189
Rightwing populists will keep winning until we grasp this truth about human nature | George Monbiot
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 14 Apr 2025
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politics
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I'm not at all convinced, because the poor aren't the ones who elected Trump. Both the rich and the poor voted for Harris. Here's the data:
Edit: This is not the most up-to date poll, although it is substantially correct. See my post below.
Ordinary people don't keep track of billionaires. Almost no one even knows how many billionaires there are, or how many billions they have. I don't know and I bet that even most people who blame billionaires for everything don't know. If there are twice as many now as there were before and each one has twice as much money, the public won't even notice.
IMO Trump support is due to envy and resentment, but it's not the resentment of the rich by the poor. It's the resentment of the middle class by the working class. Look at the results by college education:
(Note that while income and education are correlated, my first plot shows that the people without a college education who are voting for Trump aren't voting for him simply because they're poor.)
It used to be the case that mass media was controlled largely by people with middle class values. The people who opposed vaccination and supported renaming the Gulf of Mexico were called crackpots and they wouldn't appear in most mainstream newspapers or TV news. Neither the Democrat nor the Republican candidate for President would agree with them.
Now, thanks to the internet, these people have been able to organize into a mass movement and they want to smash the institutions built by the middle class that looks down on them. They voted for Trump because he's culturally one of them, despite the fact that he's a college-educated billionaire.
Do experts say Trump is a fascist? Do experts say vaccination is essential for public health? Do experts say tariffs will wreck the economy? Now Trump will make those experts cry delicious liberal tears...
This isn't how Presidents are elected either. Even though Trump narrowly won the popular vote, at the state level you might see a different picture. We're all Americans but the concerns of a Floridian aren't the same as the concerns of a Californian.
The first chart is from August 2023.
My apologies. Here's CNN's exit poll. The results are substantially similar. I added a note to my original post.
Note that CNN also has a chart of this data with the "less than $30k" and "$30k to $50k" categories merged, which conceals this phenomenon. I think that can give people the wrong idea.
Thanks for the research