Even as Election Day recedes in the rear view mirror, I continue to survey the wreckage.
There is not just one reason Kamala Harris lost the election. But some things mattered more than others. Much more.
In particular, Kamala Harris — and the Democrats in general — did not lose the election because of mistakes her campaign made (too conservative or too progressive; I’ve heard both). And it was not because of inflation, illegal immigrants, racism, misogyny, Gaza, elitism, identity politics or any of the other usual suspects. I am sure some of them contributed to her loss. But they were not determinative causes.
In fact, all of those potential causes are largely irrelevant. They should not have mattered — because Trump should never have had even the slightest chance of winning in the first place. In a sane world, he would have never even gotten the nomination.
Harris lost because of the huge numbers of people who were willing to overlook Trump’s obviously disqualifying attributes — and vote for him anyway. People decided they were okay with voting for a convicted criminal, a rapist, a fraud, a con man, an inveterate liar — and someone guilty of attempting to overthrow an election leading to a violent insurrection — and all the rest (as I’ve detailed in previous columns, starting with this one). Under any other circumstances in American history, Trump’s baggage would have been way more than enough to end his political career — in an instant. Period. But not this time. This time he had the full backing of the GOP and went on to win the Presidency. The key question then becomes WHY? Why were so many voters willing to give Trump a pass he did not deserve?
Back in July, many people said they couldn’t support Biden, even though they voted for him four years ago and generally liked him, because of his obvious and serious mental decline. Ultimately, that’s what led to his withdrawal. Trump should have faced a similar reckoning — in spades — due to his moral, ethical and legal failings. Even people who supported him at one point should have said the bar is now too high for them to get over it. But they didn’t. Again, the question is WHY?
One key answer, as detailed in a The New Republic article, is the dominance of right-wing media:
“Today, the right-wing media sets the news agenda in this country.”
“I think a lot of people who don’t watch Fox or listen to Sinclair radio don’t understand this crucial chicken-and-egg point. They assume that Trump says something and the right-wing media amplify it. That happens sometimes. But more often, it’s the other way around. These memes start in the media sphere, then they become part of the Trump agenda.”
“To much of America, by the way, this is not understood as one side’s view of things. It’s simply ‘the news.’ This is what people—white people, chiefly—watch in about two-thirds of the country.”
On Fox News and other right-wing outlets, viewers never heard about the extent of or legitimate basis for Trump’s legal problems. When told, for example, that Trump had been held liable for sexual assault, a common reaction among his supporters was to express disbelief: “That can’t be true.” At best, viewers were told a lie: that Trump’s legal problems were all the result of Democratic “lawfare” — the Biden administration and a weaponized Justice Department targeting Trump. Trump was portrayed as the victim rather than the culprit. When that is the only story you hear on the “news” — not just from partisan ads, but from what you likely view as unbiased reporting — you not surprisingly come to believe it. So you wind up giving Trump a pass.
[A related effort was a $45 million disinformation ad campaign created by political advisers to Tesla founder Elon Musk, designed to suppress votes for Harris. Once again, to the extent this was successful (and it seemed to be, as the Democratic vote was down several million from what it was in 2020), the success was based on falsehoods that came to be believed.]
Here’s one other recent example: As reported by NPR, the right-wing media successfully convinced millions of Americans that FEMA (and thus indirectly Harris and Biden) was failing in their effort to help victims of Hurricane Helene. It was all a lie. But it worked.
“Rumors, misinformation and lies about the federal government’s response to Hurricane Helene in the southeastern United States have run rampant since the storm made landfall, especially around funding for the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
The claims have become so widespread that FEMA set up a response page to debunk many falsehoods around how disaster funding works and what the agency’s response has been.”
So how do we break the stranglehold right-wing media have on the news and the people who consume it? How do we stop the massive spread of lies? I honestly don’t know; but people are working on it. If we can’t come up with an answer, Democrats’ efforts to regain power is likely doomed to fail — no matter what else they do. Many Democrats are hoping to capitalize on an expected backlash to Trump’s policies — as the policies inevitably fail to produce the promised results. Maybe that will happen. But it seems more likely that a backlash, if one even occurs, will not lead to defections from Trump supporters. Instead, Fox News and related media will claim that any troubling news is all due to Democrats and their efforts to block what Trump is trying to do. Or something like that. It will be a lie. But people will believe it. Because the right-wing media control the narrative in politics today. And MAGA will succeed in the midterms — just as they did this past election. And this will continue to repeat — unless and until we find a counter to the right-wing media dominance. I am not holding my breath.
Update: November 21: It turns out that that giving a pass to Trump’s past behavior may be the lesser of two mistakes voters made this election. The greater error was underestimating — or outright dismissing — the future harm he is now posed to wreak. It’s already begun — with Trump’s cabinet nominations. And the consequences, as outlined by Timothy Snyder (author of On Tyranny), are likely to be devastating. Here’s a quote:
“Taken together, Trump’s candidates {for cabinet positions etc.} constitute an attempt to wreck the American government…It is a mistake to think of these people as flawed. It is not they will do a bad job in their assigned posts. It is that they will do a good job using those assigned posts to destroy our country…And citizens, regardless of how they voted, need now to check their attitudes. This is no longer a post-electoral moment. It is a pre-catastrophic moment.”
It is not the disinformation in the news, it is that people believed it. Harris’ focus on women and gay rights issues conveyed the message that she prioritized them over the economy, immigration, etc. And the Harris/Biden messages on those two subjects bordered on untrue and, at the least, spoke down to voters. While the Stock Market was doing great, and Harris spoke about increase in the value of your IRA, she never addressed effectively why the price of milk, eggs, gas and butter is 20-40% higher and what she might do about it. I understand that less than 30% of workers are in unions so bragging about the rich contract the union machinists at Boeing negotiated is not just neutral to the regular working man or woman, it is offensive. Harris spent hours talking about building housing for the homeless but not about where the money would come from or how Jack and Jill would be able to pay their mortgage. “Raising taxes on the rich” does not do the trick; everyone knows that tax changes have to come from Congress, which the Dems lost. And Biden and Harris never made a serious effort to close the border, and the things he tried by Executive Order were rejected as unconstitutional by conservative judges in the Fifth Circuit where he had little chance of success. And spending so much political capital trying to reduce student debt when even a liberal like me knew that was probably not constitutional – a plan that favored the geeks that Trump was attacking – was nonsense. Any politico should have known that was ultimately a program that would backfire when he and Harris bragged about saving hundreds of millions of dollars for a relatively few voters, especially when it did not exclude wealthy borrowers. When Harris said there was nothing Biden had done that she would have done differently, she bought his 35% approval rating. Get real and focus on the fact that like it or not, the current Democratic Party positions on many social issues are too far out to be accepted by mainstream voters.
Thanks for your response. While I don’t agree with everything you said, it’s not worth arguing. My point remains the same. It is that nothing you described should have mattered in the end — because we were dealing with a candidate (Trump) who was entirely unqualified and unfit to be President and never should have been considered as a possibility in the first place. And voters were largely blocked from seeing this because of disinformation and the dominance of right-wing media — which allowed Trump to be viewed as a “normal” Republican where issues such as the price of groceries could be viewed as a basis for deciding one’s vote.
I don’t think Douglas Thorpe even read your article … he’s just spewing canned talking points that have little to do with reality.