Opinion: Voter apathy, not bigotry, led to Trump’s return

As Donald Trump begins his second term, we heard from locally based Americans to understand their fears, frustrations, and the deeper reasons behind his re-election. From voter apathy to economic despair, this is a story of a broken system and the urgent need for solidarity across borders.

Photo by Conor Walker – taken in Govanhill Park November 2024

By Ben Kritikos & Conor Walker

When Donald Trump was re-elected last November, Greater Govanhill asked local residents hailing from the United States for their reactions. Each of the respondents voiced fears and concerns about what another four years of a Trump presidency might bring. With his second inauguration on Monday, there’s good reason to worry: campaign pledges like the mass deportation of undocumented migrants, legislative attacks on trans people and trade tariffs that could disrupt an already unstable global economy remind us of the chaos that plagued his first term.

So how did he win?

It’s common to hear people talk about Trump’s re-election as though voters have endorsed his racism, misogyny and xenophobia, with understandable anger about what this means for people who will be on the receiving end of his policies. But it’s worth pointing out that by far the largest bloc of voters were those who voted for neither Donald Trump nor Kamala Harris because they didn’t vote at all. Of the estimated 244 million eligible voters in the US, only 155 million actually voted. Over 90 million voters didn’t bother casting a vote – a bloc tens of millions larger than either candidate won.

While some may see this as cause for concern, you could just as easily view it as a reasonable response to a distasteful choice that is really no choice at all: the duopoly who have governed the United States longer than anyone can remember and whose similarities are more striking than their differences.

Still, there are no two ways about it: over 77 million Americans voted for Trump, who built his campaign on a bedrock of hate. We’ve even heard people say that Americans are too bigoted to vote for a woman of colour, based on the assumption that Americans voted specifically for Trump’s most offensive policies. While an alarming number of Americans hold hateful opinions, the assumption that a majority of voters rejected Harris out of ignorance or intolerance isn’t borne out by the facts.

As we noted above, a minority of Americans delivered Trump the presidency and it seems doubtful that even they did so because they agree with his entire political program – a view bolstered by House Democrats outperforming Harris in down ballot races.

Most analyses of the results point to the economy as the main driver of voters’ choices. While Trump is clearly not a champion of the common American, we have witnessed decades of declining living standards and explosive inflation, translating into real-term pay cuts for workers and a tangible sense that the world is getting worse. The Democrats and their media apologists have simply denied this basic, evident fact of life for the last four years, pointing to a line on a graph going upwards, assuring us that, on paper, things are actually really good.

So it is not so much a case of the Republicans having won this election, but that the Democrats lost. And, as campaigns go, they deserved to lose. Trump was a historically unpopular candidate – his unpopularity matched only by Biden and Harris. In June 2024, Pew Research found that neither Trump nor Biden had secured even a 40 percent approval rating, breaking with a decades-long trend of candidates having at least 50 percent approval, if not more. When Harris took over the nomination 100 days before the election, she failed to distance herself from Biden, going so far as to say there is nothing Biden had done that she would do differently.

Americans are not stupid, yet we have been treated as though we are. We’ve watched since the 2020 primaries as Biden, who was clearly unfit for office due to his manifest senility even then, bumbled through his term in an endless string of unintelligible sound bites that are now the stuff of memes. Meanwhile, the propaganda mill tells us that the emperor is indeed fully clothed and that to suggest otherwise makes you the Republicans’ useful idiot. Until, of course, we were to perform an about-face and fall in line behind Harris.

Finally, Harris has not only failed to distance herself from but has shamefully hedged about Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, for which the US has provided the weapons, intelligence and PR cover to make it happen. It is conservatively estimated that nearly 65,000 Palestinians have been killed up to June 2024 and it is likely that history will view this as the defining event of the outgoing administration. Meanwhile, Democratic Party cheerleaders responded to Harris’s drubbing at the ballot box by declaring that her campaign was “flawless”. This kind of doublespeak throws into stark relief the importance of community media like Greater Govanhill.

While on the campaign trail you may hear Democrats call Trump a fascist, behind closed doors they all agree on the key points: the Pentagon will receive a record $850 billion as part of a bipartisan bill passed in December; the US’ uniquely expensive and inefficient private healthcare system that brings misery to millions is not up for negotiation; and in his final week of office, Biden christened a pair of nuclear aircraft carriers the USS William J. Clinton and USS George W. Bush. It’s worse than lying – it’s nihilistic. The overarching message communicated by American politics is that nothing means anything and it doesn’t matter either way. Trump’s promises to “Make America Great Again” are patently vicious lies, but against this nihilism his voters will have preferred flattering falsehoods to an insult to their intelligence.

Americans here and back home should absolutely be upset, alarmed and angry, though perhaps some of the outrage would be more constructively targeted not at ordinary Americans but at the people who would reasonably be expected to win their votes and block Trump from office by offering an attractive, winning alternative that speaks to their daily struggles and concerns. Our job now is to build solidarity and fight vigorously against any politics that pre-supposes only formal and not substantial democracy. We – all of us, Americans, Scots, Palestinians, everyone – deserve better.