What one voter can tell you – an “aha” moment
I should have seen it coming. Recently, Donald Trump has been advancing in the polls. Polls, for all their inaccuracies, can indicate trends. These days when the difference between Trump and Harris always falls within the statistical margin of error you can’t put much stock in them as a means of prediction. But a shift can be meaningful. How can it be that Trump, who is becoming more unhinged by the day, actually be gaining?
What has changed?
It came in a conversation I had recently with a woman whose vote over the years has been reliably Democratic. Not a strong Democrat, but a steady one. Until two weeks ago when she told me she hadn’t decided between Trump and Harris. Why? Two words, said with vehemence: “the border.” For a moment I was so stunned I didn’t grasp what she was saying—what border?
Then it clicked and got amplified as she expanded on the theme of violent, bloodthirsty immigrants pouring across the southern border, raping, pillaging, murdering, and bringing fentanyl and other illegal drugs into the U.S. She told me she had been watching Congressional hearings where border patrol agents spoke of hordes of immigrants overpowering their personnel through sheer force of numbers.
There was little I could say to allay her fears. Facts—even those she conceded to be true—didn’t matter. It didn’t matter to her that crime rates among immigrants are lower than among native-born Americans. It didn’t matter to her that Trump torpedoed the bipartisan border bill hammered out in the Senate with the approval of conservatives. It didn’t matter to her that most illegal drugs come into the country through official ports of entry. It didn’t matter to her that most immigrants come here to work and send money home (and get work because they will work harder and longer for less pay than native-born Americans), so avoiding arrest is high on their list of priorities. Her fear overrode her ability to think rationally. A few explosive anecdotes can wipe out the effect of a mountain of statistics.
After this conversation, a few days later I had an “aha” moment when I heard about Trump’s recent rise in the polls. He and his surrogates have been pounding ever harder and more viciously on the anti-immigrant message, a constant barrage that is overwhelming the belief systems of voters susceptible to fearmongering, of whom there are enough to decide a close election.
Trump is counting on fear of The Other to get elected
Fear is Donald Trump’s stock in political trade. It was in 2016. If he wins the 2024 election, it will be because he’s managed to scare enough voters with the threat of violent immigrants coming across our southern border to overrun the country. Already, he claims completely without evidence, that they have taken over whole communities.
(For a fact-checking attempt of Trump’s immigration claims, see this in CNN.)
Fear is so powerful because it has high survival value. A lack of love may make you miserable and harm your health in the long run, but a lack of fear can get you killed, and fast. In a nation so politically and culturally divided, breathing toxic fumes of rage and hatred boiling up out of social media, fear is always close at hand.
Because Trump knows this, he has, according to a report in today’s New York Times, decided to put immigration front and center in his current campaign. According to the Times, “Trump believes immigration ‘beats out the economy’ and he’s made it his closing message.”
These days Trump uses “immigration” as a blanket term covering most illegal and legal immigration—at least that of brown-skinned people like Haitians in Springfield, Ohio. And the immigrants he speaks of are always either dangerous criminals or parasites draining our social services.
According to The Times, Trump’s instincts are “at odds with the data.” Surveys find “Voters frequently rank the economy and the high cost of living as their most important issue.” According to The Times, Trump’s own advisors are encouraging him to talk more about the economy. But Trump finds speaking about the economy boring.
The NYT analysis leaves out the fact that this election will be decided on the margins. The bizarre belief that Trump would be better on the economy sticks with the majority of voters no matter what he says. Other issues being equal, immigration could tip the balance. Trump is winning on immigration by villainizing and dehumanizing immigrants, to include legal ones if they have the wrong skin color.
It’s not just immigrants who are being villainized and dehumanized. It is all of Trump’s adversaries (real and perceived): the press, the Deep State, the political left, Muslims, Christians who value love over hate, judges who rule against him, and anyone who has ever crossed him and failed to ingratiate themselves later. He has repeatedly called Adam Schiff, the lead prosecutor in Trump’s first impeachment trial, one of the “enemies within,” part of the radical “lunatic left.” This foreshadows what Schiff’s fate may be during a Trump administration. If they don’t have evidence to bring an indictment, they’ll make his life hell anyway with multiple investigations. He won’t be the only one.
In November of last year, Trump notoriously referred to his political opponents as “vermin,” echoing the kind of language used by Nazis, Stalinists, Mao Zedong, and Pol Pot, among the best known authoritarians. He has said,
We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.
Professor of history and author of the book Strongmen Ruth Ben-Ghiat said last year, that “othering an entire group, whether it’s immigrants or political opponents,” is key to the success of political strongmen:
You need to get people to feel they have an existential threat facing them. And the more they feel uncertain and fearful, the more the strongmen can appear and say, ‘I alone can fix it.’
Tribalism intensifies fear of The Other
To the extent that emotions matter as much or more than rational consideration of the facts, Trump has the edge on immigration because, as Michal Ann Strahilevitz wrote in Psychology Today in 2012, negative emotions have the most impact. That’s why in 2012, Obama’s and Romney’s political campaigns put out more negative ads about their opponents than positive ones about their own candidate—80% in the case of Obama and 85% in the case of Romney. No matter how much voters complain that candidates don’t talk enough about the issues, ultimately their votes are shaped as much or more by emotions than by facts.
Donald Trump and his allies have exploited tribalism to intensify fear among their followers—fear not only of immigrants but also members of the opposing political tribe, Democrats such as Adam Schiff. He has lumped Democrats together with immigrants into a super-tribe of “enemies within.” (No matter that the tribe most dangerous to the country is in fact MAGA extremists. In Trump world facts are brushed aside, to be replaced when necessary by “alternative facts”—i.e. made-up stuff.) In an article in The Conversation in 2019, psychiatrist and neuroscientist Arash Javanbakht points out that people are “more emotional and consequently less logical” at a tribal level.
In this way Trump brings into the fold political moderates who might not be swayed by attacking Democrats as a political entity, but can be swayed by conflating Democrats with bloodthirsty invaders. Their concern about a flood of immigrants morphs into an identification with the anti-immigrant tribe, at war with the supertribe of immigrants plus Democrats.
Why doesn’t fear of Trump counterbalance fear of immigrants in the minds of voters?
Those of us who are terrified by the prospect of another Trump administration are vexed by the inability of so many voters to understand that the threat of a Trump presidency to the United States dwarfs the threat from a relatively small number of criminal brown-skinned immigrants. The polls still show close to half of Americans are ready to vote for a man who tried to overthrow our government and set himself up as king. Even if they’re off by five points, the magnitude is staggering.
There are many reasons. Perhaps the main reason is the short memory and short attention span of the average American voter. January 6, 2021, is a distant memory, and those who do remember discount its significance. As for Covid, people tend to blot out the memory like a bad dream.
Secondly, even for the majority of those who do recall the horror of January 6, politics has little salience in their daily lives. They believe it’s never mattered that much in the past, why should it matter now? Nothing really changed on January 6, so why the fuss?
For the kind of disconnect from reality that has Trump nearly equal to Harris in the polls, we have both the education system and the media to blame for failing to convey just how important the government is—or even what it is. A survey by the Annenberg Public Policy Center in 2022 found that fewer than half of Americans could name all three branches of government—and a quarter couldn’t name one.
The most relevant factor at the moment may be the normalization of divisive and violent rhetoric, simply through repetition. Most Americans outside of the MAGA army have become so habituated to the language of fascism that it has become just so much noise to their tired ears. Speeches heard as rallying cries by MAGA proto-fascists are perceived by most voters as just so much political posturing—so Trump’s exaggerating, what else is new?
It seems too late in the game before Election Day to put much of a dent in the complacency of the public towards the danger of Trump. Most of those who vote against him will probably do so just because they dislike him. It’s a good thing he’s so unlikeable. After all, aren’t “likes” now the coin of the realm?