Dr. David E. Silva
Assistant Professor with the School of Communication Studies and the School of Emerging Media and Technology at Kent State University. His research focuses on political communication and online discussion quality using digital trace data and computational methods.
Email: dsilva2@kent.edu
Github: https://github.com/dataesilva
U.S. Election 2024
1. Trump’s imagined reality is America’s new reality (Prof Sarah Oates)
2. Trump’s threat to American democracy (Prof Pippa Norris)
3. Why does Donald Trump tell so many lies? (Prof Geoff Beattie)
4. Strategic (in)civility in the campaign and beyond (Dr Emily Sydnor)
5. Can America’s democratic institutions hold? (Prof Rita Kirk)
6. How broad is presidential immunity in the United States? (Dr Jennifer L. Selin)
7. Election fraud myths require activation: Evidence from a natural experiment (Dr David E. Silva)
8. What ever happened to baby Q? (Harrison J. LeJeune)
9. We’re all playing Elon Musk’s game now (Dr Adrienne L. Massanari)
10. Peak woke? The end of identity politics? (Prof Timothy J. Lynch)
11. Teaching the 2024 election (Dr Whitney Phillips)
In an alternate reality, Vice President Kamala Harris is taking to TikTok and claiming that voter registration purges in key battle ground states—supported by Republican legislators and upheld by conservative court justices—resulted in election interference. Harris is claiming that her opponents’ supporters threatening to monitor polling locations to “protect” the election had a chilling effect on Democratic voter turnout. She is claiming that leaving third party candidates on ballots after they suspended their campaign and endorsing her opponent was purposefully rigging the election against her. Harris’s allies are floating the idea that by acquiring and changing Twitter, Elon Musk, a top donor and supporter of Donald Trump’s campaign, was censoring liberal voices and changing the election’s outcome. In addition, her allies in congress are claiming that the coordinated campaign against TikTok—a developing space for young voters to get news—was merely a prolonged scare tactic designed to limit the spread of liberal messaging.
To be clear, we are not living in an alternate reality. Vice President Kamala Harris conceded defeat to President-elect Donald Trump once the will of the American people was known. Harris did not even wait for all states to finish counting ballots. However, it is not as if she lost in a landslide. She will likely have received 226 electoral votes, only 7 fewer than when candidate Trump lost in 2020. The popular vote will be closer this year than in 2020, likely only a 2-3% point difference instead of the 4.5% difference that Trump lost. Even so, all signs indicate that she will preside over the election certification that will confirm her own loss.
From November 4th to 8th, 2024—in our reality—we are seeing the results a natural experiment testing the role of politicians in the propagation and seeking of disinformation. In the 2020 Election Analysis, I wrote four days after Election Day, “So far, the American public seems accepting of the results and political violence has been avoided. Whether or not a former president and his allies can still drive attention to misinformation remains to be seen.”
In fact, the dominant story in the wake of the 2020 U.S. General Election was the perpetuation of myths of widespread election fraud and the subsequent instigation of a violent attempt to overturn the election results. These myths were seeded by lies told by President Trump and his allies in the weeks prior to the election, and immediately after Election Day. President Trump’s attempt to remain in office were ultimately foiled by his own Vice President Mike Pence. Even so, Trump, his allies, and his 2024 campaign running mate J.D. Vance continued to lie and claim that the 2020 election was stolen for President Biden.
A substantial amount of scholarly work has been dedicated to the issues of misinformation, disinformation, political polarization, and the potential for violent extremism that these phenomenon fuel. Many causes and contributing factors have been identified in this literature including the role of the news media; aspects of large social media platforms; content moderation strategies and fact checking; the mechanics of biased information selection and processing; and the public’s lack of political knowledge, media literacy, and critical thinking skills. Much of this discussion has reinforced the civic, democratic responsibilities of journalists, educators, online platform developers, and members of the public.
Comparing the aftermath of the 2020 election against the 2024 election reveals a strikingly simple conclusion. Using similar sets of terms tailored to the specifics of each election cycle, I collected Google Search trends data, normed across the relative search frequency in the different years, and matched the search frequency data along a timeline where the end of Election Day was set to 0 (the x-axis of Figure 1). By looking at the information seeking behaviors of the American public through their use of this data, we can see the effect of elite political communication and the importance of what candidates say to their supporters.
In both elections there was some searching about election fraud topics prior to Election Day. However, as ballots were tallied and the likely results took shape, realities diverged resulting in one instance—the 2020 election—where the public began searching for and consuming online information about conspiracies and terms connected to eroding trust in the electoral process. Meanwhile, Kamala Harris has chosen not to engage in fabricating and promoting electoral conspiracies. This has resulted in public information seeking behaviors uninterested in topics of electoral fraud.
This data suggests the events of January 6th, 2021 were not inevitable. It took Trump for the myth of voter fraud to be activated for the public. Had Trump lost in 2024, many indications suggest he was ready and willing to make the same unfounded arguments that he did in 2020. For 2024, this data suggests that Harris’s supporters will not storm the capital, they will not spread lies motivating political violence, they will not seek out and reinforce the fabricated reality of widespread voter fraud. This is not because Harris’s supports are better or different than Trump’s supporters. Instead, a peaceful transfer of power will occur as long as Harris and her allies choose not to activate these myths.