3 Takeaways - The 50% Enigma: Why Trump’s Vote Mirrors the Past (#249)

Episode Date: May 13, 2025

You’d think that an unconventional figure would shatter tradition—but Trump’s vote tells a different tale. His nearly 50% popular vote is in line with historical trends. Larry Bartels, Co-Director of Vanderbilt University's Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, reveals why the extraordinary can sometimes be entirely ordinary and why, behind the noise, America’s electoral outcomes remain predictably stable. 

Donald Trump is certainly unique, and everyone expected the election to be unusual. But what stands out about the 2024 election is the fact that by the data, it was not an unusual election at all. Donald Trump won 49.8% of the popular vote. So nearly 50% of the popular vote. So nearly 50% of the popular vote. That was comparable within a few percentage points to other Republican presidential candidates over the last 20 years.

Trump's nearly 50% of the popular vote compares to George W. Bush's 48% and nearly 51% of the popular vote in 2000 and 2004, and it was higher than John McCain's 46% of the popular vote and Mitt Romney's 47%. So despite Donald Trump's unusual and unique character, his results were not much different from other Republican candidates. How could that be? Why wasn't the election more unusual?

Hi everyone, I'm Lynn Toman and this is 3 Takeaways. On 3 Takeaways I talk with some of the world's best thinkers, business leaders, writers, politicians, newsmakers, and scientists. Each episode ends with three key takeaways to help us understand the world and maybe even ourselves a little better. Today I'm excited to be with Larry Bartels. He is chair of public policy and social science at Vanderbilt University and co-director of Vanderbilt University's Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions. Prior to Vanderbilt, he was a professor at Princeton and founding director of Princeton Center for the Study of Democratic Politics. He has received the United States National Medal of Science.

His most recent book is Democracy Erodes from the Top. I'm excited to find out why the election of Donald Trump was not unusual and how important a role character plays in elections. Welcome, Larry, and thanks so much for joining Three Takeaways today. Thanks for having me. It is my pleasure. So Donald Trump is certainly unique and he's very different from previous US presidents. Was his election an aberration? No, I don't think so.

I think one of my important lessons here is that I think you have to separate the electoral process from the outcome. And Trump is an example in which the outcome of the election is certainly aberrant and hugely consequential, but the electoral process, I think, operated in much the same way that it usually does, and in particular, in much the same way that it has over the past quarter century or so. We've been basically in a long tie between Democrats and Republicans. If you think back over the last seven elections,

the only one really in which either party got any real separation was the election in 2008 that occurred basically as Wall Street was melting down and the US was sliding into the Great Recession. So in those circumstances, Barack Obama won a fairly comfortable majority. But basically every other election that we've had since 2000 has been more or less a tight outcome.

The two parties are entrenched and very closely matched. And under those circumstances, I think the best way to think about the result is that it's essentially a coin flip. Not that it's literally random, but that lots of small circumstances can make the difference between one side or the other winning narrowly. How do you see the 2024 election compared to previous elections?

The impact of partisanship was very strong as it has been consistently over the last quarter century. Maybe the most surprising thing is that turnout was down by about three million in 2024 compared to 2020. So even though people were watching the election closely had the impression that the stakes were hugely consequential, there were a fair number of people who had been voting previously and didn't bother to vote for one reason or another in 2024. I should say that for a long time, political scientists bemoaned the fact that turnout

in elections was so low. One consequence of this period that we've been in of closely contested, very partisan elections is that they've mobilized a lot of people to participate and the turnout rate had been going up significantly over the past several elections. But 2024 was at least a pause in that trend. Can you give some examples of some of the numbers on how the Trump elections compared to other comparable Republican Democratic elections? Well, the overall results are obviously quite similar.

Aside from the 2008 election, every election we've had in this century has been a very close outcome in terms of the popular vote, which specific states swing one way or another has varied some. And so the electoral college outcome has varied, but the overall mood of the country has not shifted substantially in any of these elections with maybe the exception of 2008. If you look at the partisan loyalty of people within each of the two parties, it's hard to get exact figures because different surveys have different kinds of vulnerabilities to air and they vary a bit in their numbers. But typically each party's nominee gets about

90 to 95% of the support of partisans from their party. The exceptions to that were cases where a nominee got probably in the high 80s, 85 to 90%. And those would be John McCain on the Republican side in 2008 who was running as the economy was melting down under an incumbent Republican president. And Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris on the Democratic side, both running against Donald Trump.

And how did the votes by men for Trump compare to votes by men for previous Republican candidates? Was it very consistent and similar? Trump did a little better among men and a little worse among women than Republicans typically have. There's been a long-standing gender gap in partisanship and voting behavior. It's I think become somewhat strengthened recently, probably mostly as a result of people's responses to Trump's rhetoric, which has been, I think, more outspokenly pro-male in some sense than previous candidates have been.

Again, I think that's a pretty small shift at the margin. The other significant difference probably is with respect to the behavior of people with and without college degrees. And again, this is a kind of intensified difference recently, but one that has been growing over a significant period of time. It used to be the case that people with college educations were more Republican and people with less formal education were more Democratic and that difference gradually closed and now has even reversed. Again, I think Trump's rhetoric and the nature of his appeal has something to do with that but I think it's mostly a kind of long-term response to people's

understandings of the parties and what they stand for. Does party matter more than the individual? Yes. Individual candidates do matter some and their rhetoric, I think, has some impact on the movement of these specific subgroups within the parties' coalitions. But overall, the stability of partisanship and the high levels of support of partisans within each camp for their own parties and nominees seems to be pretty set, regardless

of who the candidates are. Again, I think Trump is about the most dramatic test case you could have of that proposition. A lot of people were surprised by the result of the 2016 election because he was such an unusual Republican candidate and indeed had tepid support or even opposition from many of the most prominent leaders in the Republican Party. But in spite of that, he got the overwhelming support of the Republican rank and file. How do other factors besides party affiliation, factors such as natural disasters or other factors affect elections?

Well, I think the most important systematic factor is the state of the economy. If we look historically, we see that the incumbent party does substantially better when the economy is in good shape and substantially worse when it's in bad shape. Not that there are large numbers of party loyalists who desert the party under those circumstances, but the people who are weaker partisans are often swayed by their sense of the state of the country to abandon their party temporarily. Some political scientists have thought about these patterns of economic voting as being

a kind of virtue of democracy or a success for democracy because they might hold political leaders accountable for whether things are going well or badly and provide at least some incentives for political leaders to run the country in a way that produces prosperity rather than poverty. And I think there is some of that going on, but the problem is that people's assessments are not very cogent much of the time. It seems as though what happens in the months immediately leading up to the election

are more important than the long-term record of the incumbents in economic management. It seems as though in circumstances where the press coverage of the economy is out of whack with real economic conditions for one reason or another, people are more likely to be swayed by the press coverage than by the state of the real economy because their sense of the real economy is so mediated by what the press tells them about what's going on. So there is some accountability there, but I think it's really, again, a very blunt form of accountability. What are your conclusions as you look at America's

elections? Well, in a circumstance like the one we're in now, where the parties are pretty evenly matched, which is not uncommon historically, the result of the unelection is basically a coin flip. It'll be determined by some combination of relatively minor contextual factors. Sometimes it's the personality of particular candidates. More often it's these economic factors that determine people's mood about the state of the country and the competency of the incumbent party. But those things from the standpoint of fundamental democratic values are really not particularly important, but they can, especially in a polarized period like the one we're in now be hugely consequential because the

outcome of the election has huge consequences for the kinds of policies that government is going to pursue. Interesting. What are the three takeaways about the US election and Donald Trump that you would like to leave the audience with today? One thing I would say as I've've already said, is to emphasize the importance of this relative stability of support for the two parties over a long period of time now, which heightens the stakes and makes the outcome of the election subject to so many idiosyncratic factors. subject to so many idiosyncratic factors.

The second, which is a kind of corollary of that, is that it's a mistake to infer anything about the mood of the country from the outcome of the election. I mean, literally speaking, Trump lost the popular vote in 2020 and won the popular vote in 2024. But those changes were really very small in the overall scheme of things. And it's almost always a mistake to try to infer people's attitudes and values from how they cast their votes because there are so many factors going into their voting behavior. But the most important one by far is simply whether they think of themselves as Democrats or Republicans. And the third one is called the folk theory of democracy, which is the idea that the way democracy should work is that ordinary people have preferences about what the government's policy should be and they vote for candidates who stand for those preferences. And then the candidate who wins is held accountable for implementing the policies that voters elected him or her to pursue.

The results of elections, I think, very seldom hinge on voters' policy preferences. Candidates do mostly try to accomplish the kinds of things that they promised, but they do so for reasons, I think, really don't have much to do with electoral accountability. And so thinking that we as voters can run the show is, I think, unrealistic. Thank you. I really enjoyed your book, Democracy Arrows from the Top.

Thank you. Pleasure to talk with you. If you're enjoying the podcast, and I really hope you are, please review us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps get the word out. If you're interested, you can also sign up for the Three Takeaways newsletter at ThreeTakeaways.com where you can also listen to previous episodes. You can also follow us on LinkedIn, X, Instagram,

and Facebook. I'm Lynn Toman, and this is Three Takeaways. Thanks for listening.