Simplicity Bias Explains A Fickle Electorate, the 2024 Election, and the 2025 Off-Year Elections

The elections on Tuesday swung heavily against Trump, the Republicans, and the fascists in favor of democracy, government working, and economic renewal. Not only were the margins huge, the number of people voting was huge. It rivaled the best of mid-term elections and dusted the usual numbers voting in off-year elections.

There were 2024 first time Trump voters who turned against him. Interviews with those voters indicate that they BELIEVED the Most Prolific Liar in the History of Human Kind when he said he’d lower prices and only deport criminals. What? How could you believe him? How?

How could anyone take the person who presided over the most shambolic response to a worldwide deadly pandemic, responsible for the deaths of two million real live dead Americans seriously? How could anyone take the person who presided over the most disastrous and longest government shutdowns in the history of the country seriously?

How did the nation get such amnesia?

Simplicity Bias

#ScienceFact, people prefer simpler answers to complex. We may have known this intuitively, but we also intuitively think that a heavier ball will fall faster than a lighter one (spoiler, they don’t). Aside, this is why science is important. Our intuition is often wrong. We need to test our assumptions.

The Short Explanation of the Fickle Electorate

Essentially, it explains the two states of the electorate with regard to Trump

• WHEN TRUMP IS IN OFFICE: Trump is bad!
• WHEN TRUMP IS OUT OF OFFICE: Meh, maybe

The Longer Explanation of How Simplicity Bias Works

The study under consideration found two pertinent things:

• People prefer a simpler explanation even when more complex are present and may work with the simpler cause to form a more robust explanation. The more complex explanations just don’t matter in this condition. They know they’re there, but they don’t take them into consideration.
• People prefer a simpler explanation when the simpler and complex explanations are presented as being mutually exclusive. It has to be one or the other. Again, the more complex explanation is ignored in favor of the simpler one.

Hunh? You might be asking as you scratch your ass. It’s science. They’re paid to make the simple obscure, they even have a twenty dollar word for it, obfuscation. Here’s what they mean as applied to the 2024 election, using a few select issues.

We All Knew Trump

Everyone who lived through the fiasco of our first flirtation with and introduction to a pseudo-democratic single party white-minority rule authoritarian regime knew several things:

• THE FECULENT TOUCH: Everything the Old FART does turns to shit. His only gift is convincing people to throw good money after bad and believe that he won’t eventually throw them under the bus when it all inevitably turns to shit. This includes the American electorate.
• THE MOST PROLIFIC LIAR: #ScienceFact, the Orange Grifter is the most prolific liar in the history of humankind. We all knew that. Never trust Trump. Never. How did we forget that?
• ALL CHAOS ALL THE TIME: The Felon-in-Chief thrives on chaos because it covers all of his crime and incredible duck ups. Did we really think that Trump had finally pivoted to being anything different?

As it turns out, it is just simpler to believe that Trump would not be Trump for the uninformed, unfortunate, uninvolved voter.

Inflation

Most people assume that Harris lost because inflation was high and rising under Biden, and Trump pinky swore promised like some kind of evil Furby that he would lower prices — I don’t know, through magic? — eight o’clock day one. Interviews with voters, especially People of Color, indicate that they believed him.

People tend to believe that the president can control or affect inflation even though there is little that the president can directly do about it. That’s because inflation is a complex problem with multiple causes that interact. Policies can affect inflation but only indirectly and usually take time to show their effects.

When a candidate like the Orange Felon says they can lower inflation, they are lying, but a desperate public wants to believe them. Inflation during Biden’s last year in office was bad. There’s no getting around that. Biden had engineered the softest of landings for our economy from Trump’s debacle of the #COVID19 pandemic. Biden had engineered the best post-#COVID19 economy in the world., but none of that matter in face of insanely high egg prices, ironically caused in part by bird flu necessitating the culling millions of chickens. Ironic because (a) bird flue could easily have morphed into a #COVID19-like human pandemic and (b) Trump immediately cut funding for science and medical research, making it all the more likely that we won’t be able to control bird flu or any other communicable disease.

Given that Biden had managed our emergence from the lockdowns and uncertainty of #COVID19, he probably could’ve tamed inflation eventually, too. But, the simplistic explanation of “I can do it,” actually taps into a deep seated preference in the human psyche.

Biden and the Democrats actually tried to enter into a policy discussion about inflation. They tried to explain its causes and how policy could help get it back under control. But, human beings — especially the disinterested, detached, disengaged voter — gravitate to that simple explanation of “He fucked it up. I’ll make it right.”

Works every time there’s inflation during an election, right Poppy Bush?

Immigration

The Orange TACO Stain blamed all of the ills of society on immigrants, especially the undocumented. They drove crime, used too many government programs, and took American jobs. None of those things are true. None of them. But, they are simple explanations for problems that don’t even really exist.

Across the country, crime is decreasing. We had high crime rates in the eighties, and Republicans have been milking that teat ever since. They’ve demagogued the crime-ridden inner cities (spoiler: racist dog whistle) scaring middle class white suburbanites into voting conservative at least since Reagan and Nixon.

Terrible drug gangs were marching on America in the 2016 elections in the massive unwashed hordes of undocumented people coming out of Central America to rape our fathers, addict our children, eat our dogs and cats, and behead us all in our sleep! And the Democrats are encouraging it because they hate us for our freedoms! Remember that?

The criminal undocumented person is just an extension of that rhetoric. Never mind that any kind of police involvement is the surest ticket to deportation and not being able to remit money back to a family that really needs it. Undocumented people don’t really commit a lot of crime.

The complex explanation involves crime statistics, to which the average American’s eyes just glass over until some salacious crime gets committed, and we can post our outrage on our social medias. It involves understanding the social, economics, and political problems of Central America, which if you can’t get someone to engage in the economic and political situation of the US — the social, as in divisive social issues is easy because simpler explanation — I don’t now how you’ll get someone to engage with those topics in other countries.

The strange thing about government benefits is that (a) too many of us are using them, (b) we’re ashamed of it, and (c) many people are qualified for them but don’t know it, so they are underutilized. Since the programs are made needlessly complicated in order to discourage people from using them, they are difficult to understand and use. Since they hand out money and in-kind benefits to people, they seem like they must be expensive and an unproductive waste of money.

That’s the complex part of it. Spending on people, government spending that puts money in the hands of average everyday people gets spent, which helps propel the economy. Immigrants don’t get Social Security or Medicare — although they pay into the trust funds for both — they don’t get Medicaid, SNAP, WIC, Unemployment Insurance or any of the other social safety net programs because to do so would risk deportation. They pay plenty of taxes to support them, though.

The demagoguing of immigrants is easy because we prefer simplistic explanations for our problems. What could be simpler than blaming a group of people that is easily distinguished as being different from a middle class rural white Christian?

Tariffs

Tariffs are so complex that the Orange Buffoon doesn’t understand them. That’s a lot like being the tallest building in Texarkana, too., do there’s that. But, it sounds great. Raise tariffs on imports, and we’ll protect American industries. It’s easy to believe that the companies doing the exporting to the US will pay the tariffs, and they do, but they then pass along those costs to people who buy their products. We start losing people when we try to explain how it really works.

We live in a global economy. Supply chains crisscross the world getting turned into parts that then get assembled into things that eventually make it into countries to be sold. Raising tariffs on something like wood sounds great. We’ll import less wood and fewer wood products and rely more on American wood. That’s an easy solution to all of our problems, right?

But, the complexity of the time it takes to increase wood and wood product production in the US and the tariffs that then get charged to countries that are importing wood and making wood products begins to make it much more complex and difficult to understand.

We do have billions in our treasury thanks to Trump’s tariff regime, but that is billions that have been taken out of our economy, and people now have less money to spend. Tariffs, as it turns out, are an enormous regressive tax, meaning poorer people pay more of the tax than richer people do.

The 2024 Elections

The 2024 elections showed us a couple of things.

The Simpler Explanation Bias

The simpler explanation bias is strong and will cloud people’s thinking, especially if they are poorly informed about the issues. Voters took Trump’s simple explanations and promises at face value ignoring the more complex issues that surrounded them, like you can’t trust Trump.

The Democrats tried to use facts and policy and real explanations for the complex problems affecting us. That complexity was ignored in favor of Trump’s simplicity.

Reality Really Will Bite You In The Ass

Trump and the fascists would have us all ignore the reality of the situation we’re living in in favor of their made up reality. Immigrants are eating your cats and dogs, the country is richer with tariffs, Trump is a great deal maker.

We call people who are not dealing with reality, crazy. And, if you don’t deal with reality long enough, reality bites you in the ass. We’re finding that out now. We ignored the reality of tariffs being a regressive tax on the poor and middle class. Now, we’re suffering from continuing high inflation and unemployment. Immigrants are stealing your jobs and your taxes by using government benefits and are committing horrific crimes, they must be removed. Now, we’re finding out that they did the grunt work that most Americans won’t do. The absence of those workers and their spending is contributing to inflation and a slowing economy.

The Disinterested, Detached, and Disengaged Voters Really Hurt Us

There are some voters that really hurt us in 2024, but especially the irregular voters, the new voters, and anyone who thought Trump might lower prices but not follow through with his anti-immigrant rhetoric.. They are the ones who are vulnerable to the simpler explanation bias and the dog whistle politics. The economy gets bad in some way, and suddenly they’re looking for someone to blame, and they go for the easiest explanation — it’s the immigrants, it’s the marginalized communities, it’s the Blacks and Browns, it’s those who are different, and it’s the women. They’re taking our jobs! They’re getting welfare they don’t deserve! They’re taking the American dream from us!

What we don’t see are the corporations that are buying up the housing stock and the small and mid-sized farms while consolidating industries. What we don’t see is how tariffs are not only paid for by poor and middle class people, but they are a transfer of wealth to the upper class. They are paying for the massive tax cut the Republicans made permanent.

Complexity is difficult. We have to deal with it whether we like it or not. We don’t have to be experts in everything, but we should have a working understanding of these issues so we can elect politicians who will address them in ways that are effective and not elect politicians who will cynically exploit them for their own personal gain and the destruction of our democracy.

Image Attribution

This image was found using a Creative Commons search on Functional Programming Concepts: What I Learnt From “Grokking Simplicity” Book