Robert Kagan Doesn’t Respect You

There’s something excessively irritating about the dismissive way many elite media types treat their readers. Case in point: Robert Kagan’s recent piece on Trump for The Washington Post.

Kagan writes that:

Today, less than 5 percent of eligible voters have voted for Trump. But if he wins the election, his legions will likely comprise a majority of the nation.

This is partially true- but only partially. Kagan is using selective math in each sentence to deliver a histrionic warning about the dangers of a Trump presidency- and in doing so exposes his total lack of respect for his readership.

[T]rump has eclipsed the 10 million vote mark in the primaries, which is indeed 5 percent of eligible voters. According to Statistic Brain, the number of eligible voters in the US comes in somewhere north of 215 million. 10 million is, roughly, 5 percent of that- let’s give Kagan the benefit of the doubt on this one and call it an even 5 percent.

It’s the second sentence above that’s the problem. Kagan says that Trump, if he wins the general election, will have the support of the “majority of the nation.” This is just wrong no matter how you look at it.

If, for example, you take “the nation” to mean the total US population, Trump would have to win roughly 75 percent of all eligible voters in the 2016 election. This is not only unlikely, it’s basically impossible in today’s politics. In fact, a share like that of the total vote would be an historical aberration.

[B]ut maybe Kagan means the majority of eligible voters. This presents similar challenges.

In 2012, a hotly contested election between supporters of President Obama (who wanted to maintain the legacy and policies of the first black president) and Mitt Romney (who saw the first black president as a socialist anti-Christ dictator) only drew 126 million of the 215 million eligible voters. If we take the 215 million number as the relevant population that Kagan determines as “the nation” that Trump can gain a “majority” of, Trump would need to win roughly 84 percent of the likely turnout in 2016- even more impossible than a 75 percent share of the electorate in strict terms!

And yes, it’s possible that Kagan was referring to the portion of the electorate that is registered to vote when he refers to the majority of the nation- 146 million Americans. However, that’s a big jump from the sentence directly preceding, which calls Trump’s vote total 5 percent, a number that only works if you use the entire US electorate as the base.

[T]hat Kagan uses two wildly different baselines for percentages in his analysis of the electorate and Trump’s support shows pretty clearly that his respect for his readers and the American people is so low he assumes they won’t catch his fuzzy math. It’s this kind of mentality that has allowed Trump’s political fortunes to rise in the first place.