We get tons of articles and reports explaining why people just voted like that. However, even for specific elections, these explanations are wildly inconsistent and can’t all be true. In essence, we don’t understand it and we don’t get it. We reasonable people (who care about democracy, rule of law, human rights etc) stand no chance at all to improve things if we don’t understand what is going on, or where people are getting their (dis)information from. This is very bad given the huge challenges (climate change, war) that we currently face, and for which we need to get everyone on board. Worldwide we might have only a few elections left to figure things out. Our current academic, journalistic, political and pundit-based efforts at understanding why people are voting like that are falling far short. Our research methods aren’t up to the task.
If you are a populist however, you don’t need a precise understanding of what people are thinking. You get away with saying that things are terrible. People defending normalcy meanwhile will only succeed if we actually connect with people’s problems and if possible deal with them.
In the piece below, I talk about a very similar situation faced by the UK during the second world war, and the unorthodox ways in which they attacked this problem. Truly understanding “the vibes” at specific times and in specific regions is an absolute requirement for preventing our current descent into authoritarian rule. And if we don’t “get” it soon, the results will be truly terrible.

Before I continue, again a warm round of thanks to the many people (on Mastodon and elsewhere) who provided crucial feedback on this difficult post. I literally could not do this without your help!

For the past decade at least we’ve seen tons of theories why people are willing to vote for outright trash and would-be tyrant candidates. And it does need explaining, because to vote like that you must be terribly unhappy, very badly misinformed (by (social) media), very stupid, racist, or hate human rights, or be someone who succumbed to conspiracy theories and/or who got “red-pilled”. A mix is also a likely possibility.

These politicians are not all the same, but none of them love the rule of law, and all hold very scary ideas. Photos by Gage Skidmore (twice), Geert Wilders’ Facebook page, Vox España, Kancelaria Sejmu, Quirinale, Steffen Prößdorf, C.Stadler/Bwag, Tyler Merbler

And now after this terrible election, we’re again inundated with explanations how Kamala doing A or not doing enough of B is behind all of it. Or perhaps to not enough A and too much B. People have economic anxiety, or they are fed up with being talked down to. Or they are terrible racists, or have grievances, hate inflation. I could go on and on.

Here is a list of recent and not so recent pieces which all attempt to explain things. Notably a lot of this revolves around what Harris supposedly did wrong, and NOT around how the population voted for outright trash. Most of these articles do not face up to the nasty fact that people are very ready to vote for a self-declared wannabe dictator who wants to deport millions of people and make life hell for huge swathes of the population. Seems too important to miss. But, here goes:

Democrats do not know how to talk to young men — and it cost them (The Financial Times)
None of the conventional explanations for Trump’s victory stand up to scrutiny (The Guardian)
Was it really inflation that swung it for Trump? (The Financial Times)
It’s the Сονіd, ѕtυріd! (Arijit Chakravarty)
It’s the government, stupid! (Reinder Rustema)
Study: racism and sexism predict support for Trump much more than economic dissatisfaction (Vox)
Trump Just Ran The Most Racist Campaign In Modern History ― And Won (HuffPost)
Met haar kledingstijl onderstreepte Harris haar afstand tot het gewone volk (Dutch, NRC)
Why Kamala Harris lost: A flawed candidate or doomed campaign? (BBC)
Harris Tried to Sell an ‘Opportunity Economy.’ Here’s Why Voters Didn’t Buy It. (Barrons)
A Former Republican Strategist on Why Harris Lost (The Atlantic)
I’ve been to more than 100 Trump rallies since 2016. This is why I think he won (The Guardian)
Did sexism propel Donald Trump to power? (The Economist)
Die Welt da draußen ist größer als ein Taylor-Swift-Konzert (German, Der Spiegel)
Pro-Harris TikTok felt safe in an algorithmic bubble — until Election Day (The Verge)
Why Did Trump Win? These Dems Have Discovered a Very Disturbing Answer - Turns out it proved very hard to persuade swing voters that Trump was a bad president (New Republic)
Why Did Trump Really Win? It’s Simple, Actually (Mother Jones)
This Is the Dark, Unspoken Promise of Trump’s Return (New York Times)
Waarom de PVV zo groot werd (en nee, niet door geschrapte buslijnen, guur neoliberalisme of groeiende ongelijkheid) (Dutch, De Correspondent)
Hey stupid, it wasn’t just the economy. It was inflation (Reuters)
Trump versus Biden: The Macroeconomics of the Second Coming (Thomas Ferguson and Servaas Storm)
Democrats Wonder: Are We Too Correct? (Politico)
How could they vote for him? (Mainly Macro)
Behind Trump’s victory lies a cold reality: liberals have no answers for a modern age in crisis (The Guardian)
This Is Why Trump Won (New York Times)
Donald Trump and the language of violence (FrameLab)
The Phantom Campaign (Timothy Snyder)
The Deep Psychological Reason We’re Stuck in This Feedback Loop With Donald Trump (Slate)
Why Does No One Understand the Real Reason Trump Won? (New Republic, who do claim they understand it)
Why did Trump win? The fundamentals did it. (The Hill)
There’s No Denying It Anymore: Trump Is Not a Fluke—He’s America (The Nation)

It may be however that we are expecting too much from the press - articles telling people that their gut feeling was right tend to get read really well. Publications in the end are commercial, and not in the business of finding the truth (sadly).

Given the many different, conflicting and ever changing explanations, we can only conclude that politicians, journalists, academics and pundits have no working or consistent diagnosis why people are voting like that. Not even after the vote.

Which also means there is no chance to address the issue. Governments and established political parties however often DO think they know what is going on, and frequently remind people they really should be happy since the economy is doing so well.

From such a basis you can’t connect with a dissatisfied populace, let alone get them to vote for you. Even if your understanding of the real economy is correct (which it likely isn’t). Note that an astounding number of well-off people vote for terrible candidates/parties, so it can’t only be that.

Populist “outsider” politicians perhaps also do not understand precisely why everyone is so frustrated, but they do know how to foment yet more (culture) wars to make everyone even angrier. It appears you can stoke the flames of unhappiness without understanding its causes, and also without offering workable solutions. This does not require very special talents. It is not 4d chess. You can just say that things are terrible, and blame random stuff lots of people hate already, like immigration, “woke”, “climate hysteria” etc.

In any case, people are deeply dissatisfied with many things, and they probably have good reasons not to be happy. The issue now is, how come they are SO unhappy they are willing to vote for Donald Trump, given everything he’s promising to do. I’m not here to diagnose what might be going on, although I do have a hunch that it involves unaffordable housing & jobs that are plentiful, but which suck and are getting worse. Other common theories include “economic anxiety”, plain racism, neo-liberalism and late stage capitalism. We might also call out media distrust, (foreign) disinformation and people not knowing what they are voting for, or perhaps not wanting to know. I’m also enamored by the “Trump promises that you don’t have to think about other people.”-theory.

Although I don’t know very well what is going on, I can tell you that it is extremely worrying that so many people are super unhappy, and that we can’t even agree on why. We’re all (mistakenly) looking for that one think piece that explains why folks vote for atrocious candidates that would not improve their lives, and ruin those of many more.

The theory of course goes that if only we reasonable people understood what was going on, we might be able to do something about it. I’m not entirely sure this is true, by the way. Politicians might discover that what they’d have to do runs counter to everything they’ve been espousing for the last few decades.

Or as Jean-Claude Juncker once phrased it, “We all know what to do, but we don’t know how to get re-elected once we have done it.”. However, intimately understanding people’s worries and how they distrust you can guide your actions, even before elections happen.

Unlike populists however, we can’t just tell people what they want to hear right now. But we could work to credibly address their worries, or at the very least not make things worse by proposing exactly the wrong things.

Also good to know - periodically I think all of us (briefly) feel that we understand why people are voting like that, and what (say) the democrats obviously should have done. But I suspect that we are fooling ourselves if we think we understand the dynamics. If you are part of the establishment, or the “elite” if you will, you are not well equipped to reason about why someone would ever vote for a Donald Trump. If it were easy to understand (and act upon) this would not have happened!

Note that not all extremist candidates are Trump-level extreme. It is easier to explain why well-off people vote for populist parties that merely promise to make them richer (at the expense of immigrants, the arts, foreign aid, poor people etc), and to shield them from having to do anything about climate change. But even there it is good to know what the worries are exactly, and to understand why people are willing to vote for visibly unqualified parties that stand no chance of delivering on their promises.

This is not the first time

Now, there is a strong precedent of this “not knowing” situation and it comes from the second world war. UK society is/was so class-ridden that politicians and administrators were under no illusion at all that they knew what “the people” were thinking. Asking their servants or peers would not deliver useful or relevant answers, and they knew it. But they still needed to run a war and have people support that.

Intelligence agencies have as their remit to gather intelligence on foreign countries and their plans. In contrast, we also have things called security services that look into domestic threats. But what the UK clearly needed was intelligence on their own people, so they brazenly launched “Home Intelligence”, an actual intelligence operation on the UK population. This was a tacit admission that to policy elites, their own population was effectively a foreign country. They were more realist about that than we are today.

Home Intelligence used public sources (interviews, surveys, statistics), but also relied on informers, agents and institutes like the Royal Mail to actually spy on the population, and this of course made it controversial.

The results however read like a revelation. Almost all of their daily and weekly reports are now public, and even available as a book called Listening to Britain.

The reports are very enlightening and super relevant. For example, today we worry a lot about fake news and misinformation. Turns out that during the second world war, Germany ran multiple propaganda radio stations aimed at the UK, some of them openly German (compare Russia Today), and some of them pretending to be domestic. And lots of people fell for it. With their research, they found out how the foreign disinformation worked, and how to counter it.

Also interesting is that these reports show that “the vibe” changed frequently over time, and also had large regional variations. Some rumors/propaganda first took hold in one place before spreading to others. Knowing this created time for the government to preempt harmful rumors that could undermine the war effort. Also, then too some of the misinformation was outrageous. Today we hear of immigrants eating your pets, the persistent rumors back then were about nazis dressed up as nuns (!).

Now, doing an intelligence operation on your own people today would be considered very shady. We only do that with foreigners!

But at the same time, academics, government and the press have no idea what “the people” are thinking, yet they/we continue to write think pieces, big reports and articles. Simon Kuper recently noted in the Financial Times that politicians inhabit a world so far removed from ordinary experiences that they really have no idea what is normal.

The thing that comes closest is electoral research, in which researchers do periodically spend a lot of time gathering information from the field. However, the goal there is only to figure out how to win the next election, not to understand what is going on in a broader sense. It also appears that this election research is not working that well. Those focus groups aren’t delivering.

As an example, electoral research might tell you that voters react negatively to heat pumps (although they are awesome), and a political party might then stop talking about them. True understanding however would tell you why people don’t like heat pumps, and perhaps trace that back to specific fossil industry sponsored narratives, allowing you to adjust your own story so people hear the reality that owners of heat pumps are massively satisfied with them.

Given how unhappy everyone is, and how fascist the voting is getting around the world, it would seem almost any investment in figuring out why people are so enamored of terrible candidates/parties would be well worth it. We should end the amateur-hour efforts.

If we manage to fix our understanding, we might still have a brief period of time to do something to stop the current decay. The UK had to get people on board with the war. We have to get people on board with keeping democracy alive, and doing what is needed to prevent or deal with climate change. And if we fail, the results will be dramatic.

One dire possibility is that we find out our countries are indeed majority racist, and that we are actually looking forward to the suffering of people who are not sufficiently like us. If that is the case, I don’t know what to do.

To underscore how hard this all is, even in this century, we are still trying to understand why the first World War happened. It appears that young people were positively aching for war (section 14), something that seems very hard to understand now. But apparently populations can get seriously weird ideas. I sometimes wonder if people are voting the way they are because they are “authoritarian-curious”, just to see what it would be like. If people were not adverse to war in 1914, this too might be possible 110 years later.

But how to learn what is going on

Interestingly, the UK’s Home Intelligence effort pioneered the use of “the survey”. Surveys seem so obvious and ubiquitous right now that it is a somewhat shocking to learn someone had to invent them, but apparently this was the case.

These days, we might have to uninvent the survey to make any headway. Asking people how satisfied they are with policies has so far not helped us understand what everyone is thinking.

I am personally not very much “a man of the people”, but at least I am aware of this fact. I suspect that if your world revolves around reading and writing papers, you might not be well equipped to understand what is going in the rest of the country. It is common to hear politicians and journalists say things like “since we all work from home right now”, completely missing the point that loads of us don’t and can’t. Their bubble does so however.

As another example, some years ago a Dutch politician urged people to lower their thermostats to 19C/67F, completely missing that many cash strapped (or idealistic) people had set theirs way lower already.

The usual way for establishment politicians to understand the world is to drum up a big report. And they have drummed up a ton of those already, written by people mostly working from home in well heated houses.

I do not of course argue for re-establishing an actual spying Home Intelligence apparatus. But if we truly want to figure out what people are so unhappy about we must seriously change our ways. And not only do we need to understand the unhappiness, we must also understand who is stoking that (disinformation, information warfare, state run operations etc), and what people are making of it.

As noted from the UK’s Home Intelligence work, even if you understand what is going on today, that theory might no longer hold true a few months later. As an example, in the years before Brexit, the European Union was not even in the top-10 of things people were worried about in the UK. All that changed rapidly somehow. Clearly what is needed is an ongoing effort that continually tracks the attitudes and vibes, and who is trying to influence that.

Another lesson may be that trying to capture “the” population’s attitudes might fail even for countries smaller than the US. It is entirely possible that folks in the east of your country have a completely different idea of what is wrong than people in the west. In Germany this is obviously the case.

One thing you learn if you lead any kind of organization is that there are things in the company that ’everyone knows’, yet which completely fail to reach decision makers. This is true to a comical extent (ask me how I know). Because of this, successful managers make sure they have secret sources of information embedded at all levels of the organization. Spies if you will. Previously, smokers formed such an informal intelligence network, since they tended to mingle outdoors while lighting up.

But if we are to move on beyond nice surveys and academic interviews, politicians and other policy makers will need to deploy similar techniques to get far better information on what actions would increase the population’s confidence in “normal rule of law” government again.

I’m well aware that existing (legacy?) political parties might not be able to benefit from having better knowledge because of historical hangups, ideology and deep-seated voter distrust. But not knowing what is going on is definitely also not going to help.

Another question is of course precisely who should be doing this research, and what we’d do with the results. Most university departments are uniquely unsuitable (except for some places perhaps), as are traditional research firms. Interestingly, traditional left leaning parties may be slightly better equipped because of their at least historical ties to labor movements, where the situation of actual workers is closer at hand. This might lead to better information. However, even then you can’t just barge into a neighborhood and start asking around. It will still require skilled work to find stuff out.

UPDATE: Two readers have asked why I think most university departments are uniquely unsuitable. Universities are extremly closely associated with establishment politics (even though this is not necessarily the case in reality). If a university starts interviewing people, many voters will not be ready to open up or even be willing to participate. Now, as I link above, there definitely are academic researchers that have the skills to gather data from environments that are foreign to them. Ethnographers and anthropologists for example. But in general, political science or social science departments would in practical terms have a very tough time connecting with angry voters, let alone to gather deep insights.

Governments themselves can’t do this research too openly since it is now apparently picking sides if you want democracy to succeed.

In terms of what to do with results, I can’t stress enough that just listening to voters and trying to fix their biggest worries won’t solve your problems. As with any kind of feedback, you need to listen really well to figure out where the frustration is ultimately coming from. And that may not actually be “immigrants”, but more “I can’t get to work in time because I can’t park there anymore[, because there are too many cars, and I think these are from immigrants]”.

Social media is rightfully seen as a cause of our problems, but if studied well, it also offers unparalleled insights into what many people are thinking (and who is trying to influence them). With sufficient analysis, this may tell us about trends and what is going on (without resorting to tracking individual people please).

I wish I could end this page on a more upbeat note, but I fear that I have no ready solutions at hand. But I do hope I’ve offered somewhat of a diagnosis of the problem: we are faced with the forces of darkness, people are voting for it in droves, and we don’t understand the complex reasons why, and our methods for figuring that out are clearly failing. And the deck is stacked against us since populists only need to stoke worries.

Good luck everyone. If you have suggestions, I’d love to hear them!

– bert (bert@hubertnet.nl)

PS: If at the end of this you still think “how hard could it be”, I urge you to scroll back to the 31 articles linked that come to vastly differing conclusions, mostly studying a single election. It really is an unsolved problem.

We don't know why people are voting like that, and the results are terrible

This is not the first time

But how to learn what is going on

Further reading, links