John Madden Explains Trump’s 2024 Victory (And What Democrats Need To Do About It)

The John Madden Problem

Back when I still watched football, I had a complicated relationship with John Madden’s commentary. I loved him. My friend hated him with the kind of visceral passion usually reserved for opposing quarterbacks and bad referees. It got bad enough that she’d leave the room if Madden was announcing. We’d have to check the listings before she’d agree to watch a game together.

I could never figure out what her problem was until one afternoon when Madden said something like, “If there were a play that could score four points, that’s the play they’d want to run right now.” There is, of course, no such play. My friend rolled her eyes so hard I worried for her optic nerves. “He’s a Super Bowl winning coach,” she said. “How is he this stupid?” But with most of Madden’s commentary — you gotta admit, the four-point play remark was pretty cringe, so not that one, okay? — I’d think, “Hey! I knew that! I know as much as a Super Bowl winning coach!”

She felt diminished by hearing him tell her what she already knew and I felt affirmed by it. It was as simple as that.

Today, I realized that John Madden explains Trump’s support in 2024. All y’all know that I’ve been scratching my ass since November 2024 trying to figure out how seventy-seven million real live Americans could’ve voted for Il Dunce after living through the regime of chaotic error. How did he get fifteen million more Americans to vote for him in 2024 than in 2016? We knew who he was by 2024, so how’d that happen?

Over the years, I’ve explained Trump’s support using the usual suspects — cognitive dissonance, groupthink, loss aversion, in-group dynamics, racism, misogyny — but none of them fully satisfy. They explained the committed MAGA voter just fine. They didn’t explain the growth.

That is until I came across Self-Determination Theory (SDT) researching for another post, and LIGHT BULB!

Self-Determination Theory and Trump’s 15 Million Vote Shift

SDT is a framework that links the motivation to change, grow, and act to having three basic needs met, autonomy, competence, and relatedness. When those needs are fulfilled, people engage. When they go chronically unmet, people disengage, drift, and become available to whoever shows up and makes the needs feel met — even if the fulfillment is more illusion than reality.

Sound like anyone we know?

Autonomy

Autonomy is the need to make your own choices, free from pressure and outside control. For the low-propensity voter — someone who maybe hadn’t voted in a decade, or ever — the dominant experience of American politics was being talked down to by people who clearly thought they knew better. Democratic messaging in particular has a bad habit of communicating in the register of correct behavior. Here’s what you should think. Here’s who you should trust. Here’s why the experts are right and your gut feelings are wrong.

Trump’s anti-elitism vibe — and it was more vibe than substance for most low-propensity voters who never heard his full rallies — cut right through that. You don’t have to listen to them. They’ve been lying to you. Your instincts are right and the experts are wrong. For someone who’d felt politically invisible for years, that felt like oxygen. It wasn’t real autonomy — real autonomy requires accurate information and genuine choice — but it felt enough like it to matter.

They were empowered to make the choice that would stick it to the man even if he was the nice Black lady with the loud brassy laugh.

Competence

This is where John Madden walks back into the room.

Competence is the human need to feel mastery over a task or aspect of our life. This is where Trump’s rhetoric and vibe really resonated. He simplified complex problems to appealing solutions. All of the very confusing “issues” that the left championed, Trump was able to attack using the same “common sense” that they were using. They know Trump is a show-off and braggart. They could sane-wash Trump’s ridiculous rhetoric in order to have a sense of competence.

Trump’s rhetorical style — the simplification, the repetition, the reduction of complex problems to obvious villains and obvious solutions — did for low-propensity voters exactly what Madden did for me. It confirmed what their common sense was already telling them. Inflation hurt. Immigration felt threatening. The culture felt unrecognizable. When Trump explained all of it in terms that matched their existing intuitions, they didn’t hear stupidity. They heard validation. They knew that. They were as smart as the guy who was going to be president.

My friend would have rolled her eyes. But my friend already felt competent in the political domain. She didn’t need the validation. The low-propensity voter who’d felt excluded from political comprehension their entire adult life needed exactly that hit of “I get it and I’m not an idiot for getting it.”

It isn’t real competence. Real competence requires accurate information and genuine understanding. But it felt real enough to be motivating.

When I think of it that way, suddenly their support makes a lot more sense. I can see it. God help me, I can understand how it appeals.

Relatedness

Relatedness is the need to feel connected to and supported by other people. And here’s where I have to be honest about something that’s uncomfortable for those of us on the left: the relatedness MAGA built was, at least partly, genuinely real.

The rallies, the online communities, the shared symbols and language and enemies; they all generated actual social bonds for people who had felt genuinely isolated. For people who felt unseen by mainstream politics and culture, seeing thousands of people just like them — on Fox News, on social media, at a rally — was not nothing. The algorithms were manipulative, the bots were fake, and Fox News was lying. All true. But the human need underneath it was real, and the sense of belonging it produced was real enough to be sticky.

Representation really does matter.

These were not stupid people, but they were being manipulated into voting against their interests. These were people with real psychological needs that had gone unmet — by both parties, for years — and a candidate who showed up and made those needs feel fulfilled. Even if the fulfillment was cognitive tom-fuckery dressed up as political revolution.

Which brings us to the Democratic Party, and what any of this means for messaging going into the 2026 midterms.

Self-Determination Theory and Democratic Messaging

Obama’s Hope and Change: What Good Looks Like

Trump has neatly divided American history into a before and after, with the before fading in dog years, so we can be forgiven if we’ve let Obama’s 2008 Hope and Change campaign them dim a bit. However, it was the perfect SDT-based messaging. In the face of the Great Recession, he wasn’t chastising Republican voters, he was saying, we’re in a real pickle. We’re going to need to work together to get out of it, and here’s what I’m going to do. He was pitch perfect to engage with voters where they were at and bring them along to his solution.

He trusted voters to understand the problem — competence — and make a choice for president that was right for them — autonomy. He also communicated that he understood just how scary it was. We didn’t know whether we were sliding into another Great Depression or not. The situation was so dire, that the Republican sitting Congress cooperated with Obama before he actually won the election!

Ironically, Obama’s smooth and successful handling of the economy and being Black, set Trump’s assault on our democracy up. It created the fertile ground for his grievance, blame, and flood the zone with BS to work.

What Democrats Need To Do Differently

As part of his firehose of propaganda strategy, Trump has created a slew of issues — a real smorgasbord to choose from — for Democrats. Rather than try to focus on the issue du jour, Democrats need to embrace the opportunity. First, Trump’s firehose shows us that people will choose which issues they tune into based on which ones resonate with them. The ones that don’t will just be ignored, and that’s okay.

This is an important messaging caveat for Democrats. We have a big tent coalition, so we need messaging for everyone. We won’t be diluting, we’ll be adding to. Trust people to make the smart choice for them. That’s autonomy.

We don’t need to over explain an issue. Trying to drive home the nuance of the policy stance is examining the trees when we really came out here to admire the forest. That is competence. Our voters, even the low-propensity low-information voters are competent with the issues that affect their lives. We’ve ceded too much ground with them to Republicans without putting up a fight by believing that we cannot reach our core constituency while also appealing to Trump’s 15 million.

Abortion is a good example of a message that once did resonate but has since gone cold. At its foundation, abortion and women’s health would seem to be all about autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Your body, your choice. You know what is best for your health and what your family needs. And, here are all of these people who have had to navigate the abortion decision. Democrats support the difficulty of choosing the best option for you, and we’ll provide humane options.

Since the Courts have abandoned all pretense of judicial independence , the abortion messaging has slid into more “I told you so,” territory, and we all know how warm and fuzzy that messaging is. That style of communication is oh, so tempting — guilty as charged, your honor! — but it does the exact opposite of what Democrats need. It diminishes autonomy and competence. It removes relatedness. It leaves our 15 million out in the cold again; they are disengaged and unmotivated.

Democrats are fond of saying that they can walk and chew gum at the same time. Now, is the time to chew the gum and walk the walk. Midterm elections are generally low turnout, so our messaging has be extra appealing, extra engaging, extra motivating. Hardcore MAGA maybe out of reach, but Trump’s 15 million aren’t. Self-Determination Theory points us in the right direction for honing messaging that will get us there.

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