Voting against

I taught high school political science electives for over three decades. That didn't make me a political scientist. I am actually skeptical of the possibility of political "science." But I like analysis that seems to understand voter behavior. Today I read Yuval Levin on what the Presidential election results likely do not mean. Some excerpts:

The immediate aftermath of an election is a terrible time for political punditry. Everything the winner did looks brilliant, everything the loser did looks dumb, and even widely predicted results feel shocking when they actually materialize. There is no way to avoid these analytical vices, but maybe one way to minimize them is to think about what isn’t all that different or surprising about the outcome—and to trace out what the election doesn’t seem to mean. ....

Approaching this election from that angle first of all clarifies the continuity of our peculiar political era. The 2024 election was very much of a piece with our 21^st-century politics: It was a relatively narrow win owed almost entirely to negative polarization.

Preliminary exit polls reveal an electorate deeply unhappy with the status quo, just as in the last several elections. Voters were not so much excited about what Donald Trump was offering as they were upset at Joe Biden (and by extension Kamala Harris) for mishandling key public challenges, and above all the economy. ....

The exit polls suggest that family policy wasn’t high on voters’ minds in this election. Ukraine, one way or another, was not a priority either. The constituency for dispatching Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to take fluoride out of our drinking water is non-existent. People around Trump—even in the more distant reaches of his camp—are all inclined to think they’ve won a mandate for their pet cause even though voters have no idea who they are or what they want, and likely wouldn’t be on board if they did. Most of what Trump himself is most eager to do, from mass deportations to steep tariffs, would likely prove fairly unpopular when actually put into practice.

This is the trap that our 21^st-century presidents have tended to fall into. They win elections because their opponents were unpopular, and then—imagining the public has endorsed their party activists’ agenda—they use the power of their office to make themselves unpopular. ....

It would therefore also be a mistake to imagine that this election victory is an endorsement of Donald Trump’s character and behavior. In the exit polls, just 43 percent of the electorate said Trump has the moral character to be president. Fifteen percent of his own voters said he didn’t. And 67 percent of voters blamed him for the violence at the Capitol after the last election. ....

Of course, seeing what this election does not mean should not take away from what it does mean. This win has put Trump at the peak of his power. Its achievement and reach should not be underestimated, and its implications for the future of American politics are quite significant. But a peak is followed by decline, and Trump’s win does not mean that he is the future of the right or of our politics. He will return to the White House as a 78-year-old lame duck, and he has not brought American politics out of its 21^st-century deadlock. That work will have to follow in his wake. (more, possibly behind a subscription wall)

Yuval Levin, "What Trump’s Win Doesn’t Mean," The Dispatch, Nov. 11, 2024.