November 8th has come and gone, and left behind in its wake a litter of broken hearts, relationships, and feelings. What started as a joke quickly blossomed into something real and tangible. People were left to question the results, asking themselves in pleading voices how it could have happened. Some blamed the lack of Latino voter turnout. Others blamed the millennial generation. Still others blamed themselves.
Donald Trump found himself the President-Elect in the early hours of morning. He had spent his campaign being the voice of those unheard, the voice of those who had lost jobs to a recent recession, the voice of those that had found themselves lost and misunderstood in a rapidly changing world. Liberals cried out against both him and his voters, calling them out for being privileged, for being close-minded, for being uneducated. And yet how many of these claims ring untrue? Those that voted for Donald were both rich and poor; both college-educated and unschooled. But statistical institutions did notice some surprising disparities in voter support. Pew Research reported that the difference in support between those with and without higher education differed by a 9-point margin- a difference more polarizing than that of any election since that of Lyndon B. Johnson. So why did Trump resonate so much with uneducated voters?
Many deemed Obama’s term progressive. After all, in his eight years in office, we saw a number of positive changes being made. Landmark court cases recognized the legitimacy of gay marriage, voters began to support efforts to legalize marijuana, and the welfare state, through the introduction of Medicaid, began to be recognized. I believe that it was a backlash against these changes that caused voters, and specifically those that remained uneducated (in this case, those receiving the equivalent of a high school diploma or less) to side with Donald Trump.They found themselves swayed by his simple words, which he repeated with vigor, and his recitation that he would make “America Great Again” by pushing the country back to a time that they remembered, a time that they understood. They were scared, scared because they no longer fit into the changing world around them. His cries to build a wall, to shut America in, sounded like a good idea. It wasn’t so much that they wanted to keep the immigrants out, no, it wasn’t really that at all. They wanted to close themselves in. And it was not because they were scared of losing their hard earned jobs to those that they to be undeserving. It was because they were scared that one day they would look around and not recognize the faces of the America that surrounded them.
It was not only Trump’s ideas that resonated with uneducated voters, however. It was the way in which he said them. Studies have shown that Trump speaks at the literacy level of an average fourth grader. The style that many have labeled as simple, direct, and commanding, is really little more than a plea to a demographic of voters that is tired of politics being tailored to a more progressive, liberal, and well-read audience. Speech analyses have shown that 2016 presidential candidate Bernie Sanders spoke at an 11th grade level, and democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s spoke with the language characteristic of a 10th grader. Trump, who has come under fire for using ridiculous phrases like “bigly” and lacking basic command of the English language in his tweets, gave uneducated voters ideas in a way they could understand, engaging a group of voters that has typically been underrepresented in the polls.
This presents President Elect Donald Trump with quite the predicament. Does he change his tone, and with it the voice of the radically conservative ideals that got him elected? He will soon be tasked with a difficult decision, one that I hope he makes with great deference. Donald Trump will soon have to decide whether or not to continue to cater to the audience that voted for him, or speak to the nation that he has come to inherit. And I hope, very much, that he makes the right choice.
