'Pro-choice' Trump voters were this election's curveball

Exit polls suggest voters overwhelmingly supported abortion rights, and Trump won in a landslide anyway. It's time for Democrats to take a long hard look in the mirror.

It’s pretty easy, looking at a cartoonishly misogynist candidate like Trump—who, along with his supporters and running mate, essentially called the sitting Vice President a whore, a bitch, and a cunt in the final week of his campaign—for many of us to write this election off as yet further proof that America is simply too misogynist to ever elect a woman, much less a woman of color. That was Democrats’ biggest takeaway in 2016 after Hillary Clinton lost, despite being vastly more competent and qualified than the reality TV billionaire who been caught on tape saying he grabs women by the pussy. Liberals reacted to that crushing blow by knitting pink pussy hats and marching en masse to the Capitol to send the message that women are not going to take this shit from men anymore.

Then the worst-case-scenario thing that we’d warned everyone about happened, and Trump’s Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. The stories immediately started pouring out of women suffering due to state-level abortion bans enabled by the ruling. A woman nearly bled to death in a hair salon bathroom in Florida after being turned away by the emergency room when her water broke early. A Texas woman was forced to carry a fetus to term that missing part of its skull, and then watch that baby suffer and die in front of her. Then reports of actual deaths started rolling in (thank you for your vital work, ProPublica).

The backlash to these abortion bans carried Democrats in the 2022 midterms, despite the common wisdom predicting a “red wave.” But I felt less hopeful for most of this presidential election, as a Trump win started to feel inevitable around the time of his first assassination attempt. The Democrats had essentially covered up the extent of Biden’s age issues for months until it was too late, denying the party an opportunity to choose a more viable candidate in a legitimate primary. Progressives were outraged by the genocide in Gaza, which Biden continue to fund without conditions. And the initial boom of hope and excitement around Harris replacing Biden waned when she made clear that there was very little daylight between the two of them on anything—including support for Israel.

Many of us only started to feel the “hopeium,” as the kids say, in the final week of this election, as Trump started really unraveling at the seams, and early voting numbers were looking pretty strong for Harris. Women were outpacing men by 10 points; that freak Iowa poll by a highly respected pollster seemed to suggest that senior white women had swung her way because of abortion. Muslim faith leaders rallied behind Harris in the end as she started to tweak her message on Gaza at her final rally in Michigan. Puerto Rican voters in Pennsylvania appeared to be moving her way, too, after the Tony Hinchcliffe disaster.

But none of those hopeful signals bore out on election day. Trump won by a landslide—even winning the popular vote for the first time a Republican has done that in 20 years. And yes, as in 2016, much of that had to do with the deep misogyny and racism ingrained in this country. “Your body, my choice. Forever,” Nazi influencer Nick Fuentes wrote on Twitter after Trump won, prompting a sea of very online men to do the same. Manfluencer Andrew Tate straight-up gloated about a rapist becoming president, fully acknowledging the premise.

The misogyny in this country is obvious and disgusting, and we could allow ourselves to feel blind with rage over it to the exclusion of taking a clear-eyed look at where else the Democrats went wrong this cycle. But the exit polls and demographic shifts suggest quite a few other issues at play here that I think we have to take seriously in order to understand all the ways this party’s strategy is failing us. Why, for instance, did abortion rights win in several states (Missouri, Arizona, Nevada, and Montana) where Trump also won? 23% of Arizonans who voted to enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution also voted for Trump; a quarter of Nevada voters did the same. Nearly two-thirds (65%) of all voters in this election said abortion should be legal in all or most cases, which does not point to the kind of straight-up woman-hating being espoused by men like Fuentes and Tate. (Not to mention that white women, once again, rode for Trump.)

The prevalence of the “pro-choice” Trump voter this cycle—if we can even call them that, given that he’s the reason women are dying from these abortion bans—suggests that abortion alone wasn’t enough this time to carry a party that was failing to connect with voters in a myriad of other ways. Here’s where I think the lessons are for Democrats:

1. Campaign on a coherent economic message that connects with working class voters

The economy was the second issue, behind “democracy,” that voters ranked as the most important concern driving their vote. (Abortion came in third at 14%). Republicans ran on the fact that inflation is driving up the price of groceries, and Democrats failed to make the case that A) this economy has actually bounced back quite strongly in terms of wage growth and unemployment since the pandemic, and B) Trump’s policies would actually make inflation worse. The Dems have historically failed to connect with working class voters, as Bernie Sanders correctly pointed out, and that hurt them badly this election, with people earning under $100K flipping toward Trump despite Trump and Elon Musk (his de facto running mate) both being billionaires and only offering tax cuts for fellow billionaires:

Paid sick leave passed by 74% this week in the Republican stronghold of Nebraska. Four states that picked Trump also passed measures to increase the minimum wage (AK, MO, NE, AZ). Progressive economic policies win when a candidate actually campaigns on them.

2. Rethink your unwavering support for Israel’s war crimes

Harris lost Democratic strongholds in Michigan and elsewhere because she refused to even acknowledge the Palestinian cause throughout most of her campaign.

3. Ignoring the culture wars doesn’t make them go away

As stupid as it feels to engage with, Democrats cannot ignore the fact that a lot of swing voters are actually extremely upset by the idea of trans women in sports, supposed “LGBT indoctrination” in schools, pronouns, etc. These ideas are being fed to them daily by the right-wing propaganda machine, and Trump spent a quarter billion dollars on anti-trans ads suggesting that kids are going to school and getting their genitalia chopped off without the parents even knowing. Burying our heads in the sand about this being a thing does not make it less of a thing. Figure out a productive way to engage with those freaked out parents.

4. Young men being radicalized online

The significance of Elon Musk figuring out how to tap into young male gamers/incels/budding white supremacists this cycle cannot be overstated. I don’t think the Democratic party is trying to be the party of incels, but it certainly could be doing more to appeal to young (and white) men, who have been radicalized online for the past decade while we essentially ignored and gave up on them.

The right has spent 15 years building up an infrastructure to boost their own pseudojournalists like Jessica Reed Kraus and Tim Pool, as Taylor Lorenz told me, and the left is simply not prepared for the age of people looking mainly to social media for their news. Find the young charismatic gamer kid with progressive values who’s not a woman-hating Nazi and make him a goddamn star.

With that, I crawl back into my post-election dissociation cave. I hope you all are taking care of each other this week.