Donald Trump’s obsession with inflated estimates of the crowd sizes at his various live events has been a long-running joke in American politics. This was exhibited most famously in his bitter argument with the National Park Service over the number of people who attended his inauguration five years ago. But as Elaine Godfrey notes at The Atlantic, the phenomenon persists even today, and it’s central to MAGA claims that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump:
“Before the 2020 election, Trump and his fans would often ask reporters how Joe Biden could possibly win when he didn’t have rallies as big as Trump’s. Now that Biden is president, Trump-rally goers say things like Trump couldn’t really have lost. Look at all of these people! In Arizona this weekend, 51-year-old Tammy Shutts put it this way to me: ‘100 percent, 1,000 percent, 1 million percent Biden didn’t win’ her state, she said, gesturing to the hordes of people around her. ‘I’ve been in Arizona for almost 21 years. There is no way—no way—we went blue.’”
As Godfrey acutely observes, big crowds aren’t “just a bragging point” for Trump and his supporters. It’s “proof they are part of the American majority.” This both reflects and reinforces the core belief in MAGA land that more objective measurements of Trump’s popularity, like polls and election results, are unreliable and likely “rigged.” The proof? Look at those crowds!
Th preference for subjective instead of objective standards for political strength was not, of course, invented by Trump or his followers. It’s pretty common among political groups who don’t want to accept evidence that they are outnumbered or outgunned. During the home stretch of the very competitive 2012 presidential campaign, with polls showing Barack Obama building a solid lead over Mitt Romney, there was a profusion of Republican wishful thinking based not only on comparative crowd size but on the number of Romney yard signs evident along the highways and byways of the country. This obsession with the display of popularity reached epic levels during Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign, which greatly valued huge flags and signs, boat parades, owning the libs with obnoxious motorcades through Democratic areas, and, of course, Trump’s rallies. The Biden campaign could not remotely match all this frenetic activity, in part, to be clear, because it considered it unsafe to voters, campaign operatives, and volunteers alike in the middle of a pandemic. But to an extent that leaves coastal elites baffled, the conviction has spread that Biden’s base of support was a statistical Potemkin village because it was far less visible.
Political operatives and pundits should examine themselves in the mirror before making too much fun of this hammerheaded, snail’s-eye view of political popularity. Some of its also stems from the incessantly discussed and near-universally accepted emphasis in recent political discourse on enthusiasm as a tangible election-winning asset. It does matter, to be sure, particularly in midterm and off-year contests, in which lukewarm voters often do not participate. But a candidate does not get extra votes for having supporters who are teeming with joy or fury, and enthusiasm beyond the point needed to get voters to the polls only helps if it is communicable. As a substitute for objective data about electoral outcomes, enthusiasm and its visible signs can be actively misleading.
But if your favorite president and partisan media have told you day in and day out for years that polls are fake news and elections are rigged, then direct experience of the strength of the political cause you share with so many others (in many places, with virtually all of your friends and neighbors) is all you’ve got. Add in a polarized atmosphere in which the other “team” is deemed actively evil and its supporters are dismissed as dupes or fellow-travelers in sin, and you get January 6, 2021. On that day, another crowd — “the biggest crowd I’ve ever,” according to Trump — formed to overwhelm Congress with its conviction that Biden’s victory was a lie because the Democrat didn’t command those monster crowds.
The sense that the MAGA movement feels like a majority and thus must be one is naturally growing stronger at a time when Democratic enthusiasm is low and Trump is plotting a triumphant restoration to power, whatever it takes. As Yeats famously said of post–World War I Europe just over a century ago, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.” Unfortunately, some of the worst believe their passionate intensity entitles them to rule.
Here’s a good polling suggestion that Democracy Corps or anyone else Ruy talks to can do:
First, identify a LARGE pool of voters who fit the following description: they did NOT give Bush a positive approval rating individually as of election day AND/OR preferably AND were part of that majority who felt in polls as of election day that the country “was moving in the wrong direction”.
Then you determine if they did not vote for Kerry, did they (a) vote for someone else, especially Bush, or (b) stay home, after having voted in either 2002 or 2000, especially for a Democrat.
Those voters who did NOT give Bush a positive approval rating or felt that the country was “moving in the wrong direction” AND who voted for Bush or stayed home after having voted in the past for a Democrat can first be assessed for what percentage of the total number of voters they comprised. You need to first assess the percentage of those who actually voted as a percentage of the total vote, possibly with a breakdown in key states, and then check to determine how LARGE the number of voters who stayed home but were seriously potential voters based on recent voting for Democrats and their disaffection with the status quo was. These voters cost Kerry the election.
Now, WHY didn’t these voters vote for Kerry. Two issues seem prominent — they thought he was wishywashy or a flipflopper AND/OR they were concerned about the war on terror and did not have confidence in Kerry (the Bai distortion). Voters don’t always or generally give specific indications of why they voted they way they did or why they didn’t bother to vote, but there is where a decisive number of bodies are buried. You could also measure what IF those two groups of voters had turned on mass to Kerry? What would it have done to your constituency analysis. Prediction on the latter — add those voters who felt the country was going in the wrong direction but didn’t vote for Kerry to the Kerry column, by breakdown of category, and most of those gaps you are measuring in various social groups close like a mousetrap that has been sprung.
The mandate was for being successfully snookered by the mass media AND spinmeisters justifying the lying and the chorus of hounds that didn’t bark, including when spinning the polls, on the abovementioned issues. Another mandate for a rigged election, cashed in all the moreso as real the less real it is.
Everybody is so busy “serving” and “doing the job” that no one really serves democracy and all that is left is the hollow shell of a system as it goes down the tubes.