Americans Just Want Normal People in Charge
It’s not that complicated.
I think sometimes politicians, and the media who cover them, underestimate just how truly weird the average American considers all of them to be. It really doesn’t make much sense to be a politician: Their lives seem pretty miserable. You’re away from your loved ones all the time; you make far less money than you would in the private sector; you open up your personal life to constant scrutiny; you spend most of your free time on the phone begging people for money; everyone is always angry and yelling at you (and your family) all the time. What kind of crazy person would want that job? We all remember that kid from high school who was a little too into running for student council. No one wants to be the person. Few really understand them.
Which was one of the initial appeals, I’d argue, of Donald Trump. I covered an early Trump rally in Mobile, Alabama, back in August 2015, and I spent four hours talking to the long line of people waiting to get into the event, held at a college football stadium. This was still early on in the Trump candidacy, back when it seemed absurd that Southern conservatives would ever support a germaphobe billionaire from New York City, and I spent that time asking them why in the world they liked Trump. You know what they all said? They all said he was “a normal person.” “He doesn’t talk like Hillary Clinton, or Jeb Bush,” one woman told me. “He talks like the people I know.” That’s what people, deep down, want. They want a politician who doesn’t seem that dramatically different than the people they know in their lives. They want to relate to them.
It is still up in the air how much the Tuesday night primaries will change American politics. The House looks like it will flip to Republican hands, but the Senate might remain Democratically controlled, and on the whole, what many thought would be a Red Wave turned out to mostly be a stalemate — which is of course a huge boom to Democrats (and, really, anyone worried about democracy). But I’d argue the overarching takeaway was that voters don’t want lunatics. They, on the whole, did the logical thing: They voted for the person who seemed less crazy … more normal.
If you believe the 2020 election was not legitimate, or you will say it was to curry the favor of the former President, you could do well with Republican voters. But if you were in a race that didn’t consist of mostly Republicans, on Tuesday night, you lost. Refusing to concede, pretending that the 2020 election was “rigged” (or that Trump won), just generally being a Trumpist weirdo … those were recipes to lose on Tuesday night. The “normalcy” that people like that woman in Mobile saw in Trump has long worn off; even people that like Trump don’t consider him “normal” anymore. Being an election denier might make Trump like you. But it’s weird. It’s historically aberrant. It freaks people out. It’s not normal. And people, deep down, will want normal.
“Normal,” of course, is a flexible term: We have a different definition of it now than we did five years ago, and we may well have a different one five years from now. But at the end of the day, people don’t want their politics to be revolutionary, in either direction. They want politicians to at least be somewhat relatable to them — a guy in a big hoodie rather than a TV star who doesn’t even live in their state. They just want things to look familiar. They don’t want their politicians to be weirdos. Republicans have spent most of this cycle embracing weirdos, because that’s what Donald Trump wanted, because Donald Trump is weird. “Despite everything, there is still a robust constituency in this country for leaders who are not overtly crazy.” wrote Jonathan Chait last night. That’s the real lesson from Tuesday night. Republicans paid the price for not learning that Tuesday. Will they pay the price again in 2024? Recent evidence does not inspire much confidence.
Will Leitch writes multiple pieces a week for Medium. Make sure to follow him right here. He lives in Athens, Georgia, with his family and is the author of five books, including the Edgar-nominated novel How Lucky, now out from Harper Books. He also writes a free weekly newsletter that you might enjoy.
