IdeaLog
Lessons of the 2024 election, part two
Posted on January 9, 2025
If we don’t understand the November election defeat, then we can’t know what to fix. Yet, our side does not understand. The Democrats’ two month blamefest has focused almost entirely on messaging. But the main problem is our deficiency in communications systems.
(Part one explained that average Americans are living paycheck-to-paycheck and, when we are actually reaching these voters, we need a sharper economic message. This column explains that we failed to communicate with too many swing voters. A future part three will suggest what progressives and Democrats can do about these problems.)
The biggest factor in Harris’ 2024 election defeat was that anti-Democratic entities, both domestic and foreign, successfully used disinformation – intentional blatant lies – to persuade some Democrats and new voters to support Trump and other typically Democratic voters to stay home. Harris, and the center-left generally, never got their messages through to this small percentage of Americans, in large part because they now receive political ideas primarily or exclusively from social media.
Why is it mostly a problem of communications systems rather than messaging?
First, while an overwhelming percentage of counties moved to the right, as we have all seen on maps like this, look more closely at Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, where a swing of only 120,000 well-placed voters would have won the election for Harris. (Similarly, if just 3,732 people in the three closest congressional contests had voted for the Democratic candidate rather than the Republican, Democrats would now control the House of Representatives.) In heavily contested states and districts, there was extremely little county-by-county movement to the right compared to non-targeted places like much of New York, New Jersey, Florida, California and Texas.
The Harris campaign, in fact, did a pretty effective job and the Trump campaign did a poor one in targeted states compared to the nationwide movement of voters to the right. So, what lost the election is that Harris (and other key Democrats), by small margins, simply couldn’t overcome the nationwide conservative shift. To be clear, it was this national shift, not the Trump campaign, which won the election for Trump.
Second, it is absurd to analyze the 2024 U.S. election without considering what’s going on worldwide. Virtually all western democracies have experienced a similar shift of voters to the right. The current support for extremist right-wing parties is unprecedented in Italy, France, Germany and Austria, to name just a few.
Obviously, this wave of right-wing support has nothing to do with anything Harris or Democrats said or failed to say. In addition, all of these other nations have socialist and other parties that are known for their sharp messages against the rich. Nobody has to vote for the far-right extremist in those countries if they are dissatisfied with the message or record of the center-left party or parties.
What the U.S. has in common with these countries is that they have all been subjected to organized and well-funded social media disinformation campaigns designed to (1) distort voters’ perception of reality in the service of extreme right-wing politics; (2) demonize and dehumanize comparatively small or weak minority groups and their allies; and (3) encourage contempt for democratic institutions, independent media, and the rule of law.
This worldwide right-wing campaign is not an accident; it’s a strategy directed and funded by extremist billionaires in concert with disinformation programs sponsored by Russia, China and other rogue nations. It is the extremist strategy that won the 2024 election. So, the election was not about issues, like “the border” or “crime” or “inflation,” although those were all used as excuses for right-wing lies. No matter the Democratic accomplishments, policy proposals and messaging, whatever the reality might be, both Trump and the disinformation campaign simply responded with an “alternate reality,” with lies.
It’s not that Democratic leaders haven’t admitted we have a communications problem. Nancy Pelosi said:
Republicans outdid us on the social media front…. For us in this next election…we have to leapfrog over them.
I am an 80-year-old man and can see clearly that we are barreling toward a nontraditional and decentralized media environment. Podcasts are the new print newspapers and magazines. Social platforms are a social conscience. And influencers are digital stewards of that conscience.
Based on the old school model, Kamala Harris ran a nearly flawless campaign. She raised tons of money and spent it about as effectively as anyone could with only three months to campaign. Nevertheless, the best her campaign could do on social media was buy three months of ads. The absence of a center-left social media strategy over the prior 3¾ years meant that her ads were virtually useless – the target audience had already been persuaded by right-wing propaganda.
Donald Trump, in contrast, was the worst presidential candidate ever and ran the worst campaign in American history. He made a stupid selection for Vice President, was completely trounced in his debate with Harris, he never stayed on message, and his grassroots effort was garbage. Trump won, despite his awful candidacy and campaign, because key slices of potential Democratic voters had already been brainwashed to support Republicans or sit out the election. In other words, this wasn’t ever an election of left versus right, it was a contest of truth versus lies – and the lies won.
Even now, there are three types of voters who Harris and Democrats lost but could be won back if we communicate with them:
(a) “Never-Trumper” Republicans, including Independents who usually vote Republican – Americans who have enough education and critical thinking skills to reject a terrible candidate, as they rejected Mark Robinson in North Carolina, Herschel Walker in Georgia, and Kari Lake (twice) in Arizona. But almost none of them voted against Trump in 2024.
(b) A small percentage of voters who normally vote for Democrats, but now get their “news” from social media, switched to Trump, most alarmingly including too many Black and Latino men.
(c) A small percentage of regular Democrats who turned out to vote in 2020 simply didn’t vote in 2024. As noted above, this is much more of a phenomenon outside the seven 2024 target states. It is true that Democrats failed to turn out at 2020 levels in places like Philadelphia, but that failure wasn’t decisive. Trump would have won the target states even if they all had got out to vote.
The question for a future discussion is, what kind of communications systems do we have to build to reach these voters?