This piece will be appearing as a newspaper op/ed this weekend — under the title “The Meaning of the Massive Turnout in the 2020 Election” — in my very red congressional district (VA-06).
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During a radio interview the morning after Election Day, I was asked how we should understand the high voter turnout in this year’s election.
I began with the obvious: the turnout was high because of the intensity of feeling on both sides.
For weeks, I’d seen signs of that intensity on the Blue side, manifested by so many cheerfully standing in line for hours to cast early votes, and so many eagerly working hard (make calls, send postcards, etc.) to elect Joe Biden President.
Then, on Election Day, it became evident that Trump supporters were likewise also intensely motivated-- to keep Trump President.
But what’s interesting is what generated that intensity: on both sides, the intensity of feeling concerned one person—Donald Trump.
That made this election unique. Consider the contrast with the election of 1860.
That election, too, was one of great intensity and of correspondingly very high turnout. But in that year, the intensity of feeling – and the depth of national division – grew out of a hugely important issue: slavery.
Slavery was an issue with wide ramifications for the national economy and for the long-term balance of power in the nation. No wonder that election in 1860 was fraught with intense feeling and generated the highest turnout (at 81.2%) the nation had ever seen: that election represented the nation’s dealing with something substantive and consequential—one the nation had been struggling with for more than a generation.
No such thing this time. Yes, there are issues, and the issues are important. But, on both sides, it was not specific issues that was generating the passions. It was that one person: one side impassioned to remove Donald Trump from the Presidency, while the other aflame to keep him there. (Unlike in 1860, had a single individual departed the scene, the intensity of national passions would immediately have dropped precipitously.)
It is not hard to see how Trump brought this about:
First, since he first jumped into the political arena, Trump has shown a real genius for making himself the object of everyone’s attention. Friends and foes alike have hardly been able to take their eyes off of him—either for adulation or outrage – or stop talking about him.
No one in American history, I think it safe to say, has ever matched Trump’s domination of the nation’s attention.
Second, Trump made himself not only the focus of attention but also the heart of our divisions. When America went to the polls, the deepest division in the nation concerned whether President Trump was a hero or “the most dangerous man in the world,” whether he was good or evil.
No one before Trump has ever made a presidential election so much all about him. And it’s not so hard to see how Trump accomplished this.
It has been widely observed that, as President, Trump has been unique in how – from his Inaugural Address onward -- he never even tried to reach out to those Americans outside his base. But he didn’t just leave that initial division intact. He widened it.
Trump seemed to have designed virtually his every word and action to accomplish two things simultaneously: each thing he said and did simultaneously gratified his supporters and infuriated his opponents.
Trump cast every issue –even the pandemic! -- in terms of Us against Them. And he endeared himself to his “Us” while continually outraging “Them.”
It’s not surprising that – after four years of Trump driving that kind of wedge between Americans -- by the time we got to his bid for re-election, the divisions in the American public regarding Trump had grown so virulent that voters on both sides turned out in great numbers.
Historians will note that Donald Trump managed – in a manner unprecedented in American history – to make the American political scene, and eventually this election, one about which Trump could rightly declare “It’s All About Me!”
“It’s all about me!” That is the essence of what psychologists call “narcissism.” And, since near the beginning of Trump’s presidency, narcissism is what many psychological experts have remarked repeatedly, since Trump became President, for which Donald Trump manifests all the diagnostic indicators.
It is wounding that produces such narcissism, and Trump’s niece – a clinical psychologist – has described the ways in which Trump’s upbringing wounded him in ways that generated the narcissist’s caring only about himself.
Those who are wounded often, in turn, inflict wounds. And so it is that the same President who now has given us this “All About Me” election, has also repeatedly sacrificed the nation for self-serving purposes. (Most dramatically in the events that led to his impeachment, and then in his handling of the pandemic.) The damaged spread damage into the surrounding world.
And so it is that the high voter turnout – in an election that one man made “all about him” -- is part of a larger picture.