Portrait of Jamelle Bouie
Jamelle Bouie

This post by Jamelle Bouie appeared in his newsletter, which I subscribe to. I left out his latest recipe and the list of articles he’s reading now. If you subscribe to the New York Times, you can subscribe to his newsletter for free.

He wrote:

…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.”

You may remember the constant discussion, while Trump was in office, over the effect his chaos and corruption might have on voters. Would they care? Where this “they” often meant the blue-collar voters associated with Trump’s victory. And if they didn’t care, could we say with any confidence that the American people cared?

They did!

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.

Because 2016 was not the only election that mattered. Trump’s voters are not the only ones who count. 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.