Trump Doesn’t Speak for the Silent Majority

While Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election due to the flawed Electoral College and the electors failure to act as the Founding Fathers to block unfit individuals from the presidency, he and his MAGA base have never won the majority vote of Americans.  Trump/MAGA may win in backward red states - typically thanks to evangelical extremists and white supremacists are terrified by their waning power to control the lives and beliefs of others - in no election has the silent majority of American voters supported Trump and his MAGA imitators.  In elections in 2018, 2020, 2022, and here in Virginia in 2023, Republicans and MAGA candidates have either greatly underperformed expectations or gone down to defeat(7)5 of "moms for Liberty", a/k/a "Moms for Three Ways" thanks to co-founder Bridget Ziegler, were defeated).  In each instances, Republican calls for extremism, racist discrimination, homophobia and general misogyny have failed to attract the majority of voters outside of deep red states, many of which remain economic and cultural backwaters - think Alabama and Mississippi to name just two.  Sadly, too much of the mainstream media and, of course, Fox News and its copycats, continue to falsely depict the MAGA base as the "silent majority" when, in fact they are not. A column in the New York Times looks at the true reality:

It’s for good reason that the results of the 2016 presidential race shocked, surprised and unsettled many millions of Americans, including the small class of people who write about and interpret politics for a living. There was a strong sense, in the immediate aftermath of the election, that journalists were woefully out of touch with the people at large. Otherwise, they would not have missed the groundswell of support for Trump.

One inadvertent consequence of this understandable bout of introspection was, I think, to validate Trump’s claim that he spoke for a silent majority of forgotten Americans. It was easy enough to look at the new president’s political coalition — disproportionately blue-collar and drawn almost entirely from the demographic majority of the country — and conclude that this was basically correct. And even if it wasn’t, the image of the blue-collar (although not necessarily working-class) white man or white woman has been, for as long as any of us have been alive, a synecdoche for the “ordinary American” or the “Middle American” or the “average American.”

What’s been lost — or if not lost then obscured — in the constant attention to Trump’s voters, supporters and followers is that the overall American electorate is consistently anti-MAGA. Trump lost the popular vote in 2016. The MAGA-fied Republican Party lost the House of Representatives in 2018. Trump lost the White House and the Republican Party lost the Senate in 2020. In 2022, Trump-like or Trump-lite candidates lost competitive statewide elections in Georgia, Nevada, Arizona and Pennsylvania. Republicans vastly underperformed expectations in the House, winning back the chamber with a razor-thin margin, and Democrats secured governorships in Kansas, Michigan and Wisconsin, among other states. Democrats overperformed again the following year, in Kentucky and Virginia.

“Since 2016,” wrote Michael Podhorzer, a former political director for the A.F.L.-C.I.O., in a post for his newsletter last summer, “Republicans have lost 23 of the 27 elections in the five states everyone agrees Democratic hopes in the Electoral College and the Senate depend on.”

He continues: When Trump was sworn in, Republicans held four of those five states’ governorships, and six of the ten Senate seats. Moreover, Republicans defied history by losing nearly across the board in those states last year, the only time anything like that has happened to a Party running against such an unpopular president in a midterm.

Too many commentators have spent too much time fretting over Trump’s voters — and how they might react to the effort to remove the former president from the ballot — and not enough time thinking about the tens of millions of voters who have said, again and again, that they do not want this man or his movement in American politics.

There’s been no shortage of critics of the disqualification effort who have asked us to consider the consequences for American democracy if Trump’s supporters believe he was cheated out of a chance to run for president a third time. It’s a fair point. But I think we should also consider the consequences for American democracy if the nation’s anti-MAGA majority comes to believe, with good reason, that the rules — and the Constitution — don’t apply to Trump.

[I]t is not anti-democratic, or even all that objectionable, to disqualify Donald Trump from the ballot under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. What unites Trump with the former secessionists under the disqualification clause is that like them, he refused to listen to the voice of the voting public. He rejected the bedrock principle of democratic life, the peaceful transfer of power.

Democrats need to galvanize the true majority of voters to go to the polls in November and defeat the ugly minority that wants to exercise tyranny over the majority of Americans.