Dylan Brogan
Seventy-five million.
That’s the number I just can’t get my head around. Seventy-five million of my fellow Americans voted for Donald Trump last fall.
It actually gets worse than that. A poll taken on the evening of the insurrection riot at our nation’s Capitol found that Republican voters were actually split in their opinion about what happened. Forty-five percent of Republicans were strongly or somewhat in favor of the mob and 43 percent were strongly or somewhat opposed. Trump has become the first president ever to be impeached twice, yet a CBS News poll found that 85 percent of Republicans still oppose his impeachment even after he clearly incited a violent insurrection that claimed the lives of five people and left our Capitol (and our democracy) in shambles.
An understandable reaction — and one I’ve heard from some of my friends — is to damn every Trump voter. But I can’t get beyond that number. Can we really afford to dismiss 75 million people?
It was hard enough to understand how anybody could vote for this guy in 2016. But I suppose the most generous-hearted, or maybe soft-headed, of us (I probably qualify on both counts) could give a pass to dyed-in-the-wool Republicans who believed that he would magically transform into a real president once the campaign show was over. Even the sainted Tommy Thompson seems to get a pass for saying in 2016 that everybody should get on the “Trump train.”
The problem is that train became a train wreck. And after four years of general chaos punctuated by moments like Charlotte that were just flat-out appalling, it’s even harder to imagine how anyone could vote for Trump again. And yet 11 million more people voted for him in 2020. Fortunately, Trump was an even bigger motivator for Democrats because 15 million more people voted for Joe Biden than for Hillary Clinton.
Still, about 44,000 votes in three states could have reversed the results in the electoral college, Democrats lost seats in the House and gained the Senate only by the narrowest of margins. The party lost every state house that it had targeted to take back, meaning that we can now look forward to another round of extreme partisan gerrymandering to lock in Republican majorities for another decade. So, not only did more people vote for Trump than any other presidential candidate in history, save Biden, but they generally supported Trump’s Republican Party in races down the ballot.
Of those 75 million people I know maybe a dozen or so. They’re relatives mostly, but some are friends and acquaintances as well. Few fit the stereotype of rural, blue-collar voters. Almost all of them have college or advanced degrees and white-collar jobs. They read books. They’re not stupid. Some volunteer in homeless shelters and do other good deeds.
Politics has been so divisive in recent years that I’ve pursued a policy of avoiding the subject with these folks. I know or suspect they voted for Trump in November because of general comments they’ve made, but I haven’t asked them why. As a writer, I probably should just to gain some insight. But as a relative and a friend I’m concerned that I couldn’t keep my temper. I’d say something they’d find offensive and, anyway, all the evidence suggests that when it comes to Trump nobody ever convinces anybody to change their minds about him.
But since I know some Trump voters, I also know that it’s not helpful to tar every one of them as morally part of the mob that disgraced themselves at the Capitol last week. There are those criminal thugs (which at several thousand represent an alarmingly high number in themselves) and then there are tens of millions who are not violent insurrectionists. And yet they voted for a man that anyone could have predicted would have incited a violent insurrection.
We can’t afford the easy dismissal of the whole lot of them simply because of the sheer numbers involved. If this were some sort of fringe group we could write them off, but when Trump voters represent nearly half the country that can’t happen. They are not going away.
Biden has promised to “lower the temperature” and he has done an excellent job of doing that during the transition. He’s struck just the right tone between appropriate amounts of outrage at how Trump has conducted himself and getting on with the work of building out a competent administration. He’s just the right man for the moment.
I think he’s set a good example for those of us who voted for him. There is an appropriate level of disgust to be directed at Trump, at his mobs, and at the media figures and politicians, like the odious Ron Johnson, who enabled all this for the last four years.
But if we’re going to keep this country together, then we need to try to understand what motivated so many of our fellow citizens to vote for a man this demonstrably awful and for the party that he dominated. It’s kind of like thinking of Trump as a public health problem. We’ve figured out the vaccines to stop the virus and I’m confident Biden’s team will figure out how to get it into people’s arms at a faster rate.
The next big national project needs to be to research the vaccine that stops the Trump virus.
