Some may have liked his bigotry more than others—getting off on his attacks on the left, on his perceived enemies in Congress, on marginalized groups—but that doesn’t make those who didn’t like it any less responsible for their actions.

Much of what happened last night can be traced back to the COVID pandemic and how our whole world was turned upside down. The isolation and then the economic turmoil caused real shockwaves for many Americans. President Biden did an enormous, historic job at passing legislation to bring this economy back to a juggernaut, the envy of the world. GDP is surging; unemployment is 4%. Wages are up.

But for too many voters, the jolt of inflation—and the fact that prices would never come down even if the inflation rate itself slowed dramatically—was heavy. This election split along education lines, even as it cut across racial ones—non-college educated vs. college-educated—and then obviously along income brackets and those who could buffer the shock of inflation better than others.

Many of those most affected just didn’t grasp how inflation soared as a result of the economic turmoil of the pandemic and supply chain shortages and just blamed Biden—with the help of Republicans fanning exaggerations about spending and falsehoods, and a corporate media that was complicit. And they didn’t see how Biden was revitalizing the economy as Trump and Republicans played into their unease and promised to make things better.

Too many of them believed that because their own finances were in a better place before the pandemic it was somehow due to Trump—who, in reality, did nothing to make their lives better and, in fact, caused more economic inequality with his tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. The fond memories of the economy in the pre-pandemic Trump years were actually because of the rebuilt economy that President Obama left Trump.

Republicans and Trump exploited these voters’ short memories—many of the youngest voters today, don’t forget, were 15 or 16 years old during Trump’s presidency, and, like most teenagers, weren’t paying much attention to national news. Republicans exploited the lack of awareness among many about how the economy works, how Covid shocked it, and what Biden was doing.

Again, we could blame the media for this too, as I have many times, but it still doesn’t absolve these voters of their responsibility. They were warned many times in this campaign, and the truth was laid out for them. Many simply got caught up in the cult and became unreachable.

Millions of Americans voted for a man who will cause prices to spike dramatically when he imposes his 20% tariffs across the board on foreign goods. They will see members of their families, their colleagues, their neighbors and their friends, taken from their homes and sent off to camps to be deported. They will themselves experience the horrors of the Dobbs decision on women’s health, either personally or with regard to women in their lives. They will see their transgender family members or friends demonized and harmed.

They will watch discrimination against minorities—Muslims, LGBTQ people, and people of color—play out before their eyes, and sometimes it will affect them personally, as members of those groups themselves. They will see marriage equality weakened and may see entire departments of the government abolished—like the Department of Education—as Project 2025 is put into action.

Part of me wants many of those who voted for Trump to experience this as punishment—particularly those who voted on the economy and now will see prices soar from the tariffs. That’s how angry I am.

But I realize we have to fight to protect the vulnerable, no matter how uninformed they are. And the truth is, millions more among the groups that will be affected by a Trump presidency—the majority of most of the groups I mentioned—voted against him and for a new future with Kamala Harris. Many of them worked day in and day out to get her elected, worried about their own rights and the threat to democracy.

So, we have to realize that, while also realizing that the country has changed, that through a few votes here and a few votes there, Trump has remade his coalition and got people to willingly vote for his authoritarian agenda even as it will hurt many of them. We have to face that we’re in a different landscape, and our duty now is to protect people who will be hurt, stand for the truth, and still fight for democracy, as painful as this will be to do.

Grieving is important—and the anger I’m feeling is part of that—but in a short time we have to get beyond it because transformations will happen rapidly. As in other countries that faced authoritarians, we’ll need to be the pro-democracy movement. And we have to steel ourselves for the fight ahead.