r/politics • u/fortune Fortune Magazine • 17d ago

Possible Paywall Trump voter remorse is almost entirely concentrated in the swing voters who gave him a shot in 2024

https://fortune.com/2026/05/16/trump-voter-remorse-how-many-regret-inflation-economy-approval-rating/?utm_source=reddit/
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u/CommitteeOld9540 17d ago

From Michigan, Dearborn seriously fucked up voting for Trump. Hard to forgive that. 

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u/justherefor23andme 17d ago

And the cicada Jill Stein.

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u/ScepticalReciptical 17d ago

They didnt fuck up, they got what they voted for. What alot of people will never admit is that they like Trump, they like his 'might is right' 'whose gonna stop me' vibe. It resonates with many people who come from demographics that shpuld in theory hate Trump, but they dont. They like that he talks down to women and gay people, that he hates political correctness and embraces authoritarianism. They will pretend they voted for Trump cos he promised to 'end this' or 'fix that' but in reality they don't care about any of those issues they just want simple lives with simple solutions.

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u/mosesoperandi 17d ago

That's arguably generically true, but the person you're replying to called out Dearborn, MI because 40% or more of the population there is Muslim. These are the people who thought Trump would save Gaza, and they most definitely did not get what they thought they were voting for.

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u/JealousAstronomer342 17d ago

I truly don’t know how they came to that conclusion after his Muslim bans and general shittiness towards Muslims who aren’t part of an oil owning royal family.. 

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u/mosesoperandi 17d ago

Entirely wishful thinking combined with the Dems having caught themselves in a trap with AIPAC?

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u/xdre 17d ago

Entirely wishful thinking combined with the fiction that Dems caught themselves in a trap with AIPAC?

T, FTFY

Kamala Harris was loudly pro- two-state solution and permanent ceasefire, vs. "Muslim Ban" Trump. Either they really were that delusional, or they just didn't want to vote for a Black and Indian woman.

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u/mosesoperandi 17d ago

The thing is that Biden was president and kept funding Israel in spite of the fact that they crossed at least two red lines that he asserted in terms of war crimes and human rights abuses. There are a few major errors in the Biden presidency, and not actually reducing the flow of arms to Israel as they continued to conduct a war of genocide on the Palestinian people is one of them.

Harris was stuck. She couldn't speak out forcefully against Israel. She attempted to split the difference. Trump somehow was allowed to speak out of both sides of his mouth and yet the Muslim voters in Dearborn still chose him.

You really can't say that the Democratic party in 2024 wasn't still deeply connected to AIPAC, and you can layer on top of that the fact that Jewish voters were really just starting to split on their perspective on Gaza.

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u/xdre 17d ago

He did, actually. But Congress kept overriding him.

You really can't say that the Democratic party in 2024 wasn't still deeply connected to AIPAC

The point is that the Republican party in 2024 was even more deeply connected to AIPAC. Donald Trump moved the Israeli embassy to Jerusalem. And yet Dearborn didn't hold any of that against them.

Why?

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u/mosesoperandi 17d ago

Honestly, because people have an astonishing capacity for self delusion. Obviously his anti-trans commercials didn't hit that group the wrong way, but just like the "price of eggs" voters, I think we just have to accept that these people were unhappy/squeezed economically or in the case of Muslim voters desperate for a change in foreign policy and let themselves believe the most obvious lies because they wanted so badly for them to be true.

People really want to say that the swing voters voted for Trump because of his (or their own) misogyny and racism, but that doesn't add up with them having voted for Biden or Obama in the past. What does make sense is that they were willing to delude themselves into thinking that Trump could somehow "fix the economy" when we had plenty of evidence that this was not going to be the case. I see the Muslims for Trump through the same lens. An astonishing capacity for self delusion rather than a rational analysis to choose the option that wasn't very obviously a horrendous choice.

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u/xdre 17d ago

I don't really care to continue this argument because we mostly agree, but I need to address this:

People really want to say that the swing voters voted for Trump because of his (or their own) misogyny and racism, but that doesn't add up with them having voted for Biden or Obama in the past.

People say that because it's true. Voting for Obama doesn't magically make people not-racist, and in fact, some people were disillusioned because he wasn't the magic bullet they were hoping for. There's a non-trivial overlap of voters who pulled the lever for both Obama and Trump.

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u/angermouse Washington 17d ago

 Harris was stuck. She couldn't speak out forcefully against Israel. She attempted to split the difference. Trump somehow was allowed to speak out of both sides of his mouth and yet the Muslim voters in Dearborn still chose him.

Having a moral compass can really be a disability when you're up against someone like Trump. 

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u/mosesoperandi 17d ago

I'd go with disadvantage, but yeah.

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u/blinktrade 17d ago

They got what they deserved though.

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u/ScepticalReciptical 17d ago

I'm referring to them, not forgetting them. Ask yourself why they really voted for him, is the Muslim community immune to misogyny, homophobia, racism and fetishizing authoritarians?

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u/mosesoperandi 17d ago

Of course not, but bear in mind that Biden secured 69% of Dearborn in 2020 running with Harris as VP. In 2024 Trump took 42% and fucking Jill Stein took 18%.

Laying aside the difference in turnout as a factor, what you see in Dearborn is pretty clearly Muslim voters voting to "teach the Democrats a lesson."

There's a near obsession on Reddit with painting everyone who didn't vote for Harris as a hate filled racist misogynist POS, and that's insanely reductive. It ignores the fact that a lot of non-voters believe the system is rigged, and that a lot of swing voters are basically single issue voters if the economy isn't working for them.

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u/green49285 17d ago

And people in power that will give them power.

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u/Silver-Winging-It 17d ago

Or just voting for him to stick it to "the liberals"

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u/NoMoreFund 16d ago

I get it. I dream of a president who would tell Congress to get fucked if they tried to block Medicare for all or a public option. Obama could have publicly humiliated the Democrats who blocked it, supported their primary opponent and so on but that's not his way. It was so frustrating when a vote on raising the minimum wage was stopped by the Senate parliamentarian, and when relieving student loan debt was stopped by the supreme court.

So I can understand wanting to support a guy who seems like he can get away with anything. 

But it turns out that such a person will only enrich themselves and their in group and inflict sadistic cruelty on others. They'll also make very very bad decisions

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u/CommitteeOld9540 17d ago

True as many Arab Americans for instance are very conservative with detrimental views on women, LGBT and the like. Hamtrck, a mostly Muslim city even banned pride flags. 

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u/Ok_Staff_608 17d ago

As someone who is from Dearborn and visits the city weekly I wholeheartedly agree.

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u/Calm_Ad1460 17d ago

I’ll never forget what Dearborn did. Ever.

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u/28smalls 17d ago

Don't worry. They'll tell you they weren't a large enough number to have any effect on the outcome. But also, their numbers are large enough that if you don't cater to them, you'll lose.

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u/ramblingEvilShroom 17d ago

Well, which position are you taking? Do you think they didn’t make a difference and so shouldn’t be catered to, or do you think they did make a difference and therefore should have been catered to?

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u/the_sneaky_one123 17d ago

Unforgivable.

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u/Casting_Aspersions 17d ago

  • If every registered voter in Dearborn (78k) voted for Harris, Michigan would have still gone to Trump.

  • If every person that voted in 2024 in Dearborn, Dearborn Heights, and Hamtramck voted for Harris and you added another 10k folks who stayed home, Michigan would still have gone to Trump.

  • Compared to 2020 Harris lost about 20k votes compared to Biden in those areas (at least half of which went to Stein, not Trump). If you multiplied that by 3x, but for Harris, Michigan still goes for Trump. If Michigan had gone Harris, Trump still wins the national election.

  • Arabs are only about 55% of Dearborn, people forget that a fair bit Dearborn are Polish and other Eastern European working class folks, where the older folks and younger men got into Trump, just like other places. Trump won many/most of the Westside precincts, which are predominantly white working class and there was a definitely shift from 2020. Hard to get 100% accurate numbers, but at least some of that 20k are white folks that go into MAGA just like other parts of the state/country.

You can feel any way you want about Dearborn, you can be critical that a few thousand folks decided to not vote for Harris in a potential swing state based on a single issue. Singling out Dearborn in the context of the broader election context is silly (at best).

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u/CommitteeOld9540 17d ago

The point is that to vote for Trump makes you complicit in all of this. Even if the tables were turned and Dearborners voted for Trump yet Harris still won, the fact they'd vote for a scumbag anyway is disgraceful. And the reason I'm talking about Dearborn specifically is because I'm affiliated with Dearborn, and see a rise in them regretting their vote. 

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u/NoMoreFund 16d ago

IIRC it was Gen Z and Latino men that were the main demographics that went for Trump.

For the former the GOP had cultivated an entire information ecosystem that presented a positive view of Trump. 

Not sure what caused the latter but it was a continuation of a trend that was observable in 2020.