How did this happen? That’s the question every Democrat should be asking today, following former President Donald Trump’s resounding defeat of Vice President Kamala Harris.
And to answer it, I’ve got a modest suggestion.
Don’t study the exit polls. Don’t blame Harris, or President Biden, or the news media, or the Russian bots. And don’t read morning-after ruminations by demoralized liberals (except maybe mine).
Instead, talk to people who voted for Trump.
We haven’t done nearly enough of that. Instead, we have too often assumed that Trump voters are racist, sexist, transphobic or just stupid. I mean, what else could bring someone to vote for him?
That’s what we need to find out. But if our opening gambit is that they’re morally or cognitively warped, we never will.
When Trump won the first time, in 2016, I organized a conversation between students at the University of Pennsylvania — where I teach — and at Cairn University. Formerly known as Philadelphia Bible College, Cairn was mostly Republican; Penn was heavily Democratic.
We arranged the room like a wedding, with circular tables on the floor and a raised platform up front. We gave everyone table numbers, which we staggered so that each table had a mix of Penn and Cairn students.
Up on the platform, we seated several students from each school. We began the event by asking them to explain whom they had voted for, and why.
That modeled the kind of question we wanted everyone to ask. If you begin with, “How could you possibly vote for that idiot?” you’re unlikely to get very far. But if you say, “I’m curious to know how you voted,” people will open up.
And they did. Once the students at the tables had seen the discussion on the platform, they were eager to stage their own. They talked easily and frankly, for two straight hours.
Several Penn students told me afterward that they had never held a conversation with a Trump voter before that evening. And they were surprised that people who voted for Donald Trump were so…normal.
“I didn’t agree with their politics, but they were super-nice,” one Penn student remarked. “We talked about the election, and then we talked about the Eagles.” (That’s the real religion around here: pro football.)
They also learned that many of the Cairn students loathed Trump’s crude speech and behavior, especially his notorious boast on “Access Hollywood” about assaulting women. That was before he was found liable for sexually abusing a woman in the dressing room of a New York department store. And it was before he was convicted of paying an adult film actress to keep her quiet about their sexual liaison.
But the Cairn students were going to vote for him anyway, because of his stated opposition to abortion (most of the students were pro-life) and because he had promised to lower taxes.
These are exactly the kinds of discussions that we need, right now. Trump voters are our neighbors and our co-workers. They’re the barista at your local coffee shop, the mail carrier on your block and the guy sitting next to you on the bus.
Most of all, they are your fellow Americans. You need to understand them, even if — no, especially if — you are baffled or offended by their politics.
Like many Democrats, I struggle to comprehend how anyone could support a guy who has said so many awful things about women, immigrants and military veterans. But on Tuesday, millions of those same people voted for Trump. We’ll never know why unless we ask them.
That means getting out of our political bubbles, wherever they are. And mine is the university.
Since 2020, many colleges — including my own — have made good-faith efforts to promote “dialogue across difference.” But on my campus, almost everyone is on the Democratic side. You can’t have much of a dialogue across difference when so many of us think the same way.
I know that some of my fellow liberals will bridle at the idea of talking to Trump voters. Why should I converse with someone who hates me?
Because you don’t know that, and the question assumes that you do. Come to think of it, that thought is pretty hateful in its own right.
And for those who are afraid that conversing with Trump supporters will “normalize” him, get over it. He is the new normal. Period.
I don’t like that, any more than you do. But we need to make sense of it. If you think you can do that by retreating into your echo chamber, think again.
The only way to learn about what happened on Tuesday is to talk to people on the other side. And the only question is whether we can find the grace — and the courage — to do it.
Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history and education at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of “Whose America? Culture Wars in the Public Schools” and eight other books.
