Trump won the 'double haters'

The 2024 election cycle will be one for the history books — be they about American politics generally or North Carolina specifically.

I don’t mean to suggest the results were inexplicably bizarre, or that they necessarily represent a lasting realignment. Indeed, here in North Carolina voters did what they usually do: pick a Republican for president, a Democrat for governor, and a mixture of Republicans and Democrats for other offices.

The truly history-making aspect of Josh Stein’s gubernatorial victory was its scope. He got 55% of the vote to Republican nominee Mark Robinson’s 40%. That’s a larger margin than Mike Easley achieved in 2004. It’s larger than Jim Hunt managed in 1996.

To find a larger spread for governor, in fact, you have to return all the way to 1980, when Hunt won the second of his four terms by 24 points. North Carolina was a very different state back then: less than half as populated and overwhelmingly Democratic in registration and voting patterns.

Does that make Josh Stein the most gifted politician of our age? I suspect even the governor-elect and his closest friends and family wouldn’t make so audacious a claim. They know that while the Stein campaign was managed well and communicated its messages effectively, what turned the race into a rout was the Republican nomination of so flawed and inexperienced a standard-bearer.

Even if Robinson hadn’t been so vastly outspent and outmaneuvered, he never had a chance of winning. (That’s the main reason he was so vastly outspent and outmaneuvered, by the way. Right-leaning donors and turnout organizations concluded that investing scarce resources in his candidacy would be foolish. When analyzing politics, it’s important not to mix up cause and effect.)

If you’re nodding along right now with this admittedly pedestrian observation, great. I wonder if your head will keep nodding when I apply the same analytical frame to the presidential race. Instead of focusing primarily on what Donald Trump and his campaign did to win North Carolina again — and the presidency nationwide — please consider the possibility that the result may be due more to what his opponents did or didn’t do.

President Biden is deeply unpopular. Fairly or not, voters held the economic policies of his administration responsible for a disastrous bout of inflation that reduced their real incomes and disrupted their lives. They heard little from Kamala Harris to suggest she disagreed with Biden’s policies or would go in a different direction. This was the most important issue of 2024 for a plurality of voters, including a majority of swing voters. They voted accordingly.

The logical fallacy of composition consists of looking at part of a whole and assuming that the characteristics of that part must reflect those of the whole. In the case of Trump voters, it is a fallacy to identify some supporters who actually like his nastiest traits — dishonesty, boorishness, election denial, kind words for dictators, etc. — and then assume all Trump voters feel the same way.

As I argued in a post-election piece for National Review, many late-deciding voters for president were instinctively right-of-center, preferred conservative policies to progressive ones, and disliked Biden and Harris but also considered Trump a bad leader of bad character.

“While enough came home to push the former president over the top,” I wrote, “they didn’t do so because they embraced the January 6 riot, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s crankery, or Tucker Carlson’s antics. They did so in spite of these turnoffs.”

The math is right there in the North Carolina exit poll. Some 46% respondents had a favorable view only of Harris. All voted for her. Another 42% only had a favorable view of Trump (whether on issues or personal traits, we can’t tell). All voted for him. A tiny sliver was favorable to both. The rest either disliked both or refused to answer, probably because they disliked both.

Trump won two-thirds of the “double haters.” Like it or not, that’s the choice they made.

John Hood is a John Locke Foundation board member. His latest books, Mountain Folk and Forest Folk, combine epic fantasy with early American history.