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I'm Australian. I was spared that choice.
It really is incredible that neither US party could put forth a decent candidate. Unbelievable neglect of the world's greatest power.
You have to understand the context here. Republicans tried the nice guys for years. Romney was nice. McCain was nice. Even Bush was way nicer than Trump. What they learned from that? First: your nice guy will be declared literally Hitler anyway. There's no avoiding it, that's just how it works. Second: nice guys finish last. Cruz or Rubio wouldn't likely beat Clinton. To say nothing of Jeb!. Trump did.
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Presidential candidates being thoroughly mediocre is pretty normal. There just aren't that many brilliant leaders out there, and in the US presidential system you're praying for the trifecta of: able to win a partisan primary, able to win a nationwide general election, and actually a competent executive. There is some overlap between the first two with respect to charisma, but they're mostly three distinct skill/capability sets.
However, it must be noted that 2024 didn't fit the pattern of people grudgingly voting for their party's nominee. Trump voters did not regard him as the best option amongst a subpar selection. They were (and for the most part still are) rapturously enthusiastic about him.
I don't it's mediocrity that is the issue here.
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Isn't this combining two groups?
Trump does have a base that is rapturously enthusiastic for him - which people often call the MAGA base or MAGA crowd. But this group is not coterminous with those people who voted for Trump. He did not win 2024 with his base alone - and we can see now that even though Trump won the popular vote, his current approval ratings are far lower than that. It seems like there must have been a lot of people who voted for Trump but are not consistently enthusiastic about him.
Not really. There are some marginal voters who voted for Trump but don't like him, but the vast bulk of Trump's ~~77.5m votes in 2024 came from Republicans. Amongst Republicans he is still incredibly popular, both in terms of raw approval and in terms of the fervency with which he is supported. The MAGA base has essentially devoured the rest of the Republican Party.
The fact that the Republican candidate was mostly voted for by Republicans is surely to be expected irrespective of who the candidate is. Republicans vote for Republican candidates. But not all of those were genuinely enthusiastic about Trump, and of course, Trump won on the back of swing voters.
The initial question here was about Trump voters. I think there are at least three different groups under discussion here: 1) everybody who voted for Trump, 2) Republicans, 3) MAGA. There is substantial overlap between those groups, obviously, but as far as I can tell there are plenty of people in one group but not in one or both of the others.
It looks to me like Trump's approval among Republicans was mostly in the 80s while in office, dipped significantly while he was out of office, and is dipping again due to Iran.
It is not surprising that Republican voters voted for the Republican candidate. My point there is that the subset of non-Republican Trump supporters is relatively small. The subset of unenthusiastic non-Republican Trump supporters is necessarily even smaller. Combine this with the fact that Trump's approval amongst Republicans remains stratospheric and we can safely discard the idea that Trump's supporters generally saw themselves as holding their nose to pick the least bad option.
(FWIW, despite motioning towards it earlier I think the idea that voters are mostly picking from among perceived least bad options isn't really true; the people talking like this are a loud minority of cynics trying to rationalize their decision making)
That poll is from the beginning of March. As far as I can tell it has mostly bounced back amongst Republicans while falling elsewhere.
Well, my model of human behaviour is such that even if people hold their nose to vote for a candidate at first, people tend to then talk themselves into that choice being right. Once you're in a coalition, you tend to rationalise that coalition to yourself and align along all its issues. If you are, for instance, a single-issue voter on abortion, you will nonetheless probably talk yourself into adopting the rest of the Democrat/Republican platforms over time, even if only to minimise cognitive dissonance.
So I would tend to expect a Republican who reluctantly talked himself into voting for Trump in 2016 to have, over the next decade, talked himself into being more generally supportive of Trump.
However, I would nonetheless suggest that most presidents win office with the votes of people who do not see themselves as 'X voters', or as being part of a tribe or coalition that same way. People who identify as Republicans are likely to vote for Trump, and have done that, and as the Republican party increasingly Trumpifies, talk themselves into liking Trump as well. But Trump didn't win with that group alone. He won with the independent vote - he increased his share of the independent vote from 41% in 2020 to 46% in 2024, and since independents are somewhere in between a quarter (in 2020) and a third of voters (in 2024), that is significant.
My guess would be that independents are much more likely to have grudgingly voted for a least-bad candidate than party members. If they were genuinely enthused for a candidate, they would probably just join the party. My guess would also be that independents are likely to be among the quickest to drop support for a president. Trump's declining approval rating is likely primarily seen among independents and moderates - both firm Democrats and firm Republicans have their minds made up and won't change their perspective.
What this adds up to me is the conclusion that there is a significant chunk of people, disproportionately independent, who voted for Trump unenthusiastically, and have since gone off him.
How many is 'significant'? I don't know. In 2024 Trump won 49.8% of the vote, and at present 39.7% of people, according to Nate Silver's poll, approve of him. There's some noise, since these surveys and polls aren't restricted to voters, but just as an estimate, this would suggest somewhere around 10% of the American population voted for Trump and then changed their mind and now think he's doing a bad job. That would also suggest that around a fifth, 20% or so, of Trump's own voters have since gone off him.
There's obviously a margin of error there (what about people who voted for Harris but have since decided that Trump is doing a good job, and started to approve of him? such people would be very weird but there's probably more than zero), but I think it's a reasonable speculation. Say it's less than this, that's fine. If 15% of people who voted for Trump in 2024 now disapprove of his job performance, I'd still say that's a decent chunk of voters.
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Very much agreed. Trump got about 40% of the 2016 Republican primary vote if you only look at states which voted while the race was still competitive. Cruz voters don't need to hold their nose to vote for Trump, but I don't think they are any happier with him than they would be with another winning Republican who appointed pro-life SCOTUS justices.
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I suppose I could be accused of dodging the question, so I should try to expand a little.
One of my red lines is that I will not vote for an unrepentant adulterer. Credible repentance and apology is needed before I will even consider it. Technically both Trump and Harris fail that criterion, though in Harris' case it's because, while single, she had an affair with a married-but-separated man. In general I feel that if you cannot keep faith in your personal life, you cannot keep faith in your political life. So even before we get into any other character issues, I could not vote for Trump.
The steelman of the case for Trump, to me, goes something like, "Yes, I know he is of terrible personal character, and that does weigh in my considerations, but a political choice like this has to be a kind of calculation about what's best for the country, and a bad man might nonetheless be the least bad choice for the country. It is a betrayal of the virtue of charity, and your obligations to your fellow citizens, to refuse to vote for a least-bad candidate for character reasons, because if the worse candidate wins, it is your fellow citizens who will suffer a worse result." A Trump voter aiming to persuade me would probably do best by not trying to play down or distract from the awfulness of his character, as revealed by things like these tweets, but rather by trying to direct me to concrete policy results.
For the first Trump term, I think they might have a strong case on consequentialist grounds like that. For the second term, it would be weaker. Would Harris have bungled the Middle East as badly as Trump seems to be? I can't prove a counterfactual, but I'm skeptical.
Still, if we're going to talk consequences, I would argue, I suppose, that the signalling value of a write-in or absent vote is more than zero, and perhaps a statement of lack of faith in the American political system, or of disgust at both candidates, would have about as much value as a single vote ever could.
I never actually faced this calculation, thankfully, but if I had been in the US, I suspect I would have left the vote for president blank or done a write-in, while still voting down-ballot.
By adultery, do you mean cheating (even if only technically, given that the man Kamala was with was separated), or does it include any form of extramarital sex?
I think that if you're trying to nitpick whether or not what you did was really adulterous, you're probably already in the red zone.
The underlying principle is that people who either don't keep their own most sacred promises, or who participate in helping others to break their own most sacred promises, should not bear the public trust. This is why e.g. someone who cheats in a same-sex partnership still fails the test, even though technically that's not 'marriage' in the sense that I understand the term.
You might be implying cases like a married couple who, via mutual agreement, sleep with other people? Like an open marriage? That does run afoul of my rule; I see how it's meaningfully different to traditional cheating, but it's still in my view morally disqualifying. This is also how I resolve cases of consensual polyamory - the interaction with my adultery rule is somewhat blurry, but as it is also disqualifying in itself, there is no need to resolve the exact relationship to adultery.
This is all just around the edges, though. Practical cases tend to look more like, for example, Barnaby Joyce.
Oops, I was confusing adultery with fornication. My confusion stemmed from "thou shalt not commit adultery" commonly being interpreted as also prohibiting fornication. I was actually asking about your opinion on non-adulterous extramarital sex.
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I don't think that should necessarily apply to politicians. Politicians have enemies who interpret everything they did uncharitably, so a politician may have to "nitpick" in response to them.
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