The key thing is that the majority of voters never heard anything Dems said because they are walled off by Fox and Sinclair - but they did hear from Musk’s $45M micro target ad blitz. We need to assess what message people heard before we decide they rejected it
Before he dropped out Biden gave a lot of speeches to working class groups who will benefit from his policies. The mainstream media almost never covered them but they the had the audacity to accuse Biden — and later Kamala — of being indifferent to those people and having nothing to offer them. The mainstream media did the same thing to Hillary. In other words they knowingly lied.
I would bet most people who follow politics closely have never heard that Hillary had proposed a serious, fully-funded, detailed, multi-billion dollar plan to revive coal communities or that both she and Bill visited coal communities in red states to talk about what they needed — even though there was no way she could win their states.
This is how the media treated a statement she made about not leaving behind the people who had worked so hard for years, risking their lives and health so the rest of us could have electricity. All we heard from the media was them mocking her for supposedly making a heartless statement about taking their jobs away:
“Hillary Clinton’s “coal gaffe” is a microcosm of her twisted treatment by the media
Political journalists and pundits are so wedded to their evidence-free framing that Democrats are a bunch of elitists who have no understanding of and don’t care about the working class. Another favorite frame is they love is Dems are like a bunch of squabbling kids, always in disarray. They cherry pick facts or even distort them rather than give up their preferred savvy narratives.
Waldman is right. but... while the candidates did not run on the issues the pundits think they ran on, it seems to me commentators on the left talked enough about them to scare away those leaning the other way. maybe that's because I listen to the wrong commentators. It is also the case that Trump and the commentators on the Right accused the Left of those things. And people tend to believe the lies they hear mosr often. One cannot watch a Trump rally and not be afraid for the nation that has such people in it.
Disenfranchisement might have played a role. And also those on the Left who thought they could refuse to vote for Biden because he disagreed with him on their pet issue w/o regard to the consequences of a Trump win,
One thing Harris should have done is counter the anti-trans ads by explaining to cost for surgery for prisoners is nothing compared to the tax breaks for oil companies or a multitude of other business. As for trans kids on sports, the number of kids in jr/sr high school playing vs roughly the number of trans kids….betting less than .25%. This was a huge mistake on her part, made no effort to counter the ads especially with so many in the last 2-3 weeks of the race. You just can’t let that kind of thing go. No different than when Kerry took all of August off instead of fighting back on the swift-boating. This is the kind of thing Dems almost always fail at. Too scared to took the bastards head on.
Re: “ I haven’t seen any evidence that this is true for the voters who were actually up for grabs in this election. The far more compelling explanation is simply that, just like voters in every country that had national elections this year, they essentially said “Ugh, inflation sucked" and voted for the opposition party. “
If this is true then it also means that a significant portion of voters are literally P-Zombies.
True but those voters in other countries were actually living with poor economies while Americans were/are living with the best economy in the world. Most US voters had no clue thet our economy has been ranked #1 in the world for two years running — the best job market in over 50 years, steady economic growth, and wages that have been growing faster than inflation for well over a year, with the biggest gains for the lowest incomes.
Our mainstream “liberal” media preferred to play Chicken Little by hyping inflation, wrongly predicted a recession was necessary to break inflation, all the while burying the good news about our economy, let alone giving Biden credit for it.
This is just one study that documented the how wildly unbalanced economic the coverage of our economy was. The media also buried the fact that people repeatedly told pollsters that their personal economic situations were good as was the economy of their local area but that the national economy was bad.
Media Obsession With Inflation Has Manufactured Discontent
Seen this movie before ... seeing it again. "Do it my way ..." say the factions. More useful simply to organize at whatever level is possible and contest, contest, contest.
Great post. When it comes to the real vs. imaginary Kamala campaign, perhaps some of the reason there was such a large gap between these two on messaging about issues like inflation is this: there is also a large gap between how Democratic Party candidates talk about the issues, and how the “liberal media” (for lack of a better term) discusses those same issues.
The GOP does not face a similar affliction. The Fox News cinematic universe exists to prop up Trump and the Republican Party, so conservative media’s messaging is in lockstep with Trump’s/the GOP’s. To them, there is no meaningful distinction between journalism and the political party.
Not so for the Democratic Party and the “liberal media.” Yes the liberal media shares some of the same values as the Democrats, but still feels this need to distance themselves to some extent from the Party because they still believe (perhaps naively) that journalism should be independent of political party or bias. Hence liberal journalists and media commentators making defenses of Democrats that the Democrats themselves are not making. As you note, Democratic politicians were not going around telling people that everything was just fine with inflation now, but it sure seemed like the “liberal media” was.
Dear Mr. Waldman, With all due respect, I disagree with your central points. The election was boycotted by the largest group of eligible voters. Those who did vote repudiated both the centrist and leftist positions within the Democratic Party due to white supremacy, christian nationalism, and misogyny having achieved levels of social acceptance unseen since the 1950's. This retro-attitude phenomenon was possible only because oligarchs and the majority of Republicans disseminated decades of disinformation attributed to the Supreme Court's disastrous Citizens United decision. Conservative think tanks and foundations came up with most of this deceitful material. Monopoly over who gets and keeps the money that facilitates political power is now firmly established. How to remove this dystopian reality is the true and authentic debate.
Wrong approach. Stop seeing the world as just the White House and Congress. Where you're really getting screwed is in the states.
Look at my News to Know post from yesterday. look at the map .. almost solid red! Look at the trends in state legislatures over the last few decades. In the 2010 election Democrats lost nearly 700 state legislative seats and with that control of more than 20 legislative chambers. Not only haven't they recovered, they actually lost ground in states.
State supreme court justices. Used to be overwhelmingly Democratic. Now about 6o - 4o republican. (You have to dig through pre-election posts for those stats.).
With these losses at the state level you ended up with gerrymandered districts at the state and national level. That's why you have the horrible state legislation were all stuck with.
But the first problem is, the Dems don't give a damn about their constituents unless they are big dollar donors. I wrote all of my elected Democratic office holders a detailed issue brief in January on landlord - tenant issues. Perfect campaign issue! Especially since about 50 percent of their constituents are renters. I have a high end skill set so my issue brief set up the whole issue for them perfectly.
Not a one of them bothered to acknowledge my letter let alone indicate they gave a damn about the issue.
And if they blow off someone like me (worked on the hill and as a lobbyist in DC) you can imagine how they treat everyone else.
But yet I was getting 6+ messages a day from Democrats all across the country begging for money.
They lost because they deserved to lose and they had have no one to blame but themselves. I voted solid blue but not because I thought that it mattered.
That's because all the Democrats ever talk about is "working families.". I'm a 70 year old single childless female and that phrase just infuriates me. It says that unless you are a working parent you don't exist to the Democratic party. So you basically shove all the single, childless, retired, and/or unemployed people to the other party. And they wonder why all the young make voters went to Trump???
When the dust settles I would like to know how many voters went Biden > Trump, how many Biden > no one, how many no one > Trump. Also how many potential new D voters such as college students, didn’t.
I hear a lamentation we didn't have a "primary" after Biden stepped aside. Those promoting this insist Gavin Newsom would have won that and the election. But the bickering and in fighting might well have split the party apart. And these folks tend to be the same ones who insist Bernie would have defeated Trump in 2016. Maybe so since misogyny seems to be rampant in this country.
People who think a primary would have united the Party must have born yesterday. Primaries can be very divisive, especially when the media’s preferred candidate loses as Bill Bradley did to Gore. Bernie running against Hillary badly divided the party and pushed many in the left to vote for Jill Stein in crucial states. I have never seen the Democratic Party more united than when Biden stepped aside for Harris.
This isn’t a proposal (and if anything is an indicator of how disturbing my mind can get), but I wonder how the Democrats would perform if they tried to do kayfabe bigotry. Think how conservatives insist on verbally proclaiming themselves Christian while promoting the antithesis of their alleged values. I think that if Democrats did an exaggerated verbal performance of bigotry in all its forms (not enough to deport illegal immigrants, they should be beaten to near death on camera, not enough to exclude trans people, they should be put into concentration camps, etc) while keeping their other policies (tax the rich, affordable healthcare, gun control), they theoretically would be able to convey their policies while also giving voters the same dopamine hit that comes from the Trump campaign. The kayfabe part comes from when they’re actually in power, where they don’t use the power of the government to punch down on people and rather use it to put forth the aforementioned other policies. If asked why they didn’t do those things, they can blame it on Republicans, or something else, but if you elect them again, they’ll be able to give those parasites what they deserve! I am aware that as a cis straight white guy, this strategy won’t affect me as much as others. However, I do genuinely believe that it’s not enough to offer better policies, but voters are also looking for something to despise, loathe, etc. Much of the articles I’m reading in the Atlantic and NY times seem to imply that there’s a lot of hate for elites, and Trump’s win was a fuck you to them. Democrats need to offer something voters can direct their vitriol to, rather than appealing to their better angels.
The key thing is that the majority of voters never heard anything Dems said because they are walled off by Fox and Sinclair - but they did hear from Musk’s $45M micro target ad blitz. We need to assess what message people heard before we decide they rejected it
Before he dropped out Biden gave a lot of speeches to working class groups who will benefit from his policies. The mainstream media almost never covered them but they the had the audacity to accuse Biden — and later Kamala — of being indifferent to those people and having nothing to offer them. The mainstream media did the same thing to Hillary. In other words they knowingly lied.
I would bet most people who follow politics closely have never heard that Hillary had proposed a serious, fully-funded, detailed, multi-billion dollar plan to revive coal communities or that both she and Bill visited coal communities in red states to talk about what they needed — even though there was no way she could win their states.
This is how the media treated a statement she made about not leaving behind the people who had worked so hard for years, risking their lives and health so the rest of us could have electricity. All we heard from the media was them mocking her for supposedly making a heartless statement about taking their jobs away:
“Hillary Clinton’s “coal gaffe” is a microcosm of her twisted treatment by the media
She navigated a hall of mirrors.”
https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/9/15/16306158/hillary-clinton-hall-of-mirrors
Political journalists and pundits are so wedded to their evidence-free framing that Democrats are a bunch of elitists who have no understanding of and don’t care about the working class. Another favorite frame is they love is Dems are like a bunch of squabbling kids, always in disarray. They cherry pick facts or even distort them rather than give up their preferred savvy narratives.
Waldman is right. but... while the candidates did not run on the issues the pundits think they ran on, it seems to me commentators on the left talked enough about them to scare away those leaning the other way. maybe that's because I listen to the wrong commentators. It is also the case that Trump and the commentators on the Right accused the Left of those things. And people tend to believe the lies they hear mosr often. One cannot watch a Trump rally and not be afraid for the nation that has such people in it.
Disenfranchisement might have played a role. And also those on the Left who thought they could refuse to vote for Biden because he disagreed with him on their pet issue w/o regard to the consequences of a Trump win,
One thing Harris should have done is counter the anti-trans ads by explaining to cost for surgery for prisoners is nothing compared to the tax breaks for oil companies or a multitude of other business. As for trans kids on sports, the number of kids in jr/sr high school playing vs roughly the number of trans kids….betting less than .25%. This was a huge mistake on her part, made no effort to counter the ads especially with so many in the last 2-3 weeks of the race. You just can’t let that kind of thing go. No different than when Kerry took all of August off instead of fighting back on the swift-boating. This is the kind of thing Dems almost always fail at. Too scared to took the bastards head on.
Re: “ I haven’t seen any evidence that this is true for the voters who were actually up for grabs in this election. The far more compelling explanation is simply that, just like voters in every country that had national elections this year, they essentially said “Ugh, inflation sucked" and voted for the opposition party. “
If this is true then it also means that a significant portion of voters are literally P-Zombies.
True but those voters in other countries were actually living with poor economies while Americans were/are living with the best economy in the world. Most US voters had no clue thet our economy has been ranked #1 in the world for two years running — the best job market in over 50 years, steady economic growth, and wages that have been growing faster than inflation for well over a year, with the biggest gains for the lowest incomes.
Our mainstream “liberal” media preferred to play Chicken Little by hyping inflation, wrongly predicted a recession was necessary to break inflation, all the while burying the good news about our economy, let alone giving Biden credit for it.
This is just one study that documented the how wildly unbalanced economic the coverage of our economy was. The media also buried the fact that people repeatedly told pollsters that their personal economic situations were good as was the economy of their local area but that the national economy was bad.
Media Obsession With Inflation Has Manufactured Discontent
https://fair.org/home/media-obsession-with-inflation-has-manufactured-discontent/
Seen this movie before ... seeing it again. "Do it my way ..." say the factions. More useful simply to organize at whatever level is possible and contest, contest, contest.
Great post. When it comes to the real vs. imaginary Kamala campaign, perhaps some of the reason there was such a large gap between these two on messaging about issues like inflation is this: there is also a large gap between how Democratic Party candidates talk about the issues, and how the “liberal media” (for lack of a better term) discusses those same issues.
The GOP does not face a similar affliction. The Fox News cinematic universe exists to prop up Trump and the Republican Party, so conservative media’s messaging is in lockstep with Trump’s/the GOP’s. To them, there is no meaningful distinction between journalism and the political party.
Not so for the Democratic Party and the “liberal media.” Yes the liberal media shares some of the same values as the Democrats, but still feels this need to distance themselves to some extent from the Party because they still believe (perhaps naively) that journalism should be independent of political party or bias. Hence liberal journalists and media commentators making defenses of Democrats that the Democrats themselves are not making. As you note, Democratic politicians were not going around telling people that everything was just fine with inflation now, but it sure seemed like the “liberal media” was.
Dear Mr. Waldman, With all due respect, I disagree with your central points. The election was boycotted by the largest group of eligible voters. Those who did vote repudiated both the centrist and leftist positions within the Democratic Party due to white supremacy, christian nationalism, and misogyny having achieved levels of social acceptance unseen since the 1950's. This retro-attitude phenomenon was possible only because oligarchs and the majority of Republicans disseminated decades of disinformation attributed to the Supreme Court's disastrous Citizens United decision. Conservative think tanks and foundations came up with most of this deceitful material. Monopoly over who gets and keeps the money that facilitates political power is now firmly established. How to remove this dystopian reality is the true and authentic debate.
Wrong approach. Stop seeing the world as just the White House and Congress. Where you're really getting screwed is in the states.
Look at my News to Know post from yesterday. look at the map .. almost solid red! Look at the trends in state legislatures over the last few decades. In the 2010 election Democrats lost nearly 700 state legislative seats and with that control of more than 20 legislative chambers. Not only haven't they recovered, they actually lost ground in states.
State supreme court justices. Used to be overwhelmingly Democratic. Now about 6o - 4o republican. (You have to dig through pre-election posts for those stats.).
With these losses at the state level you ended up with gerrymandered districts at the state and national level. That's why you have the horrible state legislation were all stuck with.
But the first problem is, the Dems don't give a damn about their constituents unless they are big dollar donors. I wrote all of my elected Democratic office holders a detailed issue brief in January on landlord - tenant issues. Perfect campaign issue! Especially since about 50 percent of their constituents are renters. I have a high end skill set so my issue brief set up the whole issue for them perfectly.
Not a one of them bothered to acknowledge my letter let alone indicate they gave a damn about the issue.
And if they blow off someone like me (worked on the hill and as a lobbyist in DC) you can imagine how they treat everyone else.
But yet I was getting 6+ messages a day from Democrats all across the country begging for money.
They lost because they deserved to lose and they had have no one to blame but themselves. I voted solid blue but not because I thought that it mattered.
The 15 point swing from Biden to TFG amongst young white males.
THAT needs to be disseminated.
I personally think it’s the outrageous cost of rent and unaffordable housing prices.
That's because all the Democrats ever talk about is "working families.". I'm a 70 year old single childless female and that phrase just infuriates me. It says that unless you are a working parent you don't exist to the Democratic party. So you basically shove all the single, childless, retired, and/or unemployed people to the other party. And they wonder why all the young make voters went to Trump???
Hear, Hear!
When the dust settles I would like to know how many voters went Biden > Trump, how many Biden > no one, how many no one > Trump. Also how many potential new D voters such as college students, didn’t.
I hear a lamentation we didn't have a "primary" after Biden stepped aside. Those promoting this insist Gavin Newsom would have won that and the election. But the bickering and in fighting might well have split the party apart. And these folks tend to be the same ones who insist Bernie would have defeated Trump in 2016. Maybe so since misogyny seems to be rampant in this country.
People who think a primary would have united the Party must have born yesterday. Primaries can be very divisive, especially when the media’s preferred candidate loses as Bill Bradley did to Gore. Bernie running against Hillary badly divided the party and pushed many in the left to vote for Jill Stein in crucial states. I have never seen the Democratic Party more united than when Biden stepped aside for Harris.
This isn’t a proposal (and if anything is an indicator of how disturbing my mind can get), but I wonder how the Democrats would perform if they tried to do kayfabe bigotry. Think how conservatives insist on verbally proclaiming themselves Christian while promoting the antithesis of their alleged values. I think that if Democrats did an exaggerated verbal performance of bigotry in all its forms (not enough to deport illegal immigrants, they should be beaten to near death on camera, not enough to exclude trans people, they should be put into concentration camps, etc) while keeping their other policies (tax the rich, affordable healthcare, gun control), they theoretically would be able to convey their policies while also giving voters the same dopamine hit that comes from the Trump campaign. The kayfabe part comes from when they’re actually in power, where they don’t use the power of the government to punch down on people and rather use it to put forth the aforementioned other policies. If asked why they didn’t do those things, they can blame it on Republicans, or something else, but if you elect them again, they’ll be able to give those parasites what they deserve! I am aware that as a cis straight white guy, this strategy won’t affect me as much as others. However, I do genuinely believe that it’s not enough to offer better policies, but voters are also looking for something to despise, loathe, etc. Much of the articles I’m reading in the Atlantic and NY times seem to imply that there’s a lot of hate for elites, and Trump’s win was a fuck you to them. Democrats need to offer something voters can direct their vitriol to, rather than appealing to their better angels.