Did Trump lose in 2020 basically because of the 4 year demographic change in the electorate and would it be even worse for him in 2024?
Even if everyone had voted the same as they did in 2016 but we lose 4 years of the oldest generation of reliable conservative voters and add 4 years of new 18-21 year-olds who skew away from Trump does that account for his loss?
In another 4 years does this demographic shift even make it worse for him?
I think he lost because he motivated votes against him. In 2016 he got a lot of “I don’t like Hillary, how bad can he be?” votes. After 4 years, we saw him as a heartless incompetent fascist.
I think in 2040 it would be very hard for someone like him to win. White supremacy doesn’t fly too well when the percentage of whites drops every year. Anti-urban rhetoric has less of an impact each year as the nation becomes more urban and less rural.
I don’t think demographics will hurt him as much as going from a celebrity blowhard to a cruel dictator wannabe.
The country gets less rural, less religious and less white every year, none of that helps Trump obviously but it doesn’t (or didn’t) hurt him as much as being Trump did.
This, and his poor handling of the Covid probably put off some voters too.
That doesn’t follow at all, the next populist politician can simply adjust his or her rhetoric slightly to appeal to new voters.
You have a point. But I don’t consider DJT to be a populist so much as a white supremacist demagogue. That could make for some interesting discussion about what is a populist- is it someone who believes the government to be an enemy? Someone against anyone currently in office? Someone who tells the people what they want to hear like “you don’t need to pay taxes”? I don’t think he sold that snake oil, I think he professed bigotry and xenophobia and his fans adore him solely because he hates the same people hey do.
That’s unfortunately not how white supremacy works. I like to refer to Ben Franklin to illustrate the issue - a lot of people don’t realize just how much of a crazy bigot he was, and doubly so because of what he was bigoted against.
Here’s a lovely little bit of bigotry:
Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion.
White supremacy… against Germans! It’s unthinkable today, but completely normal back then. I believe north-east Asians and certain latin populations will be absorbed into the definition of “white” and it will be unthinkable that, say, your Korean Neighbor wouldn’t vote for Donald Trump IV.
There are two issues at play. The first is that human nature runs a wide gambit. There are people who fundamentally perceive the world in a different way than you or I (in fact, we probably don’t even perceive the world at all similarly). For them, everything from morality to epistemology is different. The base axioms upon which their entire logical structures are built are different.
The second issue is tribalism of a nuanced sort - people who are strongly convinced of moral righteousness tend to attack, belittle, and otherwise offend people who are susceptible to alternative belief systems. Usually they do this in the belief that if they can just make the opposition feel bad enough, they’ll realize how bad they are and change. Some do it in order to reaffirm their beliefs to themselves, or to others who share the same values. Whatever the reason, it happens a lot. What it in fact does is make the opposition resolute in their beliefs and reinforces their opposition towards yours. This is rampant in society today.
So the world view that underscores white supremacy (or any tribalism) isn’t going to go away anytime soon. The definition of “white” will simply shift to once again form a majority. And people who aren’t tribal in that way will attack and excoriate those people, driving them into radicalism. It’s a pretty nasty cycle that has gone on since… ever?
Populist = tries to appeal to ordinary people by saying their concerns are being ignored by the elites. So it depends if you’d object to any populist, or only to one who’s also into white supremacy. But the appeal of anti-immigrant and anti-(Chinese/Mexican/other cheap foreign imports) rhetoric is by no means limited to white Americans. Many POC are more socially conservative than white people. So I don’t think a really radical change in policy would be necessary for a future Trump to be elected, and you’d likely still find him or her objectionable.
Also “Trump can’t possibly to win so I don’t need to vote against him”. People weren’t nearly as complacent in 2020.
I think the definition of “populist” is the last one here - someone who tells the people what they want to hear. Trump was successful because there were enough who wanted to hear the “America First” message he was spouting. Doesn’t mean he actually believed it, just that he espoused it. To that end, yes, in 20 years, Don Jr. could be spouting something similar, without the racist connotations.
The effect of demographics is hard to predict. For example, Hispanics voted much more for Trump this time than in 2016, and absolutely nobody was expecting that.
He lost because it was easier to vote in many places. That won’t be case in 2024.
I think it was a variety of factors.
Demographics were certainly one but I don’t think a major one. There wasn’t that much demographic shift in just four years.
But demographics isn’t just about who’s a potential voter. It’s about who actually shows up and votes. Some people who didn’t think Trump would get elected in 2016 took the possibility of Trump getting re-elected seriously in 2020. Some people who had been unhappy with Clinton were more willing to vote for Biden. Some people wanted to vote against Trump in order to send a message.
I feel Trump himself was the biggest factor. Trump could campaign on promises in 2016. He had to run on his record in 2020 and his record was horrible. Take his promise about building a border wall. Some of the people who voted for him in 2016 must have been disappointed in 2020 when they saw the wall was still nothing more than an unfulfilled campaign pledge.
Trump got more votes in 2020 than he did in 2016. I doubt a statistically significant number of 2016 Trump voters didn’t vote for Trump in 2020 because they were disappointed in his performance.
There were about 4m births a year between 1998 and 2002 (people who were not old enough to vote in the 2016 election but were in the 2020.
There are normally about 2.8m deaths in the US in 2017-2019, and about 3.1m in 2020 (though not all of the increase before the election).
Not all deaths are old people, but lets say that 2.5m a year are. That gives you a 26-million person swing between old people and young people per presidential election. Which is sizable. But of course many people do not vote at all (particularly 18-22 year olds) and young/old people are not monolithic voting blocks, even though old tend to vote more Republican and young more Democratic.
But also, people become more conservative as they age. So even though the old person who died before the next election is a net negative to Republican votes and the 18 year olds are a net positive to Democratic (on average), all the 44 year olds who are now 48 are also a net positive for Republican votes (again, on average).
Dave Wasserman of Cook Political Report was claiming as early as 2018 that if the '16 election was re-run then, with the same demographics voting at the same turnout rates and in the same partisan manner, that Hilary would win the rerun. Demographics are indeed changing and changing pretty fast by historical standards.
Now, demographics are not static, witness the gains by Trump among minorities and urban voters. But the biggest current demographic story is the liberalism of the youngest two generations, who approach 50% minority in make-up, and 16 million more of them come online with each new presidential election. Republicans may have lost both those generations by large margins for decades and that matters more with each cycle.
I see we still have believers in the theory that voters turn conservative as they age, despite it being completely debunked both here and, well, everywhere. Please stop repeating this old wives’ tale in a forum devoted to fighting ignorance.
I read somewhere, can’t remember where, that was a big part of Biden’s low-key campaign strategy. Their polling showed that the more the election was about Trump, the greater Biden’s chances became, but if the election was on Biden’s policy arguments, Trump’s chances improved. So Biden put his policy statements out there, but did not try to dominate the news cycle. He let Trump be Trump, reminding swing voters how mean and ineffective Trump was.
That strategy worked. Normally, undecided voters break evenly, or marginally favouring the incumbent. This time, the undecideds broke for Biden.
The voting patterns of Quebec sovereigntists demonstrate your point. In the 70s and 80s, youth voters were the hard core of the Parti Québécois base, and PQ strategists and leaders kept saying that it was just a matter of demographics until they had a strong majority of the voters, as more and more young people entered voting age.
That’s not what happened. Turns out that sovereignty is not a common goal of all young people. It was a common goal of young people who came of age in the 60s and 70s. That cohort, now in their 60s and 70s, is still the hard core of the PQ support, but today’s young voters, who came of age in an era of globalism, and who benefited from the major measures the PQ instituted when in power to end Anglo dominance and protect the French language, tend not to be sovereigntist.
Demographics is destiny, but not in a static way. The political views you acquire in your 20s tend to stick with you as you age. Whether that makes you seem to be getting conservative is more a factor of whether the new generations following you are more conservative than you (think Alex Keaton) or more liberal than you (Sixties youth).
Growing up in Saskatchewan, I met a lot of fairly radical socialists. They tended to be old, having been economically radicalised by the Great Depression and the apparent failures of capitalism. My parents’ generation and my generation didn’t share that radicalism.
History is, and kinda must be, a long slow grind leftward as populations become more educated and prosperous (along with a host of other developments). The median 65-year-old today is probably more liberal than the median 65-year-old was in 1981, who in turn was probably more liberal than his counterpart in 1941.
It’s interesting to speculate sometimes what series of events it would take for today’s Zoomers to shift rightward in their views by 2050.
If the pandemic never stops but instead morphs and evades vaccines, and American rivalries with other countries intensify, perhaps over global resources and our approach to global warming by countries who think we are not doing enough, the lack of liberality caused by a smaller world, along with feeling besieged by the rest of the world, could do it.
in a similar manner, AIDS caused a slight rightward shift in the 80s by stalling or reversing tolerance of homosexuality and definitely cutting down on the acceptability of casual sex.
For the first, no. Republican-leaning voters still turn out to vote in higher numbers than you would expect. Seniors are more likely to vote Republican, and they’re more reliable voters, but for some some odd reason (coronavirus!) they turned Democratic in higher numbers than is typically the case. I think Trump could have won, despite his massive incompetence, if he hadn’t screwed up the coronavirus.
Trump came very close to winning, since Biden won many swing states by very slim margins. Democrats shouldn’t rest on their laurels because Biden kicked Trump’s behind in the Electoral College count, nor should they rest easy because Biden won by a lot of votes (it’s the EC that counts, literally).
For the second, yes. I believe the demographic changes could move the vote as much as 0.5% per year (so 2% per presidential election) toward Democrats, but between the Electoral College and Republican dominance in non-presidential elections, Republicans are not going to be out of power any time soon.
Republicans need to worry about something else: a reasonable Republican presidential candidate probably wouldn’t do better than Trump. They would get more educated suburban voters but many Trump enthusiasts would stay home and not vote. (I believe Trump got a lot of non-voters to turn out for him. MTG didn’t even vote for him in 2016, and I think she might not have voted at all that year.)