Konstantin Sonin talks to Tim Phillips

Intro: Konstantin Sonin

There have been periods of polarization. 100 years ago, the polarization was as high as now, but it did not result in an actual armed insurrection.

Tim Phillips

The March to Save America in 2021 has become one of those events that we recognize by its date. January the 6th. Now afterwards, we all had a theory about who it was that was marching on the US Capitol and why they were there. Now, a team of economists has analysed 40 million phone signals to find out what really fuelled January 6th. So today on Vox Talks Economics, who marched on the Capitol? And what the way the 2020 election was reported had to do with it. Welcome to VoxTalks Economics from the Centre for Economic Policy Research. I’m Tim Phillips. If this sounds like your kind of episode, stick around and pass it on to someone who’ll find it useful. If you have tried to make sense of the events of January 6th, you’ve probably been able to encountered two stories. One, it was a mob manipulated by a demagogue. The other, it was ordinary citizens protecting democracy. And my guest today has used phone data to find out where the protesters actually came from and also why they came. Konstantin Sonin is a professor at the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy, and one of the world’s leading economists studying how information and misinformation information shapes politics. Welcome, Konstantin.

Konstantin Sonin

Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Tim Phillips

Konstantin, we need to start this story on November the 3rd, 2020, election night in the US.

Unnamed Reporter 1

It’s election night in America and a nation in crisis is at a crossroads.

Unnamed Reporter 2

We’re counting down to the first exit polls and the first results as our coverage begins now.

Tim Phillips

How close is this election?

Konstantin Sonin

Okay, American elections are normally close, and this was not like the most closest elections of all time, but it was close enough. What’s important is that Americans elect presidents voting by states, and it is the states that determine how to count votes. So the system is… for an outsider is very complex because each state has its own procedures, how to collect votes, how many days you could vote before. And this was in the midst of the pandemic, so there were a lot of mail-in votes and states have different policies how to count these votes. What’s important? is that early vote and mail vote, they have different partisan compositions. So it might be that in some states, a lot of Democrats voted early or sent their ballots by mail, and there were a lot of Republicans who voted on the voting day.

Tim Phillips

I remember this, actually. I remember watching this. Early on, who was ahead did not represent who actually won in a lot of states.

Konstantin Sonin

Right. Because, for example, if a state had a lot of Democrats voting earlier, and then it has provisions that these votes are started to be counted on the day of the vote, then what you see initially, you have like a dump of Republican votes, those who came to the election day, they are reported first. Then overnight, you see the Democratic batches of votes being counted. For professionals, they knew this all along. They knew that some states have these huge chunks of early votes to be counted on the election date. So they totally expected these midnight dumps. But for many voters, this was a huge surprise.

Tim Phillips

Now, the MAGA movement of the Republican Party, who ended up being the losers in the 2020 election, they coined this phrase that you still hear now.

Unnamed Protester

They need to stop the steal tomorrow. Stop the steal. Stop the steal.

Tim Phillips

Stop the steal. What were they alleging?

Konstantin Sonin

First, they were primed to this because a serious part of the MAGA movement is all against a major, like a large conspiracy of the United States government against its ordinary citizens. So, miscounting the votes is part of this large conspiracy. So, they were primed to believe that there’s something sinister is going to happen on the election day. So, all these things, like in Pennsylvania, for example, There were a lot of Democrats who voted earlier. Every professional, including members of the Trump campaign, they of course knew that there will be these million votes counted after midnight in Pennsylvania. But for ordinary voters, this was unexpected. They were primed that there will be some sinister things going on in elections. That’s like this continuation of this story that United States government is conspiring against them.

Tim Phillips

And this story… builds over December and the message goes out to protest this on January the 6th. How many people answer this message what are they doing? What sort of protest are they doing?

Konstantin Sonin

Okay, thousands of people came to Washington to protest against the leaked vote. They did not believe that the beloved President Trump lost to the challenger, Joe Biden. The election was not very particularly close. There were a lot of attempts by the Trump campaign to challenge some outcomes. They were all rebuffed. There was no single legal case which would go forward. All the judges, judges appointed by Republicans, appointed by Democrats, judges appointed by President Trump himself, there’d never been any evidence of real fraud. But among the Republicans, there was this growing, growing, feeling, growing movement that this was fraud. And this was amplified by the Trump campaign, the outgoing Trump administration, President Trump himself, who was trying to exploit all the ways to stay in power despite losing elections.

Tim Phillips

And of course, on January the 6th, this was the last possible moment  that they had to protest, wasn’t it? Because the election result was about to be ratified.

Konstantin Sonin

I’m not a legal scholar. I would say that, given the importance of this day, January 6th, was sort of a misnomer. The elections, they are decided by state. The state bodies, they certified the election results and sent them to Washington. That Washington, legally on paper, the Congress could not count these votes, and there is a kind of untested legal argument that the sitting vice president could do something with the vote counting. But, largely, January 6th was a kind of a symbolic date. It was a date of a symbolic counting of volts. It was not actually a decisive moment. The decisive moment was two months before that.

Intermission

Five years on, President Trump still regularly claims in interviews and speeches that this election was stolen. In May 2025, we spoke to Richard Baldwin about what he calls the president’s grievance doctrine… as spelt out in his book ‘The Great Trade Hack’. That is, how this administration’s policies are partly driven by revenge and punishment. Subscribe and you can listen to our episode, ‘The Grievance Doctrine’. You can also download ‘The Great Trade Hack’ from cepr.org.

Tim Phillips

So this protest at the Capitol in Washington, D.C. on January the 6th, it was a shocking event to watch live as thousands of people marched on the Capitol and proceeded to break into the building. Something that I never thought I would see. I remember thinking, who are these people? Why are they there, I was thinking, Did you have the same reaction when you were watching it?

Konstantin Sonin

I grew up in the Soviet Union. I’ve seen people going to the centre of the city to protest against fraud. As a kid, I watched the Iranian Revolution. I watched other places around the world. We never expected to see this in the United States, right? A mob gathering around the capital. It’s not an unheard of story. This happens in many countries around the world, but typically it’s connected to like a real breakdown of democracy. I don’t know, revolutionaries bring the mob to attack the government or people defrauded of their vote come and sometimes do violent uprising. But this was… For a person watching in the United States, this was certainly a huge surprise.

Tim Phillips

Now, to explain this, to try and explain it, to investigate it, you have used mobile phone tracking data, I believe. So how do you obtain this data? How do you know that if you’re tracking a mobile phone, it belongs to a protester? So the information that you’re getting from it is useful to you.

Konstantin Sonin

Okay, first, we don’t know to whom a particular phone belongs, right? It’s the phone company that knows this, and there are a lot of legal restrictions for them in sharing the data with the researchers. Data was anonymized many times before it got into researchers’ hands. Then we do not see where a particular phone belongs. but we see the origins of the phones that’s traveled, we know the county or even a small unit inside a county, inside a state from which the phone traveled, then we could use data patterns of other days’ travel to single out, like the anomalous travel, right? There are people who travel to Washington. It’s a major museum destination in the United States. It’s major tourist attraction. There are people who work in District of Columbia. So we used statistical analysis to separate the anomaly travel on January 6th, to separate it from all other kinds of travel. But of course, we do not know about individual people who traveled or who didn’t.

Tim Phillips

Right. So you have these patterns of travel, which you’ve managed to separate from, as you say, commuters or anything like that. You have quite a clean signal on this. What can it possibly tell you and what can it not tell you about the people who are taking part in the protest, the people who we don’t know their names, but who are the owners of these phones?

Konstantin Sonin

We basically have information about their neighborhoods, about the communities from which they traveled to Washington. We do not know about individual people, but we know about the communities. in which these individual people live. Some of our findings, they’re pretty straightforward. It’s those places which voted for Trump. Or it’s true that all kinds of extremist organizations, they played a role. So, for example, if there was a Proud Boys chapter, it’s an extremist organization in the United States, then it’s increased participation from this community: they used, for another thing, they did use local Parler. Parler is a social network, a niche social network used by people who are like on the extreme right – they used this network more. In those communities in which this network was used more, again, these communities were overrepresented. Our less straightforward findings are that, typically, these came from communities that were isolated, and isolated in more than one sense. Politically isolated, small Republican-voting community in a democratic leaning district. Or think of a community that is less represented on social media than the surrounding communities. These people are isolated in different ways, socially, politically, they feel that they’re surrounded by other different people.

Tim Phillips

I see. And this is what marks them out, because most people who are MAGA supporters, most people who thought that the election had been stolen from them, they didn’t take part in those protests, even though thousands did. And you’re saying that this type of protester was overrepresented in that group.

Konstantin Sonin

Right. But we also noted in those states which President Trump, the sitting president, narrowly lost, and in those counties in which there was Trump to Biden’s swing in the election night vote tally, so where the reported number of the collected votes was for Trump, going into the evening on the election day, and then in the morning, it was Biden winning because of these mail-in votes, because of the early votes counted this way, there was a disproportional representation from these places.

Tim Phillips

I see.

Konstantin Sonin

We cannot know what is on people’s minds, but it seems that there were people who were concerned about vote steal, easily explained by professionals, but they took this as a visible sign of fraud.

Tim Phillips

If we were to go inside the mind of someone who was taking part for these reasons, who was taking part in the protest… then perhaps they felt isolated politically, as you say. They’re surrounded by areas that don’t think politically the same as their community does. They went to bed thinking that they’d won the election. They woke up and found that they hadn’t. this has given them a reason why they think they should protest.

Konstantin Sonin

Yep. Again, for an economist, it’s tempting to go into the psychology speculation about what happens in people’s mind. I told you what we saw in the data. And basically, that’s the way we interpret this. But at least what we’re saying that this was just a totally uninformed mob. These were people who paid attention to what is happening and they saw signs that people could interpret as a sign of electoral fraud. And this has implications because Democrats for many campaigns after that, they’re trying to raise people to defend democracy. And it doesn’t easily work as the past elections demonstrated, this cry to defend democracy. And perhaps one reason for this is that the people on the other side, a lot of them genuinely believe that they do defend democracy. They’re perhaps mistaken about this, but they believe that they’re defending democracy.

Tim Phillips

We are in a very charged political environment, a very polarised political environment at the moment. But people have always had strong opinions and many people have always thought that they lost elections unfairly. This is not a new charge. Is there something different about this event?

Konstantin Sonin

There is obviously something different about this event, because watching American elections for, I don’t know, centuries, there have been periods of polarization. 100 years ago, the polarization was as high as now. There were strong feelings. There were very divided policies. But it did not result in an actual armed insurrection. There is something special about this event. It’s not just an outcome of the vote and then a protest. This made the United States look like, in my childhood, we would use the word “third-world country,” but as if this was a country with not a mature democracy and a history of 200 years of competitive elections.

Tim Phillips

Many of us have paid much more attention to how the US runs its elections now. This reporting by state, this idea that the results are being reported minute by minute, while people are still voting in some cases, could be surprising. This is a very particular story to the US. Is this instructive about how other democratic protests are happening around the world?

Konstantin Sonin

It seems, Tim,  that we need to have electoral systems which are relatively easy to discern that are not only good for academics, but also easy to explain to ordinary voters because eventually it’s the ordinary voters who either believe that electoral system works or do not believe that the electoral system works. And if this system is overly complicated, then perhaps it’s a problem because people could take the complexity of the system to mean a sign of electoral fraud.

Tim Phillips

Asking what we should do about this, well, that causes many reactions. We think about the right for democratic protest, but then we think about the respecting of the democratic process. Is it easy to find lessons, perhaps for U.S. democracy, the next time that there is a U.S. presidential election? Would there be easy suggestions about how we can avoid problems like this?

Konstantin Sonin

Both Democrats and Republicans, although in slightly different ways, they are set to better describe the electoral procedures because there were a lot of I don’t know, one-time patches because of the pandemic, the government was still encouraging people not to do social gatherings. So there were all kinds of patches that different states did to let people vote. So since then, there are attempts to put more structure on this. Also, the United States Congress passed a couple of laws that make the abuse of the procedure at the federal level, when the votes are aggregated, at least slightly less easy than it was back five, six years ago. Right, so now the whole process of gathering votes and the Congress voting on accepting these votes is simplified and made more institutionalized than it was in 2020.

Tim Phillips

We wait to see what the outcome of this is and whether it was a one-off or whether there are deeper problems for how democracy works in the US and in other places as well. Konstantin, thank you very much for talking about it today.

Konstantin Sonin

Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Tim Phillips

The paper is called ‘Isolation and Insurrection: How partisanship and political geography fueled January the 6th, 2021’, authors Konstantin Sonin, David Van Dyke, and Austin Wright.

Outro

VoxTalks Economics is a Talk Normal production. The assistant producer is Megan Bieber and our editor is Andrei Zagarian. Next week, the Bank of England’s Capital Mistake.