In the aftermath of the 2024 U.S. presidential election, polling has once again come under fire. In a small surprise after 2020’s drawn-out ending, results came quickly on November 6, returning former president Donald Trump to the White House.
In the final count, Trump collected 312 electoral votes to 226 for Democratic nominee Kamala Harris. While some votes are still being counted, the broad trends that won the election for Trump are also coming into focus. Echoing public opinion scholars, Duncan Watts of the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, author of Everything Is Obvious Once You Know the Answer, believes that Trump benefited from a broad anti-incumbent trend seen in elections worldwide; that sentiment swung enough undecided voters to his tally to win him the swing states needed for victory.
“The explanation that seems the most plausible, because it is the simplest, is just that incumbents around the world have been losing elections almost regardless of ideology,” Watts says. “That’s consistent with a ‘grumpy voter’ theory, when voters are just mad. They just vote out incumbents. They don’t really know why, and they don’t really care.”
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That still leaves open questions of why U.S. voters behaved this way. By many objective metrics, the U.S. economy outperformed almost all other developed countries over the last two years, making it the “envy of the world.” Why didn’t U.S. voters seem to notice? In a conversation with Scientific American, Watts delved into these election year puzzles.
This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Where are so-called grumpy voters getting their information about candidates? Are they in echo chambers? Or not even hearing the echoes?
Very roughly, you have two categories of information consumers. The first one is getting its information from conventional mainstream media. And we know from our research on consumption, that the biggest source of news for most Americans is television, far and away, five to one over other news sources compared with online and social media news consumption. Even online, it’s vastly dominated by conventional media.
But having said all of that, there’s a second very large and growing population of Americans who do not seem to be consuming any of what we call formal news. Mostly where we see this is television, where the number of Americans consuming any substantial news has been dropping rapidly over the last decade such that tens of millions of Americans, according to our measurements, are just not consuming any appreciable news at all.
Are these voters well-informed about the candidates’ positions, as a result? Did Trump voters just really like the idea of mass deportations and tax cuts for billionaires?
At least for the first group the mainstream media has a lot to answer for because voters were not informed. That was true in 2016, and it was true again this year. The focus of corporate media ahead of the election was almost 100 percent on the horse race, like a sporting contest, not like an existential decision about the future of democracy, or even less the details of policies. You wouldn’t know what Biden had accomplished, you wouldn’t know what Harris planned, and you wouldn’t know what Trump planned if you read the New York Times or the Washington Post or other news outlets, although maybe cable did a little better on the democracy issue.
What information then drives voting decisions? Do people simply vote on their gut?
Whatever it is, it’s not about facts. There’s been a lot of focus on fact-checking, on misinformation, in the last eight years. And in the research world, misinformation is defined almost universally as false information. There’s just an enormous amount of research on, “Here’s a piece of false information. Here’s a piece of true information.” When do people prefer the first thing, and how do we get them to prefer the second thing?
And I think all of that is kind of a red herring. It’s not that it’s wrong. It’s bad to lie to people. We would prefer people used correct facts to talk about the world.
But I would say two things about that.
First, most things that you could hear or read are neither demonstrably true nor false. As odd as it sounds, it’s surprisingly difficult to go through a news story sentence by sentence and answer the question: Is this true? Some statements are obviously true or false, but most are somewhere in between. So the focus on outright falsehoods, while understandable, is a lot of effort devoted to something that’s pretty rare. It’s not that the news isn’t misleading. It often is! Rather, it’s that you don’t need to lie to people to mislead them.
The second thing I would say is that people don’t actually respond to facts anyway. What people respond to are stories, narratives. And I think this election, like most elections, was won and lost on narratives. “Illegals are storming the border and taking our jobs, driving up prices, etcetera.” I mean, what does that even mean? Is it true? Is it false? Is it even a factual claim at all?
I would say no—rather, it’s a story, a narrative. It’s a framework that kind of helps people make sense of the world. Perhaps even more important, it gives them something to blame and to be mad about, which drives action. But it’s not demonstrably true or false.
It’s narratives like this one—“rampant inflation,” “open borders,” “boys in girls’ bathrooms”—that drive emotions. And it’s emotions that drive behavior, including voting behavior. Reality is sadly unimportant.
At some distant level, I think reality does impinge upon people’s consciousness, but only very indirectly. The thing that is directly impinging on that consciousness is the perception of reality, and narratives shape perceptions far more than facts do.
What should be done, if anything, about this?
Here’s a prediction. Everybody’s been saying the economy is doing terribly. I bet it’ll flip. You run a survey today, and you’ll see people much more optimistic about the economy, though nothing has changed. Trump is not even in power yet, and suddenly people will be like, ‘Oh, the economy is great.’ Inflation will just disappear as an issue. Prices won’t go down; prices will still be higher than when they were four years ago, but everyone will just stop caring about them. Reality is just sort of surprisingly irrelevant.
How to help voters? First, recognize that what they really care about is the story. So to be successful, politicians need to be good at crafting stories. And right now, Democrats are worse storytellers than Republicans.
The battle Democrats have been fighting is about policy. Let’s try to figure out what people need and then come up with ways to help them. I actually think that’s good governance, but I don’t think it’s how you win elections. To win elections, I think you need to give voters a better story, and that’s a different battle altogether.
This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.
