If you are a regular reader of the more highbrow US mainstream publications, you will know that the question which some of the most celebrated American journalists are wrestling with at this time, is that of trying to understand “the Trump voter.”
For to all such writers it had all along during the 2024 presidential campaigns been so obvious that candidate Donald Trump was lying every single day, and making promises he could not possibly keep, that they could not see how he could possibly win.
They were very well aware that Trump had a cult-like mass following which would never desert him no matter what – even if (as Trump himself boasted) he shot someone on a busy New York street in broad daylight.
However, they expected a critical mass of voters to be put off by Trump’s bombastic self-promotion and contradictory lies and thus deliver a safe victory to the Democratic Party candidate, Kamala Harris.
But those potential Kamala Harris voters in the end preferred to cast their ballots for Trump. And the question now arising, is this: “What were they thinking?” And this question is not asked with the kind of contemptuous dismissal that you might expect.
Rather it is an earnest attempt to understand the kind of thinking that makes a person who is sure to suffer a decline in living standards under a Trump presidency, still end up voting for Trump.
I must admit that going into the 2022 election here in Kenya, I too had an issue that I initially dismissed as mere ignorance but was later to find as deserving of serious analysis. It arose from a remark made by a man somewhere in Central Kenya who was asked – as I recall – why President Uhuru Kenyatta seemed to have substantially lost much of his support in that region, despite having presided over the inauguration of so many landmark infrastructure projects in Central Kenya as elsewhere in the country.
The man answered, “We cannot eat roads.” And to me this seemed a singular example of human ingratitude.
For I am old enough to remember what it took to get any roads built in any part of Kenya back in the 1980s and 1990s.
Local leaders in whichever part of the country President Daniel Moi was visiting, would take the opportunity to humble themselves before him and literally beg him to “give them” a road, informing him of the rutted muddy tracks that they had to make do with, which you could hardly guess had once been a tarmac road.
The improved roads mattered because Kenya is still a largely agrarian economy, in which decent rural roads providing access to markets for fruits and vegetables is a matter of the utmost importance.
For the average farmer, the state of such roads is the diff erence between earning a good price for your produce if you deliver it to the market (or factory) in good time, and having to sell the fruits of your labour at a throwaway price, because the lorry carrying your products got stuck in the mud for over 48 hours, and your farm produce arrived at the market (or factory) half rotten.
Given this context, for anyone to be so casually dismissive of Uhuru Kenyatta’s access roads improvement programme, seemed to me then, to be simply inexplicable. But I have since come to see that those who hold such a view had a valid point.
For many of us here in Kenya, bad roads may have been emblematic of governmental neglect. But improved roads, however much we desired them, were actually not fundamental if we looked deeply into the matter.
Good rural access roads are merely a facilitator of rural commerce. But once obtained, what such commerce (and any other economic activity) aimed at was individual flourishing.
If due to government policy or any other factors, the individual voters had great difficulty making ends meet, then no network of easily accessible roads would appease them. Not even if one of those new roads passed right outside their farm.
They would be well aware that feeding their families and educating their children had become more difficult than ever. And they would blame the government – and, more specifically, the president – for this.
In this way did I arrive at the unavoidable conclusion that some of us had set the bar for “development” too low.
What really matters to voters is not long-promised infrastructure, but rather, measurable improvements in their individual lives.
Wycliffe Muga is a columnist
