A majority didn't vote for a liberal nightmare

On misperceiving the other side

Trump won the popular vote. What does that mean?

Many people seem to think it’s a mandate to enact his most extreme policies: mass deportations, crippling tariffs, national abortion bans, regressive tax cuts, media crackdowns, and so on. Call that the Liberal Nightmare.

Some are convinced that it’s already happening. Others are leaving the country. Many are panicking.

And plenty are wondering: “How could so many people have voted for this?”

Separate two questions:

1. What will Trump do?

2. What do Trump-supporters want him to do?

I won’t hazard a guess about (1). This is exactly the type of scenario in which expert political forecasts are no better than random guessing. No one should be confident in their predictions.

But—insofar as Trump remains sensitive to popular opinion—we might be able to get a hint about what will happen by asking what his supporters want.

Do Trump supporters want Liberal Nightmare?

No.

Doubtful? The argument has three steps. First, you shouldn’t trust your judgment about the political out-party. Second, there’s direct evidence that Trump-voters don’t want a Liberal Nightmare. And third, there are better explanations for Trump’s win.

Let’s take these in turn.

Don’t trust your gut

First things first: you shouldn’t trust your judgment about what the other side wants. This finding is often called the perception gap: political partisans tend to be (badly) wrong what the other side believes and wants.

Here’s how to measure it. First, ask Republicans for their views on a variety of issues—for example whether “Properly controlled immigration can be good for America” or whether “Racism still exists in America.” Record the proportion that agree.

Then ask Democrats to estimate the proportion of Republicans who agree with those claims. The finding: Democrats’ estimates are way off.

Here’s the findings of a 2019 paper: red dots are Republicans’ actual views, while blue dots are Democrats’ beliefs about Republicans’ actual views. For example, Democrats estimated that 50% of Republicans would agree that “Racism still exists in America”, when in fact 78% agree—a gap of 28 points.

The result is similar for Republicans’ beliefs about Democrats.

The finding is robust—there are plenty of other ways to demonstrate mis-perceptions of the other side. For example, this 2020 paper found that Democrats over-estimated by 50% Republicans’ tendency to feel more negative toward Democrats than Republicans, and over-estimated by 150% Republicans’ tendency to dehumanize Democrats.

Here’s the dehumanization chart: the left panel is Republicans’ actual ratings of how much they saw the humanity in Republicans and Democrats; the right is Democrats’ beliefs about what Republicans’ ratings would be:

There is a gap between how Republicans feel about about fellow Republicans and how they feel about Democrats—affective polarization is real. But Democrats way over-estimated that gap: instead of the true differential of 18 points, they estimated it at 46 points. (Again, a similar result holds for Republicans’ beliefs about Democrats.)

Another example: people over-estimate how politically engaged and extreme the other side is. This paper found that partisans estimated that 64% of members the out-party had political discussions frequently (true proportion: 27%), and that 69% of them had positions classified as “extreme” (true proportion: 36%).

Finally, people over-estimate how selfish the other side is. This book (page 41) does an analysis of the data in this paper. It finds that in a game where cooperation is costly, Democrats estimated that 30% of Republicans would cooperate and Republicans estimated that 43% of Democrats would—when in fact 60% of both parties cooperated.

“But wait!", you say: “This is for random Democrats and Republicans. They’re probably not very well informed. I, on the other hand, am a political junkie: I have consistent, carefully-thought-through political views, and I follow the news closely. My beliefs about the other side are probably way more accurate. Right?”

Wrong. They’re probably worse. The more political you are, and the more news you watch, the worse your estimates about the other side tend to be.

For example, here is the average perception gap broken down by political lean: those who are most political (on the right or left) have the biggest misperceptions of the opposing party:

And here’s the perception gap broken down by media-consumption habits: the more people follow the news, the bigger their perception gap tends to be.

Upshot: if you are a politically engaged and well-informed liberal, you should not trust your judgment (or your favorite pundit’s judgment) about what Trump-voters want.

What Trump-voters want

So don’t trust your gut. Instead, let’s look at the data.

We have plenty of direct evidence about what Trump supporters do want. And it can hardly be described as a Liberal Nightmare.

First: despite winning the popular vote, Trump remains quite unpopular. Presidents with mandates for extreme agendas rarely have net-negative favorability ratings.

Second, electoral outcomes suggest that people who support Trump don’t support the extreme version of his plans. For instance, a core piece of the Liberal Nightmare is a national abortion ban. But voters—even in deep red states—don’t want that. 63% of the electorate thinks abortion should remain legal, including 41% of Republicans.

And people are putting their vote where their mouth is. Abortion rights were on the ballot in November. In 7 of 10 states—including deep-red ones like Missouri—abortion rights were strengthened. (In Florida, the bill received 57% of the vote, but needed 60% to pass.) Before that, abortion rights were defended or enshrined not only in blue and purple states like Vermont, California, and Michigan, but also red states (that Trump won handily) like Kansas, Kentucky, and Montana.

Finally, when you ask Trump-supporters what they want and expect, it hardly looks like a Liberal Nightmare. 58% (of Trump-supporters) said it would be unacceptable for him to fire government workers for not being loyal to him. 57% said it’d be unacceptable for him to pardon supporters who’d been convicted of a crime. 70% said Trump should work closely with Democrats. And 86% want him to address the concerns of all Americans, even if it means disappointing his supporters:

That hardly sounds like a MAGA majority that’s hell-bent on a Liberal Nightmare.

Inflation and change

So you shouldn’t trust your gut; and the evidence suggests that Trump-voters don’t want his extreme agenda.

But Trump does have an extreme agenda! So why did he win?

It’s the economy, stupid. As polls have been saying for ages, voters hate inflation. And they hate it much more than they hate unemployment. This makes sense: high unemployment hits a small number of people a large amount, while inflation hits a large number of people a small amount—so inflation swings more votes.

And despite good top-line numbers for the economy, the shock that inflation sent to the system made salient the affordability crisis that’s been growing for decades. Things that tend to make or break a family’s finances—healthcare, childcare, college, etc.—have been exploding in costs for decades, well in excess of wage growth:

So it’s no surprise people were unhappy with the status quo.

The understandable response? Vote for change.

The most basic adaptive strategy when dealing with a complex system you don’t understand—like politics—is “win-stay, lose-shift”. If things are going well, stick with the status quo; if they’re not, try something different.

That heuristic does a pretty good job of predicting swings in public opinion generally. And it looks to have pretty much perfectly predicted global elections in 2024. Public dissatisfaction with the status quo was high everywhere—and, for the first time in over a century, the incumbent party lost vote share in every election across the globe:

In fact—compared to the global average—Harris did remarkably well, and Trump did remarkably poorly. If Trump had run a banal, bog-standard, no-nightmares campaign, there’s a good chance he would’ve done far better.

So What?

So Trump-supporters don’t want a Liberal Nightmare.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that Trump won’t try to enact one.

But it does mean that it’s a mistake for liberals to write off Trump voters, or to think they must hold fundamentally different values or worldviews. That would be both politically ineffective, and factually inaccurate. The “other side” is not as different as you think.

And that, in turn, suggests that if Trump does try to enact a Liberal Nightmare, the backlash will be huge.

Trump is claiming that this was a historic landslide—despite the fact that it wasn’t. So it’d hardly be surprising if—like Bush in 2004, and (it seems) Biden in 2020—his next term turns out to be an exercise in political overreach. Just wait for 2026.