They Did Vote For This

Voters don’t vote for policy, but that’s not exculpatory

In Trump’s first term, the media was obsessed with interviewing Trump supporters in diners and breathlessly reporting that they still liked Trump. In his second, however, the default Trump voter story has changed. Now, the typical narrative tends to focus, not on random interviewees in diners, but on Trump voters affected by some of Trump’s horrific policies—government workers fired, people whose family or friends have been seized by ICE. These people don’t generally reaffirm their enthusiasm for Trump. Instead they says something like, “I voted for Trump. But I did not vote for this.”

—

Everything Is Horrible is supported entirely by readers. As the freelance industry implodes and I lose more and more clients, I rely on your contributions to be able to keep working. So if you find my writing valuable, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. It’s $5/month, $50/year.

__

As election analyst G. Elliott Morris points out, progressives tend to respond to these quotes with a fair bit of skepticism. “The average reaction” to the people saying they didn’t vote for this, Morris notes, “is something like ‘yes, you did’ or ‘counterpoint: you’re complicit in fascism.’”

Morris argues that these reactions are misguided. People don’t necessarily vote for particular policies when they pull the lever for a candidate. Political scientist Seth Masket elaborates in a thoughtful discussion at his newsletter:

…we know this [voting for particular policies] is not how people decide for whom to vote. Most of us either call ourselves partisans or vote like them. We tend to vote very loyally for one party throughout our lives. And generally, we will rationalize campaign speeches and promises in a way that supports the vote we were going to cast anyway. Why would someone vote Republican today? There’s a good chance it’s because they’ve always voted Republican, because Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush was president when they were a teenager and they liked him, and especially because their parents were Republicans. Do they agree with everything Trump says or does? Almost certainly not. But they think he’ll fight for the stuff they like, and they think the stuff they don’t like is either bluster or not all that important, or at any rate far better than anything the Democrats would do.

Nonpartisans, Masket adds, are likely almost completely tuned out from politics, and have only the most tenuous grasp on the actual policies at stake. He concludes, “The blame/exoneration framework just really isn’t appropriate to describing how people make voting decisions or how they behave.”

I have sympathy for the argument that Morris and Masket are making. Voters, as Masket says, tend to vote fairly casually and often without a great deal of knowledge. In that context, does it really make sense to blame or exonerate voters? Or, to put it another way, should we really see voting as a moral act? Voting can have sweeping and horrific consequences, but it’s something that people engage in without the kind of intentionality, reflection, or knowledge that we tend to think of as necessary for ethical choices. How can you be culpable for Trump’s policies when you didn’t understand them, when he lied to you about them, and when you in fact don’t support them?

A vote for white identity is a (bad) moral choice

Again, I find Masket’s argument persuasive. But at the same time, I think that voting is a moral choice—not necessarily because people are voting on policy, but because they’re voting on identity.

As Masket says, people in the US vote mostly on the basis of partisanship, Democrat or Republican. The thing is, though, that partisanship is powerfully shaped by other identities—most notably race.

Analysts and pundits use polls to dig down and divide the electorate in a wide variety of ways after each election. But for the last 50 years at least—back to George W. Bush, back to Ronald Reagan—the biggest fact of American elections is that every racial and ethnic demographic votes majority Democrat, except for white people, who vote majority Republican.

The exact numbers vary, and Trump did better with non white voters in 2024 than in 2020 (probably because anti incumbent sentiment meant he did better with everyone). But the topline remained pretty much the same; the election was white voters (who went for Trump 56 to 40) versus everyone else.

Republicans are the white identity party; Democrats are the party of multi-racial democracy. This is so consistent, and so overriding, that people don’t necessarily talk about it that much as a driving force in elections, just as people don’t necessarily mention that the sun is going to come up when you ask them what the weather will be like tomorrow (at least not in lower latitudes!) Everyone just knows this is the baseline truth of American politics, too big to change, and therefore too big to really talk about as a factor in any given election.

While it can get downplayed in analysis, though, voters do in fact generally know this basic fact of the electoral landscape, just as people without much knowledge of meteorology understand the basic truths of dawn and dusk. When people vote for Republicans, they know they’ve voting for the white identity party. They may do that affirmatively, because they embrace white identity (and the white supremacy that goes along with a white identity party.) Or they may vote for Republicans despite white identity politics, because they think the GOP will reduce inflation. But I think people understand that the white identity party is the white identity party, and vote on that understanding, even if they don’t necessarily understand or care about specific policies.

Trump is a break with the Republican party past in certain ways (on trade policy, for example.) But as far as white identity politics go, he is not a break, but a continuation, or a doubling down. Trump’s relentless attack on immigrants—his conflation of immigration and criminality—occurs in this context. The GOP is the party of white identity and white power. Trump was telling his voters that white power is dependent on xenophobia and hatred of immigrants.

People may not have exactly understood what white supremacy policy on immigration entailed, or how cruel it would be. But they more or less understood they were voting to protect white identity from people framed as dangerous encroaching non-white hordes. And I think that voting for a fascist on the basis of white identity politics is in fact a moral error, even if you end up disliking some of the fascist policies. Martin Niemöller (who wrote the “first they came for” poem) voted for the Nazis because he wanted to put the Jews in their place. He was ultimately horrified by what exactly Hitler meant when he promised to put Jews in their place. But I think even he would agree that that belated realization was not ethically exculpatory.

Building a better coalition

Morris argues in part that it’s counterproductive to insist on the blameworthiness of Trump voters when they sincerely recoil in horror at Trump policies. They are expressing some interest in joining the anti-Trump coalition. Greeting them with anger and censure may drive them away from that anti-Trump coalition. Wouldn’t it be better to just shelve the discussion of blame or fault, and being these people on board by meeting them where they are?

To some extent, I agree with Masket and Morris that you want to try to welcome people when they turn on Trump, rather than using their turn against him as an opportunity to attack them. Among other things, people saying, “I didn’t vote for this” are often victims of Trump’s policies in one way or another, and it’s a good idea to extend solidarity to all victims of fascism, even those you have very good reason to dislike.

At the same time, though, I think that people targeted by fascists have reasonable concerns about allying with white supremacists who voted for fascism. If you say you didn’t “vote for this,” what exactly did you vote for? You don’t want “good immigrants” deported; does that mean that you still want those immigrants over there, who you don’t know personally, to be kidnapped, beaten, and shipped overseas? Can you be trusted to stand with immigrants against Trump’s cruelty? Or if people reach out to you for help, will you turn them in?

Part of abandoning a fascist coalition has to involve some level of self-reflection and moral reckoning. If you think the whole problem with Trump is that he’s not targeting the right people, then you must believe he should be targeting someone—and people in the antifascist coalition are going to have some understnadable fears that the people you think he should be targeting are us.

Unless people are willing to admit that, yes, to some degree, they did vote for this, and that was an error, then they’re not rejecting fascism. They’re just saying they want a less messy, more efficient fascism that doesn’t harm them personally. Which a lot of people are not going to find very comforting. Nor are they going to want their political leaders engaged in the project of figuring out just how much fascism they need to embrace to get the “yes but” fascists on their side.

This isn’t to say that you should reject the votes of disillusioned Trump voters. There’s good reason to tell people who are regretting their Trumpism that you voted against him precisely because you feared that federal workers would be fired, that innocent people would be deported; that he would wreck the economy. Especially when talking to people directly, but even when venting on social media, it’s wise to focus frustration and anger on the administration, and to avoid statements that sound like you’re happy that the fascists are hurting people you don’t like—even if those people initially thought they were on the fascist’s side. Martin Niemöller was terrible in a lot of ways, but I am not comfortable saying he deserved it when he got sent to the camps.

But while you don’t want to reject the votes of former MAGA, you also want to be careful about what kinds of trust you extend, and about how you integrate them into your coalition. If Trump voters want the trust of those who knew Trump was a danger all along—if they want to work effectively with those who knew Trump was a danger all along—they need to accept some blame and do some thinking about what brought us all to this place. Voting is a complicated, often confused and contradictory process, and we should all be aware of that. But I think it’s also reasonable, and necessary, to say that voting for fascism is wrong.