In the wake of the 2024 US presidential election, the polls have again come under fire. In a little surprise after 2020 extended endthe results came quickly on November 6, returning former President Donald Trump to the White House.

In the final count, Trump collected 312 electoral votes to 226 for Democratic nominee Kamala Harris. While some votes are still being counted, the broad trends that won the election for Trump are also in focus. Echo public opinion scholarsDuncan Watts of the University of Pennsylvania Annenberg School for Communication, author of Everything is obvious once you know the answerbelieves that Trump has benefited from a broad anti-incumbent trend seen in elections around the world; that sentiment brought enough undecided voters to his numbers to win him the swing states needed for victory.

“The explanation that seems the most plausible, because it’s the simplest, is just that incumbents around the world have lost elections almost regardless of ideology,” says Watts. “That’s consistent with the theory of a ‘grumpy voter,’ when voters are just plain angry. They just vote for the incumbents. I don’t really know why, and they don’t really care.”

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That still leaves open questions about why American voters behaved this way. By many objective indicators, the US economy has outperformed almost all other developed countries over the past two years, making it the “envy of the world.” Why didn’t American voters seem to notice? In a conversation with american scientist, Watts delved into these election-year puzzles.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Where do so-called grumpy voters get their information about candidates? Are they in echo chambers? Or don’t you even hear the echoes?

Very roughly, you have two categories of information consumers. The first is getting information from conventional media. And we know from our consumption research that the largest source of news for most Americans is television, by far, five to one over other news sources, compared to online and social media news consumption. Even online, it is very much dominated by conventional media.

But that said, there is a very large and growing second population of Americans who don’t seem to consume any of what we call official news. Mostly, where we see this is television, where the number of Americans consuming any substantial news has declined rapidly over the past decade, so that tens of millions of Americans, by our measurements, simply do not consume any appreciable news.

Are these voters well informed about the candidates’ positions as a result? Did Trump voters really like the idea of ​​mass deportations and tax cuts for billionaires?

At least for the first group the mainstream media has a lot to answer for because the voters were not informed. It was true in 2016 and it has been true this year. The focus of the corporate media before the election was almost 100% on the horse race as a sporting contest, not as an existential decision about the future of democracy or even less on the details of policy. You wouldn’t know what Biden accomplished, you wouldn’t know what Harris planned, and you wouldn’t know what Trump planned if you read New York Times or the Washington Post or other news outlets, although cable may have done a little better on the democracy issue.

What information then drives voting decisions? Are people simply voting their gut?

Whatever, it’s not about facts. He has focused a lot on fact-checking, on disinformation, for the last eight years. And in the research world, disinformation is almost universally defined as false information. There’s just an enormous amount of research on “Here’s a bogus piece of information. Here is some real information. When do people prefer the former and how do we make them prefer the latter?

And I think all of this is kind of a red herring. It’s not that it’s wrong. It’s bad to lie to people. We’d rather people use correct facts to talk about the world.

But I would say two things about it.

First, most of the things you might hear or read are neither true nor false. As strange as it may sound, it is surprisingly difficult to go through a news story sentence by sentence and answer the question: is it true? Some statements are obviously true or false, but most are somewhere in between. So the emphasis on outright lies, while understandable, is a lot of effort devoted to something that is quite rare. It’s not that the news isn’t misleading. It often is! Rather, you don’t have to lie to people to mislead them.

The second thing I would say is that people don’t respond to facts anyway. What people respond to are stories, narratives. And I think this election was just like most elections won and lost at narratives. “Illegals are storming the border and taking our jobs, raising prices, etc.” I mean what does that mean? Is it true? Is it fake? Is that even a factual statement?

I would say no. Rather, it is a story, a narrative. It is a framework that helps people make sense of the world. Perhaps more importantly, it gives them something to blame and be angry about, which leads to action. But it is not demonstrably true or false.

It’s narratives like this—”rampant inflation,” “open borders,” “boys in girls’ bathrooms”—that stir up emotions. And it is emotions that drive behavior, including voting behavior. Reality is, unfortunately, irrelevant.

At a distant level, I think reality affects people’s consciousness, but only very indirectly. The thing that directly affects this consciousness is the perception of reality, and narratives shape perceptions far more than facts do.

What, if anything, should be done about it?

Here’s a prediction. Everyone said the economy was doing terrible. I bet he’ll be back. Take a poll today and you’ll see people much more optimistic about the economy, even though nothing has changed. Trump isn’t even in office yet, and all of a sudden people will be like, “Oh, the economy is great.” Inflation will just disappear as a problem. Prices won’t go down, prices will still be higher than four years ago, but everyone won’t care about them anymore. Reality is just surprisingly irrelevant.

How can I help voters? First, recognize that what they really care about is the story. So, to be successful, politicians need to be good at creating stories. And right now, Democrats are worse storytellers than Republicans.

The battle the Democrats are fighting is about politics. Let’s try to figure out what people need and then find ways to help them. I actually think that’s good governance, but I don’t think that’s how you win elections. To win an election, I think you have to give voters a better story, and that’s a whole different battle.

This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily theirs american scientist.