"Why do people keep voting against their own self-interest?"

Some thoughts about the question I've been asked the most

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I’m going to share some thoughts with you today that you might find challenging. If you’re reading this, you’re likely someone who I’ve been able to count on over the last few years, and I hope you’ll read this with an open mind while continuing to share your own perspective with me.

A couple weeks ago I wrote about my experience with Trump voters, particularly working people, on the campaign trail. A lot of the responses to that Substack reminded me of a question I have probably been asked once or twice a day for the last few years:

“Why do people keep voting against their own self-interest?”

Honestly, I’ve never understood where to even begin answering this question, so I usually just talked about what I was doing to connect with people across Missouri and how I would like to make our state better.

But as we all reflect on how to move forward after this election cycle, I think it’s important for us to get uncomfortably real about it.

If we think about this question from the perspective of the voters it references, the people who are “voting against their own self-interest,” this question—even if asked entirely in earnest—doesn’t come off as a question. They don’t believe they are voting against their self-interest, so it comes off as a statement: that they are stupid, and that the questioner knows more about what’s good for them than they do.

Which is unfortunate, because that’s the mentality that working people, independent voters, and persuadable people are told Democrats have, and it’s one of the things they really don’t like.

Even if the presumption in this question is true, that someone would have a better life if they voted for a certain candidate, there’s no way forward from this question that comes to a mutual understanding. Because it comes from a place of superiority.

Instead, given the way elections have been going, I think we need to take a moment to ask if the presumption is even correct and why people would feel differently, so that we can reach a point of understanding and move forward. So, here we go…

Are people who are rejecting Democrats actually voting against their own self-interest?

If you go back to the messages I got from Trump voters describing, in their own words, why they didn’t vote for me even though they liked me more than my opponent, it’s because they think Democrats are ruining the country and have jacked up the economy.

We obsess over policy a lot, but most people don’t pay that much attention to policy, to what’s happening in DC, or what long term infrastructure bill passed. They do, however, notice that they can’t afford groceries anymore and that the President is a Democrat. Frankly, I’m getting killed by groceries every month, so I get it.

And when you look back over the last few years, being a normal person has not always been easy when Democrats were in charge nationally, so claiming that voting for a Democrat is in someone else’s own self-interest goes against a lot of people’s lived experience.

Here are a few examples from my own life.

When I got back from Iraq in 2009, I spent a large part of 2010 and 2011 trying to keep Marines in their homes who were illegally foreclosed upon by the same big banks that the government had just bailed out. Banks and bankers at the time were knowingly violating the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act (SCRA) left and right, breaking the law kicking servicemembers out of their homes—many of whom had the money to stay but hadn’t gotten proper notice due to deployments. And it all happened under a Democratic President who had a Democratic majority in the House and 60 Democratic votes in the Senate.

I specifically remember these Marines and their families asking me how the bankers could get away with it. Didn’t we all just bail these banks out? They would ask. I signed up after 9/11 when these guys were attacked in New York, they would say, how could they forget that and treat us like this? Who is the government supposed to be looking out for, anyway? Why isn’t it us?

I didn’t have a good answer for them, I just did my best to keep them in their homes. And in every single case where they came to me before the foreclosure was complete, I was able to keep them in their homes, because the law was on our side and the banks were egregiously violating it.

By the way, knowingly violating the SCRA is a criminal act punishable by imprisonment. Can you guess how many people went to jail for illegally kicking Marines out on the street?

You instinctively knew that the answer was zero. Before you even read it. Because it didn’t matter that the President was a Democrat or that Democrats controlled Congress—there is no accountability for the rich and famous in our system no matter who is in charge. And Joe Biden pardoning his son Hunter just solidified every skeptic’s view on Democrats for a generation.

Try telling those Marines or anyone else who struggled through the foreclosure crisis that the system is fair or that it works.

So many powerful people actively destroyed, actually ruined, the lives of everyday people in this country during that time and not a single one of those who caused the damage suffered or lost anything. Does that feel like an administration that was in a normal person’s “self-interest?”

A couple of years later, when Democrats all around the country were bragging about how they had brilliantly saved the housing market by doing little more than pouring more money into this corrupt system, my dad put our childhood home up for sale.

That house sat for sale on the “recovered” housing market for two years before it finally sold for $43,000. My dad owed seventy-something on it at the time. He could have gotten $43k for it 25 years earlier. Try telling anyone in Missouri who experienced the effects of that era of national Democratic control that Democratic control is in their best interest.

Almost every time that I’ve been at the Hy-Vee here in Independence over the last couple of years I’ve seen people putting items back at the register because inflation has sent their grocery bills up more than they could afford.

This doesn’t mean that policies supported by Democrats are bad for working people. They’re certainly better than massive tax cuts for multinational corporations and the rich, which is likely what we are staring down again as the biggest accomplishment of the next four years. And maybe the timing was just bad luck for when Democrats were in charge. But the reality is that most people aren’t looking at their lives and thinking, damn, my life is better when Democrats are in charge.

And they certainly aren’t lining up screaming for people to save a system that feels entirely broken. When you are the party that stands for the system and the system is broken, it doesn’t matter how bad the other side is.

I remember people on the campaign trail asking me how it’s possible that working people don’t realize that voting for the same people as their bosses could never be in their best interest.

Well, the great unifying theme of the Republican Party right now is that they are going to tear the system down. An agenda that has accomplished that neat trick of politically aligning working people with the big bosses. Building a big tent that’s expanded the base of Republican voters in nearly every Midwestern state.

The billionaires, industrialists, and many others want the system torn down because they want to squeeze everyday people, the economy, our land and water, and our health for everything they can get. They want to transfer every spare dollar to the shareholder class and they’re tired of the Federal Trade Commission, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, courts, laws, regulations on financiers, and everything else getting in their way.

Everyday people want to tear down the system because it is corrupt, they can’t afford groceries, they can’t buy a house, and they basically have to work until they die.

The response to these voters just can’t be doubling down on “the system works” rhetoric and telling people that “no, it really works, and by the way you are voting against your own best interest by not supporting it.”

That’s a recipe for decades of 2024s, because people just don’t think the system is in their own self-interest anymore.

Please keep the comments and emails coming. I read through them all even though I don’t respond individually, and they are really helpful in showing me what people might find interesting and how my experiences relate to your thoughts.

More to come!

— Lucas