IdeaLog
Lessons of the 2024 election, part three
Posted on January 21, 2025
The fundamental reason why our side lost in November is that a small but decisive percentage of Americans never heard our arguments – specifically, people who normally would support Democrats but rely on social media for “news.” They became divorced from political reality and either supported Trump or decided not to vote. How do we reach them now?
(Part one explained that average Americans are living paycheck-to-paycheck and, when we are actually reaching these voters, we need a much sharper economic message. Part two explained that we failed to communicate with a significant slice of swing voters; they never heard our messages. This column suggests what progressives and Democrats can do about this problem.)
To review just a bit, in November 2024 there was a nationwide shift to the right, which is part of a movement worldwide. In much of the United States, millions of traditional Democrats simply failed to show up and vote. But Harris minimized the GOTV problem in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. She would have won the presidency except that she couldn’t quite make up for the national rightward shift in those three states, despite lavish spending on campaign ads.
As explained in the last IdeaLog, the only reasonable explanation for that shift is that the right-wing noise machine successfully targeted and persuaded these traditional Democrats through 24/7 disinformation on social media. Our side’s biggest problem is that we do not have any program to counter the 24/7 right-wing firehose of lies on social media.
Progressive funders could, of course, develop social media bots which they would, presumably, operate offshore. But let’s stick to what progressive officials and activists can do.
(1) Create a left-wing social media machine. Democrats rely on the old-school method for reaching persuadable voters – we create messages to reach them through the mainstream media. But millions of voters have stopped reading the newspapers or watching the TV news. They get their political information from social media which is dominated by right-wing bots and trolls that, along with Fox and other right-wing media, have created an alternate reality where the truth is irrelevant.
What we must do is to create our own flood of social media posts, based on a volunteer organization of state and local officials and activists. Most state legislators and major city and county officials have large lists of social media followers. The trick is to ask our followers to repost specific memes and videos to their own lists. Democratic state legislators alone probably reach a total of hundreds of thousands of followers, and if they re-broadcast it would get to millions of their own friends. Such a project could start in just one state.
To be specific, that state project would: create a list of activists who agree to repeat and amplify our endorsed messages every day; hire some good people to create the messages and memes under the direction of an advisory committee comprised of major progressive players in the state; and organize thousands of activists. The trick is to make those volunteers understand they are part of something very important (and it would be) and…
(2) Focus on focus on economic themes. That’s what moves the small slice of voters or potential voters who are persuadable and that’s how we lost them in 2024. They were persuaded by the absurd idea that Trump and Republicans were better for them on economic issues. This is, of course, preposterous in a reality-based world.
The most important message to repeat over and over is that Trump and Republicans are not on “your” side. They are controlled by billionaires, who these voters detest. And they already understand that it’s the rich who have been raising prices, cutting benefits and making it hard for them to live. This is a truthful argument which is consistent with progressive politics. But Democrats have been afraid to say it because our side doesn’t want to offend the rich. Well, it’s too late now, they have joined MAGA, there is no longer any reason to hold back.
(3) In blue states, ban social media bots that engage in fraud. Bots are a major tool, perhaps the most effective tool, to push extremist lies. Nobody knows how many there are, but probably hundreds of millions. Nobody knows who controls various groups of bots, but Russia controls a lot of them. Bots on social media are impersonations, they constitute fraud. State Attorneys General should launch investigations and lawsuits against this fraud in order to protect our nation and our world. (It is “fraud” because social media giants are enriching themselves by allowing bots to pretend they are an advertising audience.) If Attorneys General require new legislation to help them make this case, such legislation should be enacted.
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