Media Impact on 2024 U.S. Election Trump Votes

A lack of trust in the election processes and public policy systems challenges an integral

part of America's representative democracy: free and fair elections. When citizens feel

disenfranchised, the damage to democracy can be significant. If left unchanged, or if it

gets worse, the consequences for democracy can be severe as citizens increasingly

become disenfranchised. The impact of the media on then-Trump supporters for the 2020

election and whether the mischaracterization of Trump supporters by the media

negatively affected those voters' sense of connection to government and public policy

processes was analyzed. The goal was to determine if Trump voters felt the media

mischaracterized them and what that impact was on their trust in government institutions,

public policy, and other areas of their lives. The theoretical foundation, the narrative

policy framework (NPF), was used to analyze the narratives from interviews of 20 White,

male Trump voters aged 30-65 in response to a series of questions asking how they felt

the media characterized them. The study's key results were that 82% of the participants

felt disenfranchised by how the media framed them as voters. The NPF plot categories

that were dominant were "Story of Helplessness and a Lack of Control" (35%) and

"Story of Decline" (34%). The positive social change implications include exploring

potential issues with how the media affects essential political and policy discourse and

providing the insights to build towards progress with media characterizations' negative

impact on citizen connectedness to policymaking, legislative processes, elections, and

democracy.