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Why Trump Won - Maslow Knows


Since the election, the media has been inundated with an explosion of opinions, blame, arguments, and handwringing regarding the outcome of the election, especially the shift of voters in swing states and among minorities. In 1943 Abraham Maslow proposed that human motivation operated on a hierarchy of "felt needs."

His theory has been debated and modified ad nauseum since it was first introduced, however, its basic tenets have stood the test of time, and I believe it explains the reality of the November 5th, election outcome. Let’s jump in.


Who Votes

First, based on my limited knowledge and experience, I propose two types of voters. The first is ideologically driven and will always vote left, right, or third party. In our system, the third parties don’t play a major role, unless it’s a close election and then it can have an impact. I believe that was the case in this election, but more on that late later. The second type of voter is the swing voter. They pretty much decide who is president and control Congress and probably will for the foreseeable future.


I hypothesize that these swing voters will generally vote on election day in accordance with Maslow’s concept of “felt needs.”  I propose that research done by both Pew and Data for Progress support this theory.


Maslow’s View

Maslow’s hierarchy is shown through a simple triangle diagram with five levels. See the picture below.  



The bottom is Physiological needs which primarily means food, clothing, and shelter. The next one is safety which is self-explanatory. Someone who lacks food and shelter doesn’t feel safe, but it’s quite possible not to feel safe and be fully satisfied on a physiological level. The third level is love and belonging or relationships, caring, and community. The fourth one is Esteem or Respect. This one represents our need to feel respected or valued by others as well as have a sense of self-worth and confidence. The final concept at the top of Maslow’s triangle is self-actualization, which is about maximizing one’s personal potential.


What became clear during the months leading up to the election and in the ongoing post-election debate, is the fact that people who do not worry about the bottom tiers of their needs on a regular basis, have a sincere difficulty understanding those that do. Since they do not struggle daily with physiological or safety needs, they can focus all of their energy, time, and emotion, on issues they “feel” strongly about and which align with the top tiers of Maslow’s framework. Sometimes these people are given derogatory labels like “elites,”  “brain dead,” “tone deaf,”  “blind” or worse. However, as Maslow suggests, it is simply human nature.


Contrarily, those people whose felt needs are in the lower tiers have difficulty exerting much energy on issues related to their self-worth, esteem, or self-actualization. These types of issues, while very real, must be subjugated to survival, food, shelter, clothing, and safety. 


Another facet of this is that we tend to hang out with people similar to us, so our views are reinforced by others who are at the same place in lifestyle and view of the world. Now let’s look at some research.


The Research

On September 9th, Pew Research published an article on the approaching election. The top ten issues according to their Survey of U.S. Adults conducted August 26th – Sept. 2nd read as follows.

1.        Economy

2.        Health Care

3.        Supreme Court Appointments

4.        Foreign Policy

5.        Violent Crime

6.        Immigration

7.        Gun Policy

8.        Abortion

9.        Racial and ethnic inequality

10.   Climate change


Of course, the order of these varied by whether the adult surveyed was a Republican, Democrat, or unaligned, but this was the overall blend of the groups. My position is that the two extremes, or ideologically driven groups of voters don’t matter much in the election outcome. What matters is those swing voters and swing states. Before I go onto swing voters let’s do a quick evaluation of Maslow’s hierarchy and the Pew Research. The following alignment of issues is just my view.

Supreme Court Appointments, Climate Change


Abortion, Racial and ethnic inequality,  


Divided based on issues


Foreign Policy, Violent Crime, Immigration, Gun Policy


Economy, Health Care,



In summary, six of ten issues important to voters going into the election could align with Maslow’s bottom two tiers of felt needs. These issues, Foreign policy, violent crime, immigration, gun policy, the economy, and health care were in the news frequently over the last year. This resulted in these lower level felt needs being more present in our minds as a whole country, regardless of whether we were personally impacted by them. However, for those people who already struggled with these challenges, the media amplified their presence and intensity, especially when it comes to the economy, inflation, and jobs.

 

Let's now look at the swing voters specifically. These are the people that determine the outcome of elections.  For this data, I turn to a study done by Data for Progress and published on May 30th, 2024, just three months before the election. The article was titled, Measuring the Swing: Evaluating the Key Voters of 2024. The results of this report strongly align with the more generalized view of important issues as reported by Pew Research, but also had some differences.


In the section titled “Views on Key Issues” The Data for Progress report’s opening statement is “ Swing voters cite the “economy, jobs, and inflation” as their top issues when deciding who to vote for in the 2024 election.” The next three priorities for swing voters were immigration, Social Security, and Medicare, then threats to Democracy. These were followed by Abortion, National Security, and health Care. These were the top 7 out of ten concerns when the swing voter went to the polls on Nov. 5th.


Like we did with the Pew report let's align these issues with Maslow’s theory. As stated, they are similar. I believe we can safely classify the issues of the Economy, jobs, and inflation, along with Social Security, Medicare, and health care in the bottom tier that Maslow calls our physiological needs. These issues impact our ability to maintain food, shelter, clothing, and physical well-being, for ourselves and those we love.


Next, we can align Immigration, and National Security with our sense of safety due to their influence on crime and the fears of war. Some people would say that to assign immigration in this manner is racist and wrong. However, across the spectrum of swing voters immigration was a big issue. Whether the intensity of this issue was biased by racism or not is for a different discussion. What matters in this discussion is immigration as an issue that created felt concerns or fears regarding, crime, job loss, or national security penetration. Immigration impacts voter's feelings of safety and security and the media strokes these feelings with their own reporting bias.


In total five of the top seven issues could reflect basic human needs as defined by Maslow. A probable application of his theory suggests that when making decisions these felt needs will weigh the most on a voter's final election choices.


The swing voters and trust.

In another section of the Data for Progress report, the interviewers researched who swing voters trusted most to address the long list of issues that are facing Americans and America as a nation.  The title of this section is “Swing Voters Trust Biden and Trump on Different Issues – But Largely Say they Don’t know Whom to Trust.”


In this section of the report, there are fourteen election-related issues instead of ten as in the previous section. They are ordered in such a way that at the top are the issues that voters trusted Biden most and descend to those issues where Trump was trusted most. The undecided voters on trust were in the middle. The list goes as follows:

 


It is important to note that on eight of the fourteen issues President Biden was trusted more than Donald Trump. On the surface, it could be easy to link Biden’s trust level to a likely win of the election and could have led to the miscalculation of voter polls toward the end. However, the vital element is how do those issues relate to Maslow’s view of our most basic felt needs.


Six of the eight issues that went in Biden’s favor on the trust meter—climate change, LBGTQ, Race relations, abortion, threats to democracy, and America’s global image,  do not play out as significant felt needs across a broad spectrum of the population. For some people, they are very important to their sense of safety and security. However, overall, the percentage of people who experience these issues personally in that way is demographically small.  And even within each party the differences of opinion and approach to these issues vary greatly.


In contrast, the six issues Donald Trump won trust on all align most closely with the two lowest tiers of Maslow’s hierarchy and our more basic human felt needs. The six issues that went for Trump--inflation, Crime and Safety, National Security, Immigration, and Gun Policy equate to physiological needs, or safety and security for all of us. We may not be experiencing one or more of them personally at this time in our lives, but a larger percentage of the population experiences them in a similar manner. Especially the issues of the economy, inflation, and jobs which all swing voters said was their highest priority going into the election.

 

As a result, swing voters moved the needle for Donald Trump because they trusted him more on those issues they were experiencing the deepest “felt needs” in their current point of life.


A connected disclosure of the Data for Progress report was that among swing voters 46% said that if all the third-party candidates were on the ticket they would vote for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. These are individuals who had already decided they didn’t want to vote for Biden. Once Kennedy swung his support to Trump to address the pressing issues of the election, which he fiercely promoted in his efforts on behalf of Trump – a bulk of those supporters followed him. Since they already didn’t want to vote for Biden, they were left with one primary choice.


The Result

While the pundits and analysts have scores of reasons why Trump won the election, I believe Maslow might have predicted the outcome very easily.  Basic felt needs and fears, along with the Kennedy swing moved the swing voters and states to Trump's favor.


Maslow's concept of “felt needs” could probably be applied to past elections with a similar outcome in most cases. However, I will have to leave a historical analysis of this nature to someone else, but I think it would be worth the effort.


The Caution

Republicans are currently gloating about their supposed mandate, and on the basic issues, I believe their call to action was strong, even if narrower than they would like to believe. If the new trump administration successfully addresses these basic concerns one would think the Republicans have a good chance of winning the next election cycle.


But suppose they go too far on some of the higher-level issues important to the other half of the country. In that case, they will discover that victory might be short-lived and in two years, be stuck in the muck of democratically dominated Congress. The swing voters are a fickle group and keeping them committed requires sensitivity to their priorities versus those from the ideological wings.


A caveat is that should Republicans find some success over the next four years, the less swing voters will be struggling with basic needs. In this scenario, they will have more energy to focus on the other issues they said were important.  On these issues, the swing voters did not trust the Republican ticket and so Republicans not only have to address the swing voters pressing issues but build credibility in the other issues they stated were important.


If the application of Maslow’s theory is valid, then it requires political leaders to maintain an awareness of changing felt needs. A possible example of this is climate change.


Right now, both Pew and Data for Progress show that the larger body of Americans did not consider climate change a high priority. Most of them have not "felt" the issue of climate change.  However, at its current pace of acceleration, this issue, for which Trump was trusted at the lowest level, may become more real and "felt" by all of us.


If Republicans completely ignore this issue and just “drill baby drill”  this could create a major shift once people “feel” the issue more personally. Then they are likely to experience a sense of betrayal because they put “trust” in the Republicans who led them down a different path.


The better option would be to make sure Americans understand the complexity of this issue. There is a myriad of very significant components that are part of a global shift to cleaner energy. These include the actual cost of clean energy versus its outcome. The daily global dependence on petroleum and petroleum products and what changing that dependence would look like. The existing infrastructure and global economic impact of petroleum. The geopolitics and adversarial threats by world powers that are escalating not diminishing.


These are big issues and all of them affect the green energy transition. Most Americans do not see how they are all connected, especially younger American's. Helping us all fully understand what is going on should be the priority of both parties, but winning power is what rules the process.


Over the next two years, actions will determine if Republicans can build credibility, and trust grows, or if their overreaction to the big win leads to another swing in the opposite direction.

 

 

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