Are We Overreading The 2024 Election?
Was Trump's victory a sign of an emerging conservative era or merely an anti-incumbent election?
I’m Michael A. Cohen, and this is Truth and Consequences: A no-holds-barred look at the absurdities, hypocrisies, and surreality of American politics. If you were sent this email or are a free subscriber and would like to become a paid subscriber, you can sign up here.
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There is an inherent danger in taking anything that appears on Twitter too seriously, but these two tweets really stuck in my head over the weekend.
A conservative backlash may be occurring in American society, and perhaps Trump’s victory is a leading (or even lagging) indicator. But there is an obvious rejoinder.
Four years ago, Democrats won the White House, flipped the Senate, and held the House. Joe Biden won the presidency by a significantly wider margin than Trump won in 2024 (4.5 points vs. 1.5). In the House, Democrats picked up two seats and won the popular House vote by a larger margin in 2020 than Republicans did in 2024 even though Democrats lost 13 seats in 2020. In four states where Trump won, Senate Democratic candidates prevailed, suggesting he had little in the way of political coattails.
So, with that in mind, why does Trump’s victory in 2024 signal a significant backlash against liberalism … but 2020 didn’t signal a significant backlash against conservatism? Why is one emblematic of a major cultural shift — and the other isn’t?
One possible explanation is that the 2020 election is largely seen as a reaction to Trump’s chaotic presidency and the COVID pandemic. But the same can be true about 2024 — an adverse response to Biden’s presidency and post-COVID inflation. Considering that every incumbent party around the globe lost voter share in 2024, simple anti-incumbency seems like a pretty reasonable explanation.
The simple and most obvious conclusion about the last two presidential elections is that 2020 and 2024 were essentially backlash elections — more of a vote against than a vote for. But that doesn’t mean people aren’t overreacting to the results.
I don’t usually agree with Patrick Ruffini. Still, he is not entirely off base with his tweet above (though, for the record, it’s absurd to suggest that a victory of 1.4 points is a political mandate for anything other than not being the defeated incumbent party).
However, in the two months since Trump won reelection, it certainly seems that corporate America has read the 2024 election as a conservative backlash to liberal social policies and is responding accordingly. Companies are eliminating Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs and abandoning previous pledges to fight climate change.
Last week, when Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced his company’s decision to stop fact-checking on Facebook and Instagram, he cited the 2024 election as a “cultural tipping point toward once again prioritizing speech” as the reason why.
Of course, this is bullshit. Zuckerberg has long been a political weather vane who sways with the prevailing winds, and this recent decision is more of the same. In addition to scrapping fact-checking (partly a response to Trump’s active spreading of misinformation). Zuckerberg recently had dinner with Trump in Mar-a-Lago, donated $1 million to his inauguration fund, eliminated Meta’s chief diversity officer role, named Trump ally Dana White to Meta’s Board of Directors, and hired a Republican lobbyist as the company’s head of global affairs.
Zuckerberg, like many corporate CEO, wants to curry favor with Trump, avoid further regulation, and, more directly, get out from under a potentially damaging FTC lawsuit against Meta. (Another factor might be that Trump previously threatened to send Zuckerberg to jail for the rest of his life).
Let’s be honest: most corporate CEOs align politically with Trump and the GOP. Citing the 2024 election as a reason to change direction obscures the fact that many of these business titans were just playing along with liberal pieties.
Moreover, unlike when Biden won the White House in 2020, the corporate world has far more to fear from a Trump presidency and the MAGA hordes. Trump and the conservative media echosphere have repeatedly attacked companies that have upset him or adopted “woke” policies, and there’s no reason to expect that won’t continue, or even escalate, in his second term. So siding with Trump is smart business — and a way to avoid getting on MAGA’s bad side.
However, while it might seem like a smart short-term business move to suck up to Trump, from a larger political perspective, one should be careful in reading too much into what happened in November.
Trump’s margin of victory was 1.5 points, one of the narrowest presidential wins in history (Trump didn’t even break 50 percent). As I’ve pointed out numerous times here, in the places where Kamala Harris actively campaigned, she performed decidedly better than in those where she didn’t. Trump’s win was not an overwhelming victory — and certainly not as impressive as Biden’s win in 2020.
Then there is what one of my Twitter commentators called the “Iron Law of Thermostatic Public Opinion.” That means that when public policy moves in one direction, public opinion moves in the other. So, if Trump enacts far-right policies like mass deportation and tariffs, which have the potential to spark higher inflation, and if he takes a swing at Obamacare subsidies, cuts taxes for the wealthy, or tries to take over the Panama Canal or buy Greenland, there will be a backlash effect. None of those policies are terribly popular, and few Americans fully appreciate their direct economic consequences (most of which are negative).
Maybe Americans specifically voted for these policies (even the ones that Trump didn’t run on, like making Canada the 51st state). However, the more likely explanation for his victory was that they weren’t happy about inflation, the economy, and the status quo. They wanted change (even if that change meant voting for one of the two candidates who’d actually been president). Trump would hardly be the first president to misinterpret his election victory and assume a mandate even when one didn’t exist. One could argue that the same thing happened to Joe Biden from 2021-23.
(Indeed, when I wrote my book on the 1968 election, I was surprised to discover that while LBJ had won a massive victory in the 1964 election, it was not necessarily an endorsement of his Great Society plans. They were wary of LBJ”s ambitions. Americans talk a big game about wanting political change, but more often than not, they don’t like it).
Keep in mind, even though Trump is more popular now than he’s ever been … he’s not all that popular (though being a hair underwater in public approval is, in our polarized era, exceedingly impressive).
How do we know there will be a thermostatic shift in public opinion? We don’t, but we can draw some inferences from what’s happened in American politics over the past 16 years.
In 2008, Democrats won the White House, expanded their Senate majority to 60 seats, and gained 21 seats in the House—a governing trifecta.
In 2010, Republicans picked up 63 seats to gain control of the House of Representatives.
In 2012, Democrat Barack Obama won reelection, and Democrats picked up seats in both the Senate and House (the GOP still held the latter).
In 2014, Republicans gained control of the Senate and held the House.
In 2016, Republicans won the White House but lost seats in the House and Senate. Still, they achieved a governing trifecta.
In 2018, Democrats picked up 41 seats and gained control of the House of Representatives.
In 2020, Democrats won back the White House and Senate, giving them a governing trifecta.
In 2022, Republicans underperformed but still won enough seats to gain control of the House.
In 2024, Republicans won back the White House and Senate and narrowly maintained a majority in the House. They have a governing trifecta — the third different trifecta in the previous eight years and the fourth in the last 16 years.
I detect a pattern here — or perhaps, more accurately, a pendulum.
Or, to make a long story short — the most likely political outcome after two years of Trump is that Democrats make hay in the 2026 midterms and have a fighting chance to win the White House in 2028. I’m not making a prediction here, but rather suggesting that based on recent electoral outcomes, a political backlash to Trump that benefits Democrats is more than in the cards. That seems even more true when considering the narrowness of Trump’s victory this year and the American people’s continued reservations about his policies and character.
This is all a long way of saying: Don’t be shocked if, in 2029, Mark Zuckerberg is wearing kente cloth, talking about his preferred pronouns, and pledging fealty to wokeness.
What’s Going On
For MSNBC, I wrote about the pointless blame game after the catastrophic fires in Los Angeles.
Catherine Rampell makes a compelling case that Biden’s economic legacy may not amount to much.
North Carolina Republicans are preparing to steal a judicial election.
New Yorkers are coming around on congestion pricing … it only took a week.
I’m not much of a self-help guy, but I found this Ezra Klein interview with Oliver Burkeman about dealing with burnout fascinating … and, dare I say, helpful.
Vaccine rates in America are falling. That’s bad.
Musical Interlude
Paul’s bass work on “Paperback Writer” is extraordinary.
I’d never heard this Diana Ross song until today, and it’s absolutely fantastic!
I think more than one thing can be true at the same time. This was a backlash election, even though the culprit was misidentified. Many social policies espoused by some Democrats (although not Harris) are broadly unpopular, eg , DEI, "open borders" (Biden did too little too late on immigration), affirmative action, defunding the police, almost anything to do with transgender/LGBTQ rights (there must be a way to guarantee everyone's rights without provoking a backlash), vaccine mandates, and so on. Don't ignore also the effectiveness of the right-wing disinformation machine. I remain shocked that such an objectively dreadful human being got elected despite all the above and I also expect Democrats to do better at least in 2026. In the meantime we're in for some very bad times. I mean, can you imagine a president-elect demonizing people after the LA fires instead of asking first "How can I help?" Of course we don't have to imagine it.