November 20, 2024 | Reading Time: 4 minutes
Until there’s a liberal media apparatus, the Democrats will live in Trump’s America
Kamala Harris did not lose the election because of things she said. She lost because of things Donald Trump said she said.
It takes time for things to stick properly, so please bear with me while I say again that Kamala Harris did not lose the election because of things she said. She lost because of things Donald Trump said she said.
So Democratic Party critics are basing their criticism not on what Harris said but on what Trump said she said, as they are accepting as true the allegations of the president-elect against the vice president.
By focusing on things that Trump said she said, rather than on things she said, critics are missing the lesson from the 2024 election – that her policies were not the determining factor in her defeat. The determining factor was the ear-splitting volume of the accusations against Harris and the absence of equal and opposite accusations against him.
In the final weeks of the election, the Trump campaign spent more than $29 million on television ads attacking Harris on transgender rights. It was “by far, the biggest focal point when it comes to Trump’s ad spending — one of the best barometers of messaging priority there is,” wrote The Bulwark’s Marc Caputo on October 24. “By contrast, the campaign has spent $5 million over that same time period on TV ads on the economy, making that topic their fifth-most emphasized.”
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According to a new study by a Democratic pollster, Trump’s attack ads largely explain the outcome of the election. The report calculated the percentage of swing voters who voted for Trump in the belief that Harris supported federal funding of transgender surgeries on undocumented immigrants. It was a whopping 83 percent.
“These voters — who remained open to persuasion until the very end — delivered not just a rejection of Harris but what they believed the Democratic Party stands for, absorbing rightwing narratives.”
Harris didn’t lose because of things she said.
She lost because of things Trump said she said.
Critics of the Democratic Party will point out that, well, ackshually, Harris did say she supported access to gender transition care for undocumented immigrants. But that was once, in 2019, during her first run, and it wasn’t a campaign pledge. She wasn’t running on it. She gave an affirmative answer to an ACLU questionnaire. This year, her campaign explicitly rejected the questionnaire as having any bearing on her platform as the 2024 nominee. Indeed, she did what critics say she should do. She backed away from lefty woke things like trans rights.
And it didn’t matter.
It didn’t matter because what she said, the substance of her message, wasn’t as important to the outcome of the election as the volume of it, which is to say, the substance of what she said was too quiet compared to the bullhorn-din of the rightwing media apparatus. As media expert Matthew Sheffield said today, nothing was going to get through that, not even the shared reality of the economy. “Through seven TV channels, more than 1,500 talk-radio stations, and millions of social media posts. Republicans sold a fictional narrative about the economy to unsuspecting Americans. Trump inherited a strong economy from Obama and then destroyed it. Democrats never told the story.”
They couldn’t. No one was listening, because no one could hear it. Trump’s attack ads worked in tandem with thousands of media sites, including the one formerly known as Twitter, that have been operating around the clock since 2020, often in parallel with the Washington press corps. They were able to take one small thing Harris said years ago and turn it into a caricature so ridiculous that a convicted felon like Donald Trump could look like a viable candidate by comparison.
It was so loud some voters didn’t know what the Democrats stand for.
And that includes some Democratic voters.
Harris won more votes than Trump did in 2020 (she now has 74.3 million to his 74.2), but she did not win as many as Joe Biden in 2020. (He won 81.3 million votes, the most ever, while Trump won 76.8 million this year, the second-most ever.) Where did seven million voters go?
You could say voter suppression laws, but I think a bigger source of “voter suppression” was lies and propaganda, directly or indirectly from rightwing media, or from anti-trans TV ads, or in the form of “false-flag efforts” funded by billionaires, including Twitter’s Elon Musk, to make Democratic voters in swing states feel like there’s no point in voting for Harris. Her margin of defeat across those states was a few hundred thousand votes. “The entire goal of the campaign was to push her numbers down,” a top Trump adviser told the Post. Clearly, it worked.
The volume of the rightwing media apparatus, especially when it’s in sync with the Washington press corps, is so loud that it can feel like the ultimate arbiter of our political reality. As one CNN anchor put it this morning, this is Donald Trump’s America. We’re just living in it. Until there’s a liberal media apparatus, one that can meet bad info with good info, the Democrats will continue living in Donald Trump’s America.
Coda
After posting, I came across this piece by John Avlon, a journalist who ran for Congress in Long Island. In it, he describes the power of the rightwing media apparatus and its impact on his campaign. (He lost.) Sadly, he does not center information warfare in his diagnosis on what went wrong for him and Kamala Harris. He retreads old views about the need to regain trust on partisanship and economic issues.
I was struck by the prevalence of misinformation but also the relentlessness of the right-wing media ecosystem. There was willful amnesia over Trump’s botched COVID response, dismissal of election denialism and the January 6th attack, a demonization of Ukraine aid, and outright hostility to facts about America’s economic recovery and the re-shoring of essential manufacturing under Biden.
The network of influencers and social media accounts, compounded by what remains of right-wing talk radio and cable news, would drive a message that was repeated loudly by true believers in ways that reached the ears of less politically-active voters. This prevalence overwhelmed the influence of less partisan legacy media, which proved susceptible to getting pulled toward a fake fairness out of concern over seeming biased.
John Stoehr is the editor of the Editorial Board. He writes the daily edition. Find him @johnastoehr.
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