For nearly a decade, the media have struggled to provide insight into the psychology and motivation of the Donald Trump voter. We've learned that their views have been sorely neglected. We’ve been led to believe that their concerns and the attitudes that sustain them deserve our consideration. And so it’s been the mission of the media to explain these voters, just in case we might jump to hasty conclusions about the people who vote for Trump.
Meanwhile, the values of the majority of Americans who cast their vote for President Joe Biden have been curiously omitted from the same degree of solicitude.
As observed by Jonathan Last, writing in January for The Bulwark, many in legacy media interpreted (and continue to interpret) the mandate to inform the public as an opportunity to rationalize the behavior of Donald Trump’s voter base.
Because we must understand why all of these people support a man who wrecked the American economy, attempted a violent insurrection, is under 91 felony indictments, and has been disavowed as a threat to the country by a large number of the high-level Republicans who worked directly for him.
Last notes that one of the biggest promoters of “understanding” Trump voters has been The New York Times. However, as he points out, this myopic focus has inevitably resulted in very little attention being paid to the voters who elected Biden in 2020.
As Last notes:
There’s also another group of voters the NYT seems oblivious to: Biden voters. You may recall that in 2020 Joe Biden received more votes than anyone in American history.
No one is terribly interested in what makes those people—who comprise a flat majority of the population—tick.
The Times, of course, is not the only outlet guilty of this selective focus. When Trump first arrived on the scene, many in the media instantly tried to explain the social reasons fueling Trump’s attraction. We were quickly informed that small towns and worn-down suburbs across Middle America—where many of Trump’s supporters live—had sunk into a spiral of economic anxiety caused by the decades-long evaporation of the blue collar manufacturing sector.
After someone imprudently pointed out that more Hillary Clinton voters had actually experienced economic distress than Trump voters, the diagnosis was eventually revisited: It wasn’t exactly economic anxiety but rather status resentment that was the root of Trump’s support. The fear of lost status loomed, as people with darker skin hues were allegedly seen as competing for the jobs of their whiter peers. In the end, most journalists eventually acknowledged that plain old racism was the big motivator for most Trump voters.
Last cites an August Bulwark article, written by Nicholas Grossman, that suggests the relentless focus on Trump supporters was a predictable consequence of New York- and Washington-based editors and journalists who, surprised at Trump’s electoral showing in 2016, veritably “bent over backwards” to “study” the Trump phenomenon, simply to compensate for what they perceived as accusations of “liberal and/or pro-establishment bias.”
But in doing so, they failed to show any similar diligence examining Biden’s supporters, as Grossman points out, leading to erroneous predictions that the party had moved so far to the left that the 2022 elections would yield a “red wave.” Of course, the “red wave” did not materialize, much to the chagrin of the Beltway press.
Grossman notes that the media’s failure to acknowledge the values of Biden voters to the same degree they afforded Trump’s base of support goes a long way toward explaining how the media can reinforce a bogus narrative.
For example, he points out that the Democratic Party is hardly a party of “elites:”
Over 81 million Americans voted for Joe Biden, and the vast majority sure aren’t societal elites. They struggle with rising costs—of housing, healthcare, groceries, college, etc.—and economic disruptions from globalization and technological change. They might be hurt more by the decline of shopping malls than the decline of coal mining, but both impose economic difficulties on the larger community.
By every reasonable definition of working and middle class, the Biden coalition has tons of them.
The media’s reflexive deference to Trump voters was also geographical, owing to the idea that many of them hailed from the so-called heartland of America—apparently anywhere outside the Acela corridor and the nation’s major cities. Trump’s voters and the values they espouse were understood as somehow representing what this country stands for, or should. Hard work, love of family, and self sufficiency, for example, were the mythical traits grafted on to this population from the outset.
Those salt-of-the-earth values, we were assured, were common to most Trump supporters, be they rural, suburban, or urban. Conversely, the rest of the country—actually the majority of citizens, including the vast majority of people of color, LGBTQ+ folks, and college-educated voters of all backgrounds (especially those in major population centers)—by default had to be somehow deficient in these same patriotic values.
This “Trump voter as working-class-hero” framing embedded itself in the national media psyche, even though it was hogwash.
Grossman convincingly breaks down the numbers by income, educational attainment, type of work, and even location. He points out that more working class voters live in Queens than in entire red states, and asserts that “treating elite and lives in a major metropolitan area as interchangeable synonyms is absurd.”
The only definition of “elites” that includes most Biden voters is the postmodern one popular with today’s right-wing culture warriors: “disagrees with me on social issues.” But virtually no one outside the culture-war right thinks a millionaire who owns car dealerships but didn’t go to college, or a tech-industry venture capitalist who complains about the “woke mob,” are working class, while a middle-school teacher with a college degree or a coffee barista who puts they/them pronouns on a nametag are elites.
To Biden-voting workers, boorishness and bigotry are not inherently “working-class values.” They know there are people who are formal and informal, polite and rude, racist and non-racist in every societal class, and recognize that sexual harassment often comes from bosses. And since Biden beat Trump among people of color, women, and LGBT voters, it’s safe to say most do not think that changes in norms regarding race and gender have been, on balance, bad.
Just try to imagine a New York Times article, for instance, conducting a focus group or on-the-ground interviews with people who think trans kids are kids who deserve to exist! People who abhor book bans and don’t want religion to dictate how their schools (and lives) are run! People who aren’t convinced that a person’s skin color is a threat to them or their futures. People who actually believe in democracy and find the very idea that someone who’s facing 91 felony counts is even considered to be a viable candidate for president to be preposterous. Or people who believe that the reproductive rights of everyone should be protected. People who won’t pretend that the biggest threat to our country is immigration.
Can you imagine the headlines?
Now that we’re facing what promises to be the most divisive election in our nation’s history (unseating 2020’s contest), it’s fair to ask why Biden’s voters aren’t afforded the same deference and friendly scrutiny long afforded to Trump’s base. Few in the media seem to have considered that question.
But if they did, they might reach a whole different conclusion about where the heart of America really resides.