'Revolting' voters are key to Democrats' future

During an episode of the BlackAdder the Third comedy series set in eighteenth-century England, Hugh Laurie as the British Prince Regent, remarks to Edmund Blackadder (Rowan Atkinson) ‘I say Blackadder, I hear the peasants are revolting in France!’. Blackadder looks over at his dogsbody sidekick (played excellently by the hangdog-looking Tony Robinson) and responds, ‘By the look of Baldrick they're pretty revolting here too’. Its funny because it’s true, as to how those in power have traditionally regarded the ordinary people when they don’t behave as they should. However, this establishment bias has persisted into the present day.

Pre-Great Famine Ireland of the early to mid-nineteenth century was alive with reports of the illegal activities of secret societies rejoicing in such names as the Ribbonmen, Threshers, Rockites and Whiteboys. Posting warnings to doors, walls and even churches warning transgressors of the danger of flouting their societies’ ‘laws’ was an oft-reported feature of contemporary police reports. Until recently, serious historians have argued that despite their often violent acts, such groups were simply ‘traditional’ and rather unthinkingly conservative in nature, as evidenced by their notices warning of dire punishments but signed with ‘God save the King’ or similar. It never occurred to these researchers that such peasants engaging in their form of collective protest may have had the wit to obscure their real intentions from the state by a simple slogan. It betrays an academic view of ‘ordinary people’ as unable to think through their actions in strategic and complex ways.

Both derisory opinions of the agency of ‘ordinary people’ is being echoed by political experts in the post-US Presidential election aftermath, though without any laugh-track. Democrat-leaning pundits are in consternation about the apparent stupidity of their former party supporters for either abstaining from voting for Kamala Harris on November 5, or worse —choosing to vote for Donald Trump. On the face of the overall results they would seem to have a case, where too much of the electorate appears to have voted illogically.

In the battleground states, which Trump ended up mostly winning, many of his voters also voted for Democrat candidates in Senate and/or House elections.[1] This was especially marked in Arizona where the new Democratic candidate for the contested Senate seat, Ruben Gallego, defeated ultra-MAGA Republican, Kari Lake, by around 2.4 per cent. So, despite Joe Biden narrowly winning Arizona in 2020, most voters now wanted to see Donald Trump as the next president, but not one of his ardent sycophants as senator. Thus, Kamala Harris lost her race here by 5.5 per cent — a significant margin.

The Florida referendum on enshrining limited abortion rights into state law failed to reach the necessary 60 per cent threshold, even while garnering 57.2 to 43.8 per cent of the voters’ support (yes Florida is different). However, by almost the same ratio, Trump beat Harris by 56.1 to 43 per cent on the same day. Clearly many pro-abortion supporters voted for the same man who had boasted his success for ending the constitutional right to abortion, by the 2022 Supreme Court overturning of Roe v Wade.

The outspoken progressive Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently questioned her supporters who ‘split their ticket’ and backed Trump for the presidential election but voted Democrat for down-ballot races. "People who supported both Trump and me, or voted Trump/Democrat, tell me why", she wrote on her Instagram story. The answers were varied, but most ran along the lines that both she and Trump were seen as anti-establishment leaders, more in touch with ordinary people.[2] Centrist Democrats railed against this as evidence that the ‘extreme left’ or ‘woke politics’ in the form of Ocasio-Cortez or socialist Bernie Sanders, had more in common with MAGA populism than serious politics and had effectively cost them the election.

But is there more going on here with voters? And are the Democrat powers-that-be ignoring the wisdom of the crowd when venting their anger against their perceived ‘illogical’ split-ticketers? Rather than demonstrate uncritical reasoning could this instead reveal strategic voting by an electorate who has thought through the consequences of their political support and made their mind up accordingly. Perhaps many wanted the change that a Trump administration would bring but also saw that by electing Democrats to the House and Senate, Republican excesses could be tempered?

In Ireland, we have seen tactical voting in the past by the large swathes of the electorate, against their own immediate interest. Lawyer and Irish independent senator, Michael McDowell, is credited with preventing Fianna Fail achieving an overall majority in the 2002 general election. Toward the end of the campaign, McDowell warned that Fianna Fáil's high standing in the opinion polls put them in a position to potentially to return to government but without their outgoing coalition partners, McDowell’s Progressive Democrats. This sparked a late surge toward the latter, with many supporters of the Fine Gael opposition voting strategically for McDowell's tiny party, to prevent a single-party Fianna Fáil government and thus curbing the larger party’s more insidious instincts (or at least attempting to…). Yet, the result also saw the meltdown of the Fine Gael parliamentary party, losing almost half their elected members, with their surviving leaders in despair at the actions of their supporters.

It remains to be seen if the belief by down-ballot-only supporting Democrats that a Trump administration will not condemn the US to a fascist dystopia — as promised by Harris and the Democratic leadership — will come to pass. Yet, instead of listening to these aberrant voters as Ocasio-Cortez is actually doing, the media are platforming liberal voices which reduce all Trump support to either racist white-nationalism or stupidly misguided protest against inflation or excessive immigration. They are ignoring a deeper truth in the revolt of their supporters and instead regarding these potential voters of the future — as Blackadder would put it — as ‘pretty revolting’. We have four years (or less) to see who is right.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/elections/2024/11/09/democrats-house-senate-down-ballot/

[2] https://www.newsweek.com/aoc-supporters-donald-trump-split-ticket-reasons-establishment-1983849