Faisal Bashir/SOPA Images/Sipa USA via AP Images
Donald Trump’s surprising victory has already inspired a frenzy of recriminations, as various Democratic Party factions seek to figure out who is to blame—was it Kamala Harris’s wishy-washy stance on Gaza? Or her palling around with Liz Cheney? Or was her economic messaging unconvincing?
Frankly, I don’t buy pat explanations, which most of the time boil down to “she didn’t adopt my personal preferences.” Perhaps as the data rolls in, some more informed critiques can be assembled. But in my view, it simply can’t be denied that Harris ran an extremely good campaign. Her discipline was tight, she raised a ton of money, and her ground game—which I reported on personally—was superb.
More to the point, Donald Trump ran the single worst campaign I have ever seen, and possibly the worst in American history. He constantly insulted huge swaths of voters. He outsourced his ground game to Elon Musk, who by all accounts wasted much of the money. He held a huge rally in direct echo of the 1939 Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden that might have been even more racist than the original. He was visibly decompensating on stage several times. He spent the last week of the campaign pretending to fellate a microphone and whipping up a completely incomprehensible panic about some porn star’s squirrel.
And that was in addition to the fact that he has been convicted of 34 felonies, held legally liable for sexual abuse, and attempted to overthrow the government.
None of it mattered. Trump won, and he won by a lot. Why?
Again, I’d look skeptically at any pat explanations. But the information environment—the combination of traditional journalism, social media, party propaganda, and so on—is preposterously biased and inadequate. Trump brushed aside any of about a thousand scandals that would have sunk any previous politician. Democrats need to take a long, hard look at what their information strategy should be, and more importantly, how their messaging can be reliably and consistently put in front of voters.
Now, one might also conclude that American voters simply love senile autocratic racist criminal traitors who propose wreaking untold havoc at all levels of society. And I think that is probably true of most Trump voters. But there is a sizable fraction who basically have to be either ignorant, deluded, desperate for leadership and help, or some combination thereof. Below the gutting topline result, many Democrats and progressive causes actually did fairly well. A large number of people split their tickets to vote for Democratic House and Senate candidates, and the party may actually win control of the House after the votes are counted.
A ballot initiative to give public school tax money to rich private schools failed in Kentucky. A measure to legalize abortion passed in Missouri. In Florida, an abortion rights initiative failed, but only because it fell slightly short of the required 60 percent margin; it got the same level of support in Montana, and passed.
Democrats, from rank-and-file members to the leadership, need to reconsider their relationship with even nominally liberal mainstream sources.
Voting to protect abortion rights, while voting for a president who is entirely responsible for taking those rights away, is at a minimum peculiar. Anecdotally, many voters simply have not heard of Trump’s deranged behavior, or dismiss the possibility that he means business about his many psychotic promises. Some migrants seeking asylum even told a reporter recently that they would have voted for Trump, trusting that he wouldn’t deport them because they just want to work.
The other possibility is that voters just feel like Democrats didn’t keep their promises and instead abandoned them, making their promises untrustworthy and giving them the freedom to support Trump. Of course, Democrats achieved full employment, neutralized inflation, and generally created a very good economy poised for more investment in the future. Maybe it’s just that nobody knows any of that.
I have previously argued that Democrats need a party publication—something to bypass the traditional media and deliver progressive messaging directly. The reasons are obvious. Local news and radio are overwhelmingly dominated by conservatives. Every large social media platform is run by a right-wing billionaire. Twitter used to be somewhat friendlier to Democrats, but Elon Musk bought it and turned it into another pit of white supremacist vipers. All Democrats, particularly famous ones, should leave the husk of Twitter at once for Bluesky, by far the most favorable replacement, as Threads is run by another censorial right-wing billionaire.
But Democrats, from rank-and-file members to the leadership, also need to reconsider their relationship with even nominally liberal mainstream sources. The 2024 coverage from NPR and The New York Times, for instance, despite many individual pieces of good reporting, was probably worse than it was in 2016. The ages of the candidates got sustained, frenzied coverage when Biden was the oldest in history, right until he dropped out and that became true of Trump, at which point it was almost totally ignored. The Times’ formal endorsement of Harris, while welcome, does not make up for the fact that its political desk catastrophically failed to convey the stakes of the election. It spent the final week of the campaign doing a “but her emails” style hatchet job on a Biden gaffe when he wasn’t even on the ballot.
Historically, the Dem rank and file—who make up the overwhelming majority of Times subscribers and NPR listeners—instinctively trust these mainstream outlets, and Dem elites typically conduct their messaging by trying to get attention from them and then complaining when it almost invariably does not work. On TV, MSNBC is compromised on account of its ownership by Comcast, a major defense contractor. Though certainly better than Fox, its hosts tend to fixate on comparatively low-stakes stories, like the Mueller investigation, that are comparatively unlikely to lead to either policy changes or serious consequences for Trump. That is not a coincidence, and it influences the party.
Democrats should forget the idea that subscribing to the Times, The Washington Post, or NPR is a responsible act of supporting journalism. That may have been true once, but no longer. Dems should abandon these publications en masse and instead subscribe to ones not owned by petulant nepo babies or corrupt hyper-billionaires who interfere with their coverage for Trump—like, for instance, this one.
Websites, radio stations, podcasts, and so forth ought to be stood up by party members with access to money—the Harris campaign and associated groups, by the way, spent about $5 billion losing this election—particularly if they can replace genuine local news that has been gutted by private equity and Facebook, or if they are centered on subjects typically neglected by liberals like sports or gaming. The core strategy is to set up publications with progressive views but likely to have broader appeal. Honest partisanship should be the standard, rather than a pretend above-it-all “objective journalism” that in practice means bending reality completely beyond recognition to benefit Donald Trump.
Incidentally, I strongly suspect that paper publications are going to have a minor renaissance soon, as people sour on the horrible toxicity and dysfunction of the modern internet.
One could go further. Communication, journalism, and propaganda are just some of the institutions that used to make up the core of political parties. Time was, there were party clubs, bars, gyms, and so on. But the information environment is a good start.
