As always: I wrote this in roughly an hour. These are my rambling thoughts after a night with not enough sleep.
We've gotten too good at politics.
I've been mulling this thought over for more than a year now. So let me explain what I mean. And, I should say, I am joining countless others this morning who have interpreted last night's results and said, "this confirms my priors."
Politics — electoral politics in particular — is not a rational process. In politics, it does you no good to present lengthy, throughout policy papers and attempt to engage in robust debate. In politics, when a journalist asks you a tough question, you're supposed to pivot to your talking points; you never concede an inch, and avoiding a dreaded gaffe is more important than making a cogent argument.
In politics, the goal is to convince a majority of the voters that you are on their side, or at least more on your side than the other guy — that guy doesn't care about people like you, at all. In politics, emotions trump reason. In politics, negative emotions — fear, confusion, and hate — trump positive emotions. In politics, it pays to know that people are at their heart selfish, even as they want others to think they're not.
This year, Trump convinced that many more people in rural parts of swing states that he was on their side — or that Harris was decidedly not. He convinced more Latinos that he’d treat them just like any other working class stiff rather than a special interest to be won over with inconsequential sops to their heritage like nominating a hispanic Secretary of the Commerce. And he convinced — or Democrats failed to convince — millions more people that what happened on January 6th ultimately didn’t effect their lives one way or another
In "The Selling of the President 1986" Joe McGinnis detailed how Madison Avenue's ad men and TV producers transformed Richard Nixon to a gruff has-been politician who had the stink of scandal about him into the president. One of those TV producers turned image consultants, Roger Ailles, went on to create Fox News. They sold America on Nixon, the brand, the way they sold America on Coca Cola and Pall Malls. We know how the Nixon story ends.
That dynamic hasn't changed, but the marketers have gotten better. They know how to target emotions more effectively, and how to target messages more specifically to a targeted audience. Americans are fatter than ever because marketers do a better job convincing us to indulge our baser instincts for fats and sugars instead of eating what’s healthier for us. So it is in politics.
And they've taken advantage of changes in the media marketplace to avoid the would-be regulators — the gatekeepers in traditional media — who would warn the customers about the side effects you might experience taking a daily dose of Trump for the next four years.
We're still just selling the presidency, but the media marketplace has dramatically changed. Nixon bought airtime on the national broadcast channels — then, the only game in TV town — to run 30-minute infomercials. That's where the audience was. Today, Trump sells himself to podcasters, YouTubers, and Twitch streamers, because that's where the audience is.
Harris did too, but there's an asymmetry there. The online world has splintered us into smaller and smaller audiences, more specialized cells of group think. Large swathes of the internet cater to disaffected young men, telling them that their failures in life and love aren’t their fault, but rather the byproduct of a feminist cabal that hates them.
And instead of trying to win these men over, Democrats have largely responded by lecturing them, calling them sexist. It’s not an effective way to win elections, in the short run. In the long run, this media ecosystem plays to our basest instincts; it builds audiences by creating parasocial communities, which breeds a kind of tribalism that crushes empathy for others.
I talk about rational debate and reason above because that's what our Founders predicated our system of constitutional democracy on. The idea was that the electorate could evaluate the performance of elected officials, the promises of the challengers, and their respective qualifications, and then reward those who offered the best combination. They knew that men were flawed, that passions could cloud judgement, that factions could turn the nation against itself, but the ultimate goal in our convoluted government that separates powers and ensures the freedom of the press, is that there would be something resembling a thoughtful, earnest debate where the power of ideas and the strength of truth would ultimately arise triumphant.
But that doesn't happen. The political-industrial complex has learned that, as in marketing in general, vibes matter more than arguments. They have learned from marketers and behavioral psychologists the ways to quiet the rational parts of our brains and heighten the emotional and reptilian parts. Car commercials show off how those cars will make you feel or inform you identity — trucks are sold to the kind of guy who wants to be seen as tough and rugged and self sufficient; in the ads, hatchbacks and smaller SUVs are always taken off road, sometimes by a family of four and a golden retriever; every luxury sedan and sport scar is shown whipping around the corners of the pacific coast highway. The marketers have convinced us that we should reach for a gatorade after jogging two miles, because of electrolytes, even though it has roughly double the sugary calories that we burned on the run. We’re too good at politics, which makes us bad at governance.
In the idealized world the Founders envisioned, politics would be like a job interview. But today, it’s more like dating. You don't lay out your resume, five-year plan, and present an argument why your career and life goals align well on a first date, and certainly not when you first message someone on a dating app. You try to connect, emotionally, with the other person.
But the serial daters out there know there are tricks you can use to forge those connections. Maybe they read "The Game," the book by Neil Strauss that looked into this odd world of "pickup artists," who utilized psychological tricks to help them get laid. The book taught a generation of young men (full disclosure: I, included) things like "negging," or playfully mocking someone you were flirting with to lower their self esteem, which would make them more open to your advances. All the tips in the book were effectively providing men who otherwise lacked confidence a way exude it, but also a way of taking advantage of mental heuristics to essentially trick women. It had the side effect of training a generation of young men to look at interactions with women as the eponymous game — contests to win, with sex as the prize. It's objectifying, and Strauss ends the book partly horrified by what he has become after learning at the feet of the other pickup artists. But it also works.
So it is in politics. It's all vibes, and there are tricks you can do to make connections — or mistakes you can make that rub your date the wrong way. Frank Luntz, the conservative messaging Svengali who opposes Trump, was on NPR last week along with Richard Reeves, a Brookings Institution scholar who focuses on men. The pair discussed how Democrats' pro-woman messaging had the side effect of alienating young men.
Voters broadly agree with Democrats on the vast majority of issues, and yet they lose. That's in part because Democrats' messaging can come off as hectoring and holier-than-thou. In a world of rational debate, having numerous former Trump administration officials say the man is a danger would be instantly disqualifying. But not in the marketing world that consistently sells us cigarettes, online gambling, and junk food that'll lead to our ruin.
Public health campaigns can, over the years, convince people to stop smoking or eat leafy greens, but only if they’re getting that message from people they trust — only if they’re ever listening. Our disjointed media marketplace, where legacy outlets have been demonized on the right for over 50 years, and where increasingly huge numbers of voters are largely getting their news from alternative sources, if at all, isn’t up to the task.
The problem goes beyond just media. It’s a failure of civics education, as well. It’s a failure of Democrats to play the game as it is, not as they wish it to be; a failure to recognize that the cherished ideals they share with one another aren’t the same for all Americans, and that they cannot win presidential elections if the vast majority of non-college-educated white people vote against them.
It’s a failure of an electoral system that lets special interests drown out everyone else with the megaphone of their millions. It’s a failure of an electoral system that does not end.1
As I mentioned above, lots of other folks are arguing how the results confirm their priors. Let me address some and say why I think they might be wrong. Also, I should say that in all of this, I’m striving to be descriptive, not prescriptive — describing objectively what is happening, not saying what should be happening.
Harris didn't have enough time / Democrats should have had an open primary to pick a better candidate / Harris was a bad candidate. This is more a criticism of Biden and his closest advisors, really, but it misses the mark. Joe Biden is popular with Democrats. He had challengers in the primary who never caught any momentum for that reason. If he had decided to never run for reelection, who knows what might have happened. Maybe someone like Josh Shapiro or Pete Buttiegieg would’ve won, maybe they would have performed better with rural voters and Latinos… who knows.
But Harris raised a historic amount of money in record time. She ran one of the largest GOTV efforts in history, if not the largest. She largely avoided gaffes and performed well in her lone debate with Trump. Tim Walz was a popular pick who certainly didn't hurt her campaign. It's tough to say she was lacking.
There is perhaps another argument to be made, that women in general suffer from an electoral deficit still as some percentage of voters just are less likely to vote for one. But I have my doubts how much that ultimately matters.
Harris didn't distance herself enough from Biden. This, I think, begs the question. If you believe, as I do, that in objective terms our post-COVID economy has performed as well or better than can be expected, Biden should be popular. There should be no need for Harris to distance herself from his policies -- which, as I've said before, are all broadly popular things! -- just show that you aren't so ancient that a stiff breeze might crush your bones.
The idea that Harris didn't do enough to put forth a proactive economic agenda or delineate how she would differ from Biden (other than on nebulous stuff like appointing a Republican to her cabinet) seems absurd when juxtaposed to Trump's own policy proposals, or lack thereof. Economists roundly panned Trump's tariff plans, saying it would exacerbate inflation significantly. Again, if there was any rationality in this electoral debate, people who were upset about inflation would not have picked the person promising to make things worse.
The Gaza War. In this take, Harris is being punished for not opposing the unpopular war in Gaza, that this issue kept left-leaning voters at home or even lodging protest votes for Trump or Jill Stein.
If this were the case, we’d expect the rightward shift in the electorate to happen in the left-leaning parts of the country, but that hasn’t happened. Instead, already red rural areas appear to have voted more for Trump than they did before, and Latinos broke for Trump in large numbers. Furthermore, if you oppose U.S. military support for Israel, there’s no rational argument for supporting Trump. The GOP has almost uniformly backed Israel and Trump shows signs he will take any steps to curtail how they are prosecuting it. Biden, meanwhile, has been criticized numerous times by Republicans for the steps he has taken to delay or withhold some materiel shipments. Again, it’s irrational.
Democrats just didn't deliver. This just begs the question more. It's been put out there, on the left, that voters are simply responding to the fact that life is harder now than it was 4 years ago -- inflation squeezed their wallets, they don't like the wars. While the economists will say that wages have risen in real terms -- adjusted for inflation -- those statistics flatten reality. For a lot of voters, their incomes stayed the same or barely went up while seemingly everything got more expensive. So they punished the party in power.
This criticism implicitly puts the onus on Democrats not just to fix all problems single handedly, but to do so despite active opposition by the GOP. Again, to the extent presidents and Congress can rightly be given credit for a strong economy, Democrats should have been given credit, rationally. The real question is why they weren't.
It's because we're too good at politics. Also, a lot of Biden's achievements haven't been "felt" yet, because that's just how it is in government. It takes time to pass a law, then implement it; it's very sadly likely that most of us won't get to enjoy true free tax filing with the IRS, because Trump will now reverse Biden's plan to implement that nationally. And some of those changes are always going to be hidden. There's road construction all the time, and the average person can't tell the difference between routine maintenance and federally-funded repairs that'll prevent a bridge collapse disaster.
The changing media landscape hasn't helped. In the past, gatekeepers like magazines and newspapers played an outsized role in setting the terms of the competing marketing campaigns for the presidency. They were steeped in history and philosophy, well versed in the Federalist Papers. Arguments made outside the constitutional norm were couched in highly critical context.
Today's gatekeepers are Joe Rogan and Theo Vonn; Call Her Daddy and Hot Ones. These comedians, YouTubers, TikTokers and Twitchers have the audiences once commanded by Time and CBS News. They don't have the same sensibilities that the old guard media had, or that the chattering classes continue to believe they have. If John Kelly wanted to really convince voters that Trump was a danger, he shouldn't have talked to Bob Woodward of Jeff Goldberg; he should've done a podcast.
Suffice it to say that having one large social network, Twitter, owned by a Trump-supporter didn't help Democrats. It also didn't help that another, Facebook, has tried to tamp down politics.
Trump seems to be sui generis in getting-out non-voters; he's outperformed down ballot Republicans consistently in his races as well. And Democrats have performed better than expected in every race he hasn't been on the ballot for. Marketers have long used the parasocial relationship we have with celebrities to sell people crap, and I think this helps explain why Trump is so unique here. Everyone else is just another politician, but Trump is a celebrity. Obama, to an much smaller extent, was a celebrity, but we haven't had this sort of broader interest outside of the normal political world in a politician since JFK. In politics, you're selling yourself, and no one on earth has spent as much time and effort selling themselves as much as Trump.
Again, we're too good at politics. The qualifications it takes to be a celebrity -- fundamentally, to draw inordinate amounts of attention to oneself -- and the qualifications for governance -- wisdom, empathy, curiosity, intelligence, judgment -- share little overlap. But celebrities are great for marketing, great for drawing eyeballs, great at inculcating the parasocial relationships that make complete strangers feel some sort of connection with them.
Some other thoughts:
If this election proved anything for Democrats, it's that its base's viewpoints do not align with the nation as a whole. Harris absolutely crushed it with donors. Democratic volunteers were as excited as I've ever seen. Not just fearful of Trump, but hopeful for Harris. They still lost. The nation is more reactionary and conservative than they thought. In a democracy, the only path forward is to convince those voters who backed Trump this year that they were wrong to do so, or to find enough non-votes to talk into actually coming out to vote for Democrats next time.
Indeed, it appears that is what Trump did. In his three presidential races, he has drawn out inconsistent voters, the people who don't usually follow news or vote in off-year races. It seems like he did so by record amounts this year, despite the felony convictions, fascism accusations from former staffers, inconsistent messaging, etc.
Democrats have long been in favor of making it easier to vote in general and taking steps to encourage non-voters to get to the polls. Tactically, as the party becomes dominated by college-educated and union households — people who vote in every race, even for dog catcher — these pro-democracy efforts are anti-Democrat.
You may read this and go “too good at politics, Trump’s campaign sucked! The ground game was garbage, his message discipline in shambles, his rallies poorly attended, his fundraising weaker! Come off it!” Fair enough. But I think that, too, misses the point. Presidential campaigns simply no longer end. Trump has been running for this office for 11 years now, nonstop. By traditional metrics, he ran a bad campaign. But his campaign wasn’t traditional, never has been, and to compare it to traditional campaigns is folly. He communicated a message heavy on our basest emotions — fear and hatred of the other, promises of retribution and violence and other un-Christian ideals — that Democrats didn’t simply fail to counter, but actually helped spread. So many white folks in the forgotten parts of America feel like they are the victims of modern society, and until they stop feeling that way, they will not listen to any arguments about democratic ideals or constitutionality or fascism, but will go for the guy who says that he knows who to blame and he plans to go after them with a vengeance.