Trump's Irregular Army
On Irregular Voters
As all the media oxygen rushes towards the sucky hot mess of Trump’s Cabinet picks, Progressives are slowly shaking off their post-election grief malaise. Not a minute too soon. Trump’s poor judgement — in Gaetz, in Hegseth, in Patel and Gabbard — unfolds in real-time, demanding some sort of meaningful pushback. And as Biden recedes into the background, the new resistance — to #Protect democratic institutions — takes to the fore. But first some serious questions in the weeks leading to the confirmation fights. Is the President-elect “flooding the zone with shit,” as the Machiavellian Steve Bannon advised? Or are these nominees serious? Is this a preview of what thumotic excess will look like in Season 2 of the Trump Reality Show? In other words: the mock charge of a silverback or a cunningly devised strategy to sneak through some of his more challenging picks, like the eccentric Robert F. Kennedy. Jr? Perhaps a touch of both?
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“Character is Destiny,” Heraclitus warned us twenty-five centuries ago. But so intent are Trump’s late-breaking voters — his irregular army, I call them — in breaking the wheel altogether, that they elected him to have another go at it, Character be damned. Even though last time his sloppy transition out of power involved a lot of urine and feces spread about in order to degrade the Capitol building. Who, exactly, are these irregular voters that lack political memory? They are a species of voter — the most important species of voter — disengaged from the election until its last moments. But there’s more to it than that. Ron Brownstein in The Atlantic does a good job in describing irregulars vis-a-vis persuadables, right before Election day:
When most people think about a voter still trying to make up their mind, they probably imagine a person who is highly likely to vote but uncertain whether to support Harris, Trump, or a third-party candidate. Both political parties, however, are more focused on a different—and much larger—group of undecideds: potential voters who are highly likely to support Harris or Trump, but unsure if they will vote at all.
Campaigns typically describe the first group of reliable but conflicted voters as persuadable; they frequently describe the second group as irregular voters. Persuadable voters get the most attention from the media, but campaigns recognize that irregular voters can loom much larger in the outcome—especially in presidential elections when more of them ultimately participate.
“There are a gajillion more of those [irregular] people than the Harris/Trump ‘I don’t know; I’m still thinking about it’” kind of voter, Anat Shenker-Osorio, a communications consultant for Democrats and progressive groups, told me. “There are more humans who are non-habitual voters than there are voters who swing back and forth. That’s just math.”
It is easy to dismiss irregular voters outright as intellectually déshabillé, as David Sedaris essentially did in the pages of The New Yorker in October. The sort of people that eat mushroom soup out of a can and, horror (!!), make casseroles with it (Averted Gaze). The peasants! But they, canned mushroom soup notwithstanding, represent tens of millions of Americans that, because of the disfunctions of our system, have had a minimal civics education (if that). “Even in 2020, the highest-turnout national election in more than a century, a third of eligible voters — about 80 million people — stayed home,” Jonah Goldberg wrote for the LATimes. “All else being equal, if Trump or Harris could disproportionately turn out even a tenth of such people, it would be enough for a landslide.” Or at the very least, a last-minute sweep of the swing states.
What are we now to call low information voters, the less engaged or “undecideds” in a post-Woke Trump New World Order? Low-propensity? Do we go back to "poorly educated,” which Trump actually employed in Nevada in 2016 (How does he get away with things like this, anyway)? The testosteronal zeitgeist notwithstanding, I’m going to settle on “irregular voters,” which actually captures their approach to the election process. As opposed to, say, medium-propensity voters, low propensities are less likely to be engaged with every election. They operate in a politically liminal state, activated during the last few months of the campaign, and are thus particularly vulnerable to unscrupulous social media targeting aimed at them. This is probably why Trump’s experimental, non-traditional maneuvers — McDonalds stunt; bloodsports podcasts; the “dark final pitch” — worked.
Further, it is quite difficult to poll irregulars, though the social scientists in the polling class are improving. We should have known this, because this always happens with trump in the electoral mix. In 2016, the polling variability was blamed on everything from not accounting for land lines to not weighting polls for non-college voters. And in 2020 some polls, ridiculously, had Biden ahead of Trump by 12-points! “Pollsters can take some comfort in the fact that polling averages in state-level presidential races did slightly better than they did in 2020 — perhaps suggesting that polling adjustments helped limit the overall polling error,” Josh Clinton and John Lapinsky of NBC News surmise. “In an analysis of all public reported polls in the last two weeks of the 2020 election, those pre-election polls conducted in the last two weeks understated Trump’s support by an average of 3.3 percentage points compared to the final results. In 2024, the polls conducted in the last two weeks understated his support by 2.4 points on average.” Also which, in retrospect, is about how far off David Plouffe was about Trump’s swing-state strength in October.
It is as difficult to predict how irregulars vote — one cycle for Obama, another cycle for Trump is a famous example — as it is to predict how many will actually come out in the first place. I’ve called them in this Substack Trump’s “invisible army,” but “irregular army” is more accurate. About 9% of irregulars switched from Obama to Trump in the 2016 cycle versus 2012. Of this we cannot fail to note that President Obama was politically quite fortunate to draw a former founder of Bain Capital, the private equity investment firm, as his opponent. Trump, too, was lucky as well in 2016, drawing the wife of the former President who signed NAFTA into law, which accelerated the economic decline of the working class. And, so — bonus question — What do Hillary Clinton and Mitt Romney have in common? Answer: the perception of hostility to America’s manufacturing base, who, though disappearing, are inextricably intertwined with the irregular voting group.
What of the 12.5 million manufacturing employees in the United States? The Democrat Party’s the party’s electoral coalition of urban professionals and a multiracial working class didn’t speak to the white working class as powerfully as those they/them ads, apparently. How many of those white working class voters in manufacturing centers count themselves among the “irregulars”? A team of researchers in 2019 found that manufacturing — or the uncertainty around manufacturing — was key to understanding the irregular vote in 2016. “(The researchers) discovered that although most of the respondents included remained loyal to the same party in 2012 and 2016, about 6% of white working-class voters and 2.4% of white non-working-class voters switched to Trump in 2016,” Tess Eyrich said of the study at UC/Riverside News. “In contrast, only 2% of white working-class voters and 3.1% of white non-working-class voters switched from supporting Mitt Romney in 2012 to Hillary Clinton in 2016.” Ironically, the Harris campaign had former President Bill Clinton roaming around Eastern North Carolina, arguing her case, despite the fact that NAFTA devastated the region. North Carolina lost 328,126 manufacturing jobs (or 41.1 percent) from 1994-present, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Trump beat Harris in the Tar Heel state by nearly 200,000 votes.
But this is not just about North Carolina. The Economy was the top concern of voters, according to the exit polling. And the rising cost of food everywhere all but negated the steady GDP growth and a low unemployment rate, particularly in the lives of voters making under $50,000 a year. Half of voters with income under $50,000 supported Trump, compared to 47 percent who supported the Harris campaign. In other words: the working class. Further, even voters making under $100,000 turned Republican in 2024. “According to exit poll data, the Democrats are now the preferred party of higher-income, college-educated voters, with 55 percent of college graduates and 51 percent of individuals with incomes over $100,000 voting for Kamala Harris, while Donald Trump attracted more support from low income non-college educated voters,” writes Martha McHardy for Newsweek.
The pendulum swings. In 2024, the Republican party was the preferred party of the working class. Even though the contradictions of pro-working class rhetoric clashes mightily against the anti-union busting that the former party of heirs in heir to. That having been said, do not call 2024 a blow out election by any means. The Republican Party of the working class is a new phenomenon in American politics and things are still rather fluid as to whether or not this is permanent. “… (T)he former president’s margin of victory over Harris is a miniscule 1.6 percentage points, ‘smaller than that of every winning president since 1888 other than two: John F Kennedy in 1960 and Richard M. Nixon in 1968,’ as an analysis in the New York Times noted last month,” Greg Jericho of The Guardian reminds us all.
It will be a while before we have the full autopsy of the corpse, of course, but some things are becoming more and more evident as the election recedes into the rear-view mirror. The Democrat Establishment needs to conduct a rigorous housecleaning, ancillary to the postmortem. "In all seven battleground states, Mr. Trump won more votes than Mr. Biden did four years ago," notes Nate Cohn. Some interesting numbers to ponder over: Harris got more votes in Georgia in 2024 (2,548,017) than Biden did in 2020 (2,473,633). The problem is, Trump got nearly 200,000 MORE votes in GA than he did in 2020 (2,663,117). Further, in AZ, Trump got nearly 100,000 more votes (1,770,242) than Biden did in 2020 (1,672,143). Are these activated irregular voters? Again, it will be some time before we have the full picture with granular detail, but it appears that irregular voters, largely working class, were a major factor in Trump’s popular vote victory, the first for a Republican in two decades.
As in 2016, TrumpWorld focused on social media while the Harris campaign ran a very old school, classic Bob Shrum Presidential campaign, despite the fact that they had a massive financial war chest. TrumpWorld, by contrast, ran an asymmetrical campaign evolving their Web 2.0 2016 strategy to include Web 3 in 2024. The Trump campaign even accepted crypto donations, when not setting up the SEC as a bogeyman on the campaign trail. Trump was activating irregulars on Joe Rogan (which boasts 11 million listeners per episode), while Kamala did Howard Stern (a couple of million a week) and Call Her Daddy, which probably was all-in for Kamala Harris at the outset. The Harris campaign played it too safe, to vanilla, too John Kerry, 2004.
Again, the full post-mortem is not yet available, but the TrumpWorld strategy of having a conversation in the manosphere and decentralized Web3 messaging spaces clearly worked. It did not help matters that despite $1.5 billion in funds, the Harris campaign sat back, avoided the manosphere altogether (despite having testosteronal bragging rights after the one and only debate) and never pushed back on the anti-trans/they-them cultural attack ads. Imagine if Harris had gone on Theo Von and Joe Rogan, bragging about how she “kicked his ass” at their one debate and was scared of having another. Or had Tim Walz — nearly invisible on the campaign trail in the final weeks — do it? Imagine if the Harris campaign had spent money fighting back against the plural pronouns ad spends? Eric Cortellessa of Time magazine writes about Trump’s asymmetrical strategy:
That’s meant eschewing traditional media interviews in favor of fawning long-form podcast conversations with laddish hosts who draw massive young male audiences, such as Theo Von, Lex Friedman, Logan Paul, the Nelk Boys, and Joe Rogan, who boasts the most popular podcast in America. Instead of trotting out endorsements from political heavy-hitters, they have touted support from professional athletes such as the retired Green Bay Packers quarterback Brett Favre, former Pittsburgh Steelers Antonio Brown and Le’Veon Bell, and the boxer Jake Paul. At the Palm Beach headquarters, the campaign has built a data mine to target irregular GOP male voters and unregistered young men in swing states who they surmise can tip the scales in Trump’s favor.
… In 2020, President Joe Biden did just as well with women as Hillary Clinton did four years earlier—winning them over by a 13-point margin—but narrowed Trump’s lead with men. Trump beat Biden with men by six points whereas he routed Clinton with them by 11 points, according to a post-election analysis by the political data firm Catalist. “Where we lost ground on raw vote terms primarily was men,” says a Trump official. To that end, the campaign has devised a straightforward thesis of the race: “Max out the men and hold the women.”
And hold them he did. As well as the Latino vote. 53% of white women went with Trump, according to exit polls. “If a Black woman had cheated on all of her husbands and had three sets of children,” LZ Gunderson observed, acidly, in the LA Times, “I doubt she would have gotten the white evangelical vote as Trump did.”
The TrumpWorld was laser-focused on messaging through sports events, which was particularly evident when they asked for equal time after Kamala Harris’s SNL cold open with Maya Rudolf. TrumpWorld raised the possibility that the not-ready-for-prime-time players had violated the FCC’s Equal Time Rule, which led to conniptions at NBC Universal, which has always had a dodgy relationship with the former President. Instead of asking for another SNL appearance of the same media value, however, the Trump team asked for equal coverage on NASCAR and NFL. NASCAR, incidentally, has an over 30% fan base of women. And the NFL, America’s most popular sport, has a large female fan base as well. So, even when Trump was not specifically marketing his brand to women, whom all the pundits (myself included) thought were a lock for the Harris campaign, the former President was getting some of that residual audience, wholly without pushback.
Incumbency was also at issue this election cycle, clearly. The mood of 2024, like most Presidential elections of the modern era, was decidedly "throw the bums out.” When was the last time anyone ran on being an “insider” or better yet, the Establishment. So, both trump and Harris were trying to portray the other as the incumbent, as the swamp. And while technically neither Harris nor Trump were actual incumbents in this election, only one of the two candidates had ever been President before. That didn’t stop TrumpWorld from successfully painting Harris as the incumbent in 2024, by fixing her to the Biden administration. Her unforced error on the View in October attached her, once and for all, to the incumbent Biden for keeps. Not a good look. “Since the pandemic hit in 2020, incumbents have been removed from office in 40 of 54 elections in Western democracies,” said Steven Levitsky, a political scientist at Harvard University, revealing “a huge incumbent disadvantage,” wrote David Rising, Jill Lawless and Nicholas Riccardi for AP.
Finally, the “saving democracy” argument was well past its expiration date this time around. This did not matter much to irregulars. In 2020, it had some potency. In 2024, that argument fell behind the Economy and Immigration as front-of-mind concerns in voters’ minds. The threat of Fascism, though vital to college graduates who have wrestled with political philosophy term papers, is less of a concern to a non-college family making less than $50,000 a year. In fine, what was a winning message for “Scranton Joe” Biden in 2020 was not nearly as urgent in 2024, according to Pew earlier this year. The election was not a blow out, despite TrumpWorld’s hyperbolic claims of an unprecedented and powerful mandate. But Progressives are going to have to seriously consider creating from the grassroots up an ecosystem to compete with talk radio, with the manosphere, with Fox news and all of the right-wing social media platforms out there. Because Old Media is far less relevant, unfortunately, and the Howard Stern Show is not nearly enough.