Sleepwalking Our Way to Fascism

We should be alarmed by how unalarmed we are about a second Trump Administration.

One of the most puzzling questions of the cycle is how, with less than three weeks to go to Election Day, polling shows the race in a dead heat despite Trump’s obvious unfitness for office and authoritarian intentions. Consider how unlikely you would have thought that to be the future on January 7th, 2021, or in November 2022 when responsibility for Republicans’ dashed midterm hopes was laid at Trump’s feet, or in December 2023 when it appeared Trump could face four criminal trials in 2024. 

Just as puzzling, and no doubt connected, is how much less attention the media is paying to Trump’s unfitness and authoritarian intentions now than it was four years ago, despite substantially more evidence of his intentions now than there was then. 

This is no small point. Over the last four election cycles, the margin of Democratic victories has been their margin with those who did not vote in 2016 and for the most part do not have favorable views of either party, but understood what they had to lose if Trump/MAGA won. Their likelihood to cast ballots has been in direct proportion to what they thought they had to lose if they didn’t. 

And so, the most alarming thing right now is that America is insufficiently alarmed given what we know a second Trump Administration would mean. Not to put too fine a point on it, this is a disaster. Especially with only a few weeks to go, the media should be far more concerned with whether voters know what will happen if Trump wins than whether voters know whether Trump will win, or, even more ludicrously, how this or that demographic group will vote. 

Right now, we can be far more confident of what Trump will do than whether he or Harris will win Wisconsin by 20,000 voters this time. More to the point, who wins Wisconsin depends on what Wisconsin voters believe Trump’s second term would bring. Indeed, this race is closer than it would be if more people understood what a second Trump term would actually mean for them.

This post has three sections:

• The Anti-MAGA Majority - A quick review of the evidence that Democrats have been winning elections due to higher turnout of less partisan voters who are voting against Trump and MAGA Republicans, not necessarily for Democrats.

• MSM to America: Ho Hum - We compare the front pages of the New York Times for the last month to the front pages in 2016 and 2020 as a way to illustrate how much less attention this presidential contest is receiving in general, and Trump’s fascist intentions in particular. (Prebuttal: this is not about whether the NYT should be “defending democracy”; read on!) 

• Deadly Disbelief - I use a survey conducted by Lake Research Partners to illustrate three points about so-called “swing voters,” especially soft Harris voters: (1) the overwhelming majority of them are as hostile to Trump as “solid” Harris supporters, (2) they have much the same substantive concerns about Trump winning as “solid” Harris supporters, but (3) they are much less likely to believe that Trump would actually follow through on those intentions.

As I wrote in “Democracy is not a Spectator Sport,” at a time when nearly half of America does not identify with either party, and when politicians are deeply distrusted, only the media and other civil society institutions and leaders can make clear what Americans have to lose if Trump returns to the White House.

The Anti-MAGA Majority 

As I’ve been arguing continuously for the life of this Substack, there’s a simple reason Democrats have been nearly running the table in purple states since 2018. Americans, especially those who entered the labor market after the Great Recession, deeply disapprove of the political system and politicians. Yet instead of dropping out, these disaffected Americans keep turning out at record rates – because so many believe that politicians (especially Trump and MAGA Republicans) can make their lives much worse if they don’t. 

We can see that clearly in this VoteCast exit poll in 2020. Of those who said their vote was against a candidate, Biden won 71 to 27; but among those who said they were voting for their candidate, Trump won by 59 to 40. Or, put differently, about half of those voting for Biden said it was a vote against Trump, while nearly 80 percent of those voting for Trump said it was for him, not against Biden.

Joe Biden flipped five swing states not because those who had voted in 2016 had a change of heart, but because those who didn’t vote in 2016 turned out in 2020 to reject Trump. 

Loss aversion among newer voters is why – despite how improbable it would have seemed in November 2016 when Trump shattered the Blue Wall of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania – Trump and Republican federal candidates would go on to lose 16 of the 17 statewide races in those three states, and in two others that Democrats hadn’t won since the 1990s (Arizona and Georgia).

However, the 2022 midterms showed us that when the stakes are less clear to disaffected voters (as was the case in New York, New Jersey, and California, where Democrats lost critical House seats), they don’t turn out to defeat MAGA. 

MSM to America: Ho Hum

Think about the extraordinary, but credible, statements Trump has made regarding his intentions if he becomes president again. In an interview with Fox News on Sunday, Trump called for the military to be used against “the enemy within.” At the same time, as if more confirmation of his fascistic ambitions was necessary, we learned in Bob Woodward’s new book, War, that Mark Milley, Trump’s former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, said that Trump is “fascist to the core.”¹ 

Now, imagine any other point in American history where a major party presidential candidate could make such a declaration without it becoming a banner headline in The New York Times or leading the evening news. If Romney, Dole, or Nixon had made such a statement, would the media have waited for comments from Obama, Clinton or Humphrey before deciding it warranted banner headlines? Certainly not. And reporters would be clamoring for reactions from Republican congressional leaders.

Yet, the following graphic compares the front page of the New York Times the day after Trump’s “enemy within” comments to October 1st, 2020, when the paper devoted most of the front page to its own research on Trump’s escalating “push to erode trust in the vote.” 

(I want to pause here to make clear that I am not making the usual Democratic complaint that the media isn’t treating them equally or fairly; I am making what I think is a much more important democratic complaint – that as Americans, we should expect that those who pride themselves as being the “paper of record” should hold to the standard they themselves have set for decades as to what objectively should be considered front page news.²)

And this is not an anomaly. Despite the election being just weeks away, when we looked through all the New York Times print front pages for the past 30 days, there was not a single edition with comparable front-page coverage of the threat Trump poses. Furthermore, using the New York Times front page as an indicator of the perceived significance of this presidential election, and comparing the past month of this year’s coverage with the same time period in the last two election cycles, we can see that, whether measured in number of stories or column inches, the 2024 election has received about half as much front-page attention as 2020, and even less than 2016.³ (How to read this chart: vertical bars indicate the estimated number of column inches (left axis) and the black horizontal bars indicate the number of stories (right axis).)

You can browse a gallery of the New York Times front pages⁴ we cataloged from September 17th to October 16th for the 2016, 2020, and 2024 elections.⁵ While there are many ways to measure the quantity, prominence, and quality of coverage across these election cycles, simply flipping through the pages gives you an unmistakable sense: by any reasonable standard—especially compared to the Times’s own precedents in covering past presidential elections—Trump’s statements, behaviors, and intentions this cycle have been consistently overlooked or downplayed.⁶ 

No longer front page news

This is the case even though Americans have many more reasons to be alarmed by Trump this cycle than in 2020. Before November 2020, Trump had not yet led a deadly insurrection. He had not yet made clear his intentions to replace the civil service with his own loyalists. And he had not yet appointed any of the judges who have proven more loyal to him than to the law. 

Here is just a sampling of news about what Trump has said and done in the last month that did not make the New York Times front page during the period in the gallery, but would certainly have if any previous presidential candidate had said or done the same: 

• Trump said critics of the Supreme Court should be jailed (9/23). 

• Trump proposed “one really violent day” of policing to end crime (9/29).⁷

• Trump said he’d revoke Temporary Protected Status of Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio (10/2).

• Jack Smith’s unsealed court motion argued that Trump “resorted to crimes to try to stay in office,” that Trump personally sent an inflammatory tweet about Pence after he was made aware of the Capitol breach, and that he said “So what?” after being informed that Pence was being rushed to safety. (10/3)

• Trump refused to give wildfire aid to California until aides showed him how many GOP voters lived in the affected area. (Reporting by E&E News, 10/3)

• Trump sent COVID testing equipment to Putin for his personal use at the height of the pandemic and has had multiple conversations with Putin as a private citizen. (Bob Woodward book excerpt, published 10/8.)

• A Senate report disclosed that the “Trump White House restricted FBI investigators and lied to the American people about the [Kavanaugh] investigation and tip line.” (10/8)

• Trump called for CBS to lose its broadcast license over its 60 Minutes Harris interview. (10/10)

• Trump threatened to use the same 1798 law that led to Japanese internment camps for mass deportations, which could sweep up lawful immigrants and their children. (10/11 rally in Aurora, Colorado)

• Trump suggested using the military against Americans on Election Day. (10/13 Fox News interview.) 

Nor did we see investigative or context-setting pieces, along the lines of the Times’ 2020 “erode trust in the vote” piece, on obvious topics like:

• The legal system. Trump will be able to replace Thomas and Alito to lock in at least a 5-4 Federalist Society majority on the Supreme Court for a generation, as well as add another 200 Cannons and Kacsmaryks to the federal bench. 

• Trump backers. The Times did have a 2400 word front page story on Elon Musk being all in for Trump. But, like nearly every story about money in politics now, it makes no mention of what Musk, Thiel or others of his supporters stand to gain if Trump wins. This is especially galling in light of: 

  • Trump’s record of pay to play policy making⁸ (e.g. telling oil executives he would do their agenda for $1 billion, which the Times reported on in May). 

  • The fact that, especially following reporting by Ronan Farrow in the New Yorker, the Biden Administration is re-evaluating the extent to which Musk has used his role as a contractor to unilaterally and without accountability make key defense, foreign policy and space exploration decisions 

  • The fact that Musk is likely blatantly violating campaign finance law, as noted by respected election law expert Rick Hasen.

  • Musk has been a principal funder of a dark money group running anti-semitic, racist ads against Harris – something that was reported by the Times, but on page A16.

How Trump should be covered

In the last two weeks, we’ve seen two extended interviews with Joe Kahn, the executive editor of the New York Times (NPR, New Yorker). When questioned on how the Times covered Biden’s age, Kahn continued to insist on categorizing his critics as being motivated by their ideological (the left or the right), or partisan (Democratic or Republican)  commitments. In these interviews, he does not acknowledge that there could be objective or good-faith critiques of their coverage. Here is what he says in defense of the Biden coverage in the NPR interview: 

It was important for the American people to understand that leading media in the country were paying very close attention to the fitness and the health of the person who is the leader of the country, who has access to the nuclear football.

He is absolutely right! But if that is the standard, let’s compare the Times’s coverage of Biden after the debate with the election coverage of the last month. For 16 straight days, beginning on June 29th, there were 29 stories (nearly two a day) consuming more than 300 column inches, most above the fold, devoted to the Biden age story. (Gallery of front pages) Proportionally, the Times devoted nearly as much of its front page to that one story as it did to the presidential race in the last month!  

So, my point is that by Kahn’s own criteria, at least as much of the front page should be devoted to Trump’s similar shortcomings – not to mention all the other equally important missing stories I raised in the last section. 

The consequences of inaction

What happens when the media doesn’t treat such statements (or even the presidential race in general) as A1-headline-worthy? First, it makes it harder for Kamala Harris (and others) to seize on the issue—those not paying close attention might dismiss it as typical partisan rhetoric if she's the one raising it. And as we’ve seen, if Harris responds first, the media is likely to frame the story as a partisan squabble rather than a serious threat to democracy. 

Perhaps most importantly, over the past several years, we’ve witnessed how an underwhelming media response to Trump’s more extreme remarks leads voters to doubt that Trump would actually act in that way, and therefore feel unthreatened. 

In his New Yorker interview, when asked, “How do you communicate the editorial judgment that came from people opening up the newspaper and seeing what was on the front page?” Kahn makes clear he understands the importance of what he puts on the front page: 

I think the difference between coming to the Times at any given moment and going to many other places where you can find news on the Internet is we’re constantly thinking about the hierarchy of the stories that we’re promoting, which is a big part of my day and a big part of my leadership team’s day—the play and the prominence of the different story lines that we have.

And then when asked about his coverage of Trump, he says: 

I think we’ve done, honestly, more than anybody else. And we’ll have more to come. One of the things we’re trying to do with the packaging of this is to make some of that really impactful reporting on Trump, and the people around him, and his agenda for 2025 more present in the report throughout the campaign, rather than relying on people to search into the background to get it. (Emphasis added)

It is absolutely correct that the Times has done some crucial in depth reporting on Trump, as Kahn claims. but the paper’s leadership has utterly failed to make what they've reported in deep pieces “more present” in all their coverage, as what I’ve already laid out makes clear. 

Deadly Disbelief 

In 2020, Biden won the key Electoral College states because enough of those who were not enthusiastic about voting for Biden were sufficiently motivated by the prospects of a second Trump term to vote against Trump. Right now, evidence suggests that many of these same voters are less alarmed than they could be about the consequences of a second Trump term. 

In “About That Times Poll,” I made this point with a deep dive into results from the September NYT/Siena survey. Here, I’ll add more evidence from a survey of the six presidential battleground states fielded at the end of August by Lake Research, commissioned by the Research Collaborative.⁹ 

This data should help illustrate why most of the “swing voters” you keep hearing about are not equally likely to swing to either side. 

Harris and Trump Supporters: Strong and Soft

In the Lake survey, respondents were asked whether they favored Harris or Trump now, and whether they recalled voting for Biden or Trump in 2020. That’s standard for any poll. In addition, however, these respondents were asked whether they strongly favored, or had mixed feelings about, either of the two candidates. 

The chart below compares these swing-state respondents’ feelings about the candidates in 2020 to their feelings about the candidates today. The size of the bars, regardless of color, shows what percentage voted for Biden or Trump (strongly) (top two bars) or voted for them with mixed feelings (bottom 2 bars). We can see that Trump had more strong supporters than Biden had, but that Biden had more mixed-feeling supporters – which corroborates my argument that if only the most committed supporters had voted in those states in 2020, Biden would have lost by about the same margin as Clinton had. The colors of the bars show the breakdown of how those 2020 voters feel about their votes for Harris or Trump today – dark blue/red for strong Harris/Trump, light blue/red for leaning toward Harris/Trump, and gray for undecided.¹⁰ 

We can see that among those voters who had strong opinions in 2020, Harris trails Trump by a similar margin as Biden did (the darker blue and red). The good – but not good enough – news for Harris is that she has converted more mixed-feelings 2020 voters into strong supporters for her than Trump has, and that this offsets the previously strong Biden voters who are now merely leaning toward voting for her or are undecided. 

Now, here’s why I say that this last part is “not good enough” for Harris. The key to who wins and loses is how many of the 28 percent who are currently leaners or are undecided show up. (The lighter red/blue and gray.) They are evenly split now.

Soft Supporters: Cross-Pressured or Disaffected? 

The next logical question is, how do those who lean toward Harris differ from those who strongly support her? Fortunately, the Research Collaborative/Lake Research Partners survey can give us some important insight into this question – especially as to whether these voters’ uncertainty is because they are also open to Trump, or because they are the alienated kinds of voters I’ve been describing. 

The survey asked two questions about 15 things Trump might do if elected. The first question asked respondents how concerned they would be about each thing, and the second asked how likely they found it that Trump would actually do each thing. Both questions had a four point scale (very/somewhat concerned/unconcerned; very/somewhat likely/unlikely).  

Now, if soft supporters of Harris or Trump were cross-pressured (might vote for either) then you would expect the two “not strongly” groups to be closer to each other than to those who strongly support Harris or Trump. But, if soft supporters are merely disaffected with their own party, then you would expect their views of the other candidate/party to be very close to those who are strong supporters of Harris or Trump. 

The following graph makes it perfectly clear that soft supporters or “leaners” are merely disaffected with the team they say they are leaning towards – but are just as unambiguously opposed to the other team as those who strongly support the candidate they are leaning towards with mixed feelings. 

Solid and Soft Harris Voters Have the Same Concerns

Now, let's look at what concerns voters have regarding Trump’s intentions by their presidential preference, using the same logic.¹¹ As you can see, there is virtually zero difference in concern between strong and soft Harris supporters in how concerned they are about any of those issues. There are, however, significant differences between strong and soft Trump supporters; strong supporters aren’t worried on net about any of the 15 policies and actions, but soft Trump supporters show net concern about allowing state governments to monitor pregnancies, cutting Social Security and Medicare, ending caps on insulin prices, and passing another tax break for the rich. 

Soft Harris Supporters Are Much Less Likely to Believe Trump Will Follow Through

Now that we’ve established that both strong and soft Harris supporters are equally likely to see Trump/Republicans/MAGA negatively, and are equally likely to be concerned about Trump’s agenda, let’s look at how they differ – how likely they are to believe that Trump will enact his agenda. The following graph is pretty dramatic. It shows that those who strongly support Harris are much more likely to believe that Trump will follow through on his agenda than those who support Harris, but not strongly. 

It is, of course, possible (even likely) that some of the voters who were less engaged or alarmed in these surveys from 4-6 weeks ago have since become more engaged or alarmed. But it’s a problem that, notwithstanding the dozens of media surveys fielded since then, we don’t have more data about this – especially when, as you can see, it would not be difficult for more media pollsters to incorporate this line of questioning into more of their surveys. 

Conclusion: It’s Not Too Late

Somehow, in the final weeks of the 2024 election season, media outlets, pundits, and commentators have been more focused on anticipating how we will vote than in reporting what we should know. 

That said, it’s not too late for this trend to turn around. We still have 18 days until November 5th. Voting has already begun, and early/absentee voting rates are high (more on this later) – but many of the voters Harris needs to win are just now tuning in. Every day counts.  

Weekend Reading is edited by Emily Crockett, with research assistance by Andrea Evans and Thomas Mande.

1. Milley’s comment finally made it to the front page of the New York Times today – tellingly, not as news in itself, but as part of a story about Harris being more willing to use the term.

2. Now, let’s think about what we’ve heard from the mainstream media about why there isn’t more coverage of Trump’s threats to our future: 

• Everyone already knows who Trump is; it’s not news. Knowing who Trump is and knowing what Trump will do are two very different things. More on this below

• Harris hasn’t made it an issue. Properly, the Times devoted enormous resources to put together the package of stories in 2020 about eroding trust in the vote even though Biden was not making it an issue.

• “Democracy” is only one of several concerns of voters. In his May interview with Semafor, Joe Kahn underscored the importance of their coverage being responsive to readers’ priorities – yet, of course, no survey in 2020 would have shown erosion in trust in the vote as a top priority.

• Trump was president in 2020; he’s just a candidate now. Yet in other contexts, mainstream media defenders insist on covering Trump as a previous president.

3. We didn’t take the time to make a precise estimate of column inches, but approximated each story to the closest inch. Looking at how dramatic the results are, that rounding clearly did not have an impact. But, again, the reader can check it out in our gallery. 

4. As New York Times reporter Adam Litpak notes, “Political scientists measure the importance of decisions — they call it their salience — the same way some journalists do, by asking whether the decision was covered on the front page of The New York Times.”

5. Great work by Thomas Mande and Andrea Evans.

6. For example, although it was on the front page, this excellent analysis of Trump’s cognitive decline was only given approximately 13 inches, and rarely figured into other reporting in which those insights would have been relevant. 

7. This story was in the Times, but not on the front page.

8. That this was the case was reported on even before Trump was sworn in – see for example Michael Lewis’s The Fifth Risk, which documents the transition period.

9. Disclosure: I founded and am president of the Research Collaborative. The six states were Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. 

10. Here, I’m using “leaners” or “soft supporters” as shorthand for those who said their feelings about either 2024 candidate were “mixed” or “neither” strong nor mixed. 

11. Full wording in question:

Checks/Balances: Removing checks and balances and increasing the power held by the president

Monitor pregnancies: Allowing state governments to monitor menstrual periods and pregnancies to possibly prosecute people if they have a miscarriage or abortion

Abortion: Restricting or banning access to abortion, fertility services, and contraception 

Low income K-12: Eliminating federal funding for low-income K-12 students

Military vs US citizens: Deploying the military domestically against American citizens

Social Security/Medicare: Cutting programs for children and seniors, including Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid

Civil Service: Firing thousands of federal career public servants and replacing them with Trump and MAGA loyalists

Insulin: Ending caps on insulin prices, raising drug prices and out-of-pocket drug expenses for seniors

ACA: Getting rid of the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, and ending coverage for preexisting conditions, resulting in millions of Americans losing their health care coverage

Tax breaks for rich: Giving the wealthiest 1% and wealthy corporations another tax break

Restrict voting: Restrict our freedom to vote based on our background or zip code

Anti-discrim: Removing laws that prevent discrimination by race and gender in employment

Housing: Rolling back programs that provide more affordable housing and ending laws that prevent discrimination in housing