As I keyboard this the Senate race in Pennsylvania between Dem. Bob Casey and Rep. Dave McCormick is still too close to call. But it probably will be called by the end of the day. Control of the House is not yet called, but the Republicans are a lot closer to the finish line than the Dems.
Trying to access Will Bunch’s column at the Philadelphia Inquirer without a subscription is getting trickier, but I found a gift link to his most recent column on Threads. Try it if you hit the paywall. Highly recommended reading — 2024’s other big loser? The mainstream media. Is there any path forward? I’m starting in the middle here, after a description of how the old traditional news media are struggling to stay afloat financially these days.
And while newsroom leaders were getting a lesson (or, in many cases, not getting it) that balanced-but-bloodless journalism that equalized “both sides” would eventually drive both sides away, it’s also fair to ask whether this head-on crash between journalism and increasingly tribal ideologies even mattered that much in the end. The perfect-storm fluke of mid-20th-century media monopolies that the late David Halberstam famously described as The Powers That Be have been zapped by the electrons of the internet, creating other ways for folks to speak to each other on social media or read targeted websites that appealed to their niche interests and ideas or their prejudices.
But especially their prejudices. …
… The things that pundits have been talking about since Tuesday — an economy that hasn’t worked for the working class since the time of Ronald Reagan, anxieties among white voters about a potential end to white privilege and the patriarchy, and a Democratic Party that’s lost touch with the great American middle — all factored into this election. But nothing mattered more than this: Donald Trump was returned to power by the most badly informed electorate in modern American history.
Ultimately, it may not have mattered how brilliant Kamala Harris’s campaign was or how well crafted her proposals. Most voters saw little to none of it. They were stuck in a right-wing media bubble or getting information from other ignorant people on social media. And they have absolutely no idea what they’ve just done.
I honestly don’t think the current Democratic party has lost touch with the American middle class, btw. The party worked hard to address middle-class issues. It’s Trump and his minions who don’t give a hoo haw about the American middle class or what it’s like to be a middle class American.
The problem with most Americans only hearing the right-wing side of political discourse has been going on for many years. I remember despairing about it during the George W. Bush years, and it was an old problem even then. I like what Bunch says about “balanced-but-bloodless journalism that equalized ‘both sides.'” A lot of this goes back to Spiro Agnew’s attacks on news media being biased toward liberals that went on to become gospel on the American Right. The news media establishment responded to the criticism by sacrificing accurate reporting in order to avoid the appearance of favoritism to liberals.
Paul Krugman addressed this in a column he wrote more than 24 years ago that’s worth reading again now. In Reckonongs, Bait and Switch, he described some blatant lies being told by George W. Bush in 2000 as he campaigned against Al Gore.
How has he gotten away with it? One answer is that voters can’t relate to big numbers. But it’s also true that the media haven’t helped them make sense of these numbers.
Partly this is a matter of marketing — insider gossip makes better TV than budget arithmetic. But there has also been a political aspect: the mainstream media are fanatically determined to seem evenhanded. One of the great jokes of American politics is the insistence by conservatives that the media have a liberal bias. The truth is that reporters have failed to call Mr. Bush to account on even the most outrageous misstatements, presumably for fear that they might be accused of partisanship. If a presidential candidate were to declare that the earth is flat, you would be sure to see a news analysis under the headline ”Shape of the Planet: Both Sides Have a Point.” After all, the earth isn’t perfectly spherical.
Mainstream media refused to change course and became mostly useless as a means ot informing the public about political candidates. And now that the pre-Nixon press has retired or expired, everyone working in news media today has been well trained to produce artifically “balanced” but bloodness reporting. And here we are.
Democrats must stop assuming that they can get their message to the people through mainstream media. That hasn’t been true for a very long time. I remember I used to complain that President Obama was making that same mistake, assuming media would accurately explain what his administration was doing and why it was doing it. It did not. He was lucky that Mitt Romney was a less ruthless candidate than Trump, or Obama wouldn’t have been re-elected.
I believe I linked to this before, but it fits here too — at Talking Points Memo, Kate Riga says that the Dems really must develop their own media to talk to the people. “Democrats need well-produced, well-funded, compelling content that can go punch for punch with the Rogans and the Theo Vons.” she said.
See also Reckonings of Contempt by Josh Marshall. And the Associated Press called Pennsylvania for McCormick.
The media was absolutely dominated for so long with a torrent of negative news and opinion about Donald Trump how could you possible ask for more?! People were so exhausted from it 20 million of them didn't even show u to the polls.
It's very important that we take a moment to evaluate how much of the fear we've been instilled with is grounded in reality. There are very real dangers, yes, but there is a certain percentage of the programming we're receiving, which is being amplified for the sole political advantage/purpose of the Democratic Party.
Trump is the political equivalent of Chinese finger cuffs. We should have realized long ago that to defeat him, we have to stop poking our fingers and let him hang himself. Stop feeding the hungry ghost before it really is too late.
Yet Trump was able to explain it away as just a witch hunt. I suspect most voters are utterly ignorant of the mountain of evidence against him. He's guilty as all get out, but now he'll never stand trial for the federal charges. Likewise, most voters have no clue how well the Biden administration really did manage the economy to bring down inflation without causing a recesssion. The U.S. really does have the strongest economy on the globe right now. Most people don't seem to understand that the inflation they complain about is a global phenomenon, not something that just happened in the U.S. And most people don't know that a big reason egg prices keep fluctuating is that a bird flu keeps infecting the chickens. Most people don't know that under the Biden Administration the U.S. has become the world's top producer of crude oil, surpassing Saudi Arabia and Russia. According to Trump lore, Biden shut down drilling; the opposite is true. And did you know that Kamala Harris was never a "border czar"? Her tasks regarding immigration had nothing to do with border security. Biden dispatched Harris on a diplomatic mission to work with Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras to reduce the reasons people were fleeing those countries, and I understand she had some success. Most voters probably don't realize that Trump clearly has no idea what a tariff is. Tariffs are not paid by the countries of origin but by importers, and the costs are passed on to consumers. And if he does impose the tariffs he wants to impose, inflation will come back with a vengeance. And the mass deportations of migrants are going to cause food shortages and cause grocery prices to spike. Did YOU know any of that, btw?
Please do read the Will Bunch column, btw. He makes the case of how ignorant voters were very well. And the point isn't just that mainstream media is lame, which it has been for a very long time. The point is that it has rendered itself nearly useless. People have gone elsewhere for information. Unfortunately, most of that information is wrong.
Go away troll; the way to deal with Trump is to convict him for his crimes, but Republicans are too chickenshit to tell the truth.
I am not a troll. The time to prosecute and convict Trump for his crimes has passed. They started years too late to finish the process before the Democratic process finished it.
The question is what do we do now.
I know all of that. You are going over very familiar territory. We are on the same side after all we both voted for Harris. Trump's voters know quite well we think they're ignorant. But what they are not ignorant of is who this strong economy is working for, and its not them.
The economy hasn't worked for working people since Reagan. The Democrats finally have been moving in a more progressive direction lately and have been moving toward leveling the playing field, so to speak. Now it's going to go backward again. Voters keep electing people who will hurt them financially.
I wrote a long-ass wonkish comment a few days ago which (almost) nobody read. Yes the mainstream media has failed in its constitutionally protected role to present objective truth. And that failure isn't the point in this election because the people who voted for Trump are getting their misinformation elsewhere. Reforming the media as a solution is a moot point. So is when the media went off the rails, how, and whether we'd be in a different place if the business motive of profit wasn't driving the news.
If we can't construct a media ecosystem that some Trump voters will listen to for the value of objective truth, I think we could wreck MAGA internally by infiltrating their ecosystem of lies and rumors with conspiracy theories that will put the factions of MAGA at each other's throats.
One example that almost nobody noticed: SNL had a parody which included a Musk character who declared (as Musk) "I run the country now." And Musk was NOT amused by the skit. SNL flicked Trump in a very sensitive place – that other people like Musk are going to run Trump for their benefit. (Not unlikely.) These people will eat each other alive with creative misinformation (fiction) properly introduced.
In the early hours of last Wednesday I was devastated. In the days following that I went through the stages of grief, not because I was heavily invested in the Harris/Walz ticket (which I was), but because of my fears of the consequences of the election disaster. And over the past 3 or 4 days I have been reading, and watching, and thinking.
The post-mortem analysis that has erupted is absolutely necessary, as we must learn from our losses and then get back up and get back into the fight. But the same post-mortem analysis can feel unsettling at times because it seems like we are doing the typical Democratic circular firing squad thing. We don't all see things the same way, and it can feel like a competition to highlight the ONE BIG THING that we did wrong. But I think there are many factors involved and most of them have been pointed out here in our "Politics-Society-Group Therapy" family. In order for all people of good will in the US to prevent our system from being Obanized (or Putinized) we are going to have to do a lot of work over the next two years, because there are global forces that present many complex and inter-connected challenges. And there are political trends among progressives just in our country that are complicated in ways that we need to break free from the past (including the most recent past) and find ways to establish political power of the good kind. We didn't have enough in this election cycle. By political power I don't mean institutional power, I mean large numbers of people aligning with us. Voters can give us the power to shape the actions of the institutions in support of the good goals that we have; or they can deny us that power.
It's going to take several long posts over several days to get everything that's in my head out. I'll start with the analysis I did first.
We lost the most important election of my lifetime. It was the most important not because of the stark difference in governing vision of our two major parties, but because of many world-wide conditions: climate change, massive financial inequality, the rise of terrorism (many types), the crumbling of the information system, the urban/rural dichotomy, a sociological war between science and religion, artificial intelligence, brutal wars in progress, the acceleration of the pace of life, and maybe more. The human race is swamped by very difficult problems.
That said, we lost this election. What happened? What happened where? Why did it happen? I started by looking at the results, and I didn't pay much attention to the electoral college because that was fully presented in the election coverage. On election night I had noticed something in the details that wasn't being talked about. In each state they talked about the percentages of the votes and the differential. They would show the vote totals, but when comparing to the 2020 election they focused on percentages. I noticed that the vote totals by county seemed smaller in this election than in 2020. Nobody was talking about that (that I saw).
So I looked at the nationwide vote counts (as of Nov 9).
2020: Trump 74.2 million, Biden 81.2 million.
2024: Trump 74.7 million, Harris 70.9 million.
Look at those numbers. Trump gained 500,000 votes. The Democratic ticket LOST 10.3 million votes.
Furthermore, in Florida alone, Trump gained 500,000 votes this year.
So, while I know that Trump may have lost some number of votes and picked up some other voters, I don't think it is useful to try to analyze that.
So, how did Trump basically hold onto his votes? And how did the Democrats lose 10 million votes?
My guess on the Trump side is this: The Dems needed to make the election a referendum on Trump instead of a referendum on Biden. The Harris-Trump debate was major victory in that regard. But somewhere between that debate and the election, I think the Repugs figured out that their best chance was to make it a referendum on gender. And I think they succeeded at that. I'm not going to get into all of the ins and outs of that in this post. They did succeed in that but they didn't increase their total vote count. They just managed to not lose any.
Then how did the Dems lost 1/8th of their 2020 votes? At least 10 million people who voted for Biden didn't vote for Harris. It's possible that 20 million people who voted for Biden didn't vote for Harris but she got 10 million new voters to vote for her. So it's kind of squishy, but at least 10 million Biden voters either stayed home or switched to Trump. Why?
It is my belief that we were doomed from the get-go. The information bubble problem made it impossible for Harris to peel off 2020 Trump voters, and the inflation problem made it impossible to pick up just 6 million votes more that would put her over the top. Educated people understand that Bidenomics has been a great success and that things take time to settle out. But for voters who aren't particularly savvy, who have their hands full putting food on the table and paying climbing rents, Bidenomics hasn't solved their problem. And on top of that everybody knows that for at least two decades our political/economic system works only for those at the top financially at the expense of everybody else… and what do you get? You get voters who are out of patience; they just vote their frustration, or they sit it out as their protest. They don't want to give encouragement to an "establishment" that hasn't yet delivered for them. Please take a look at the link below. Matt Dowd does a way better job of explaining it. In that video, slide the slider over to the 5 minute mark and watch the next 4 minutes. Some of you might disagree, but I think it's a sensible explanation of what happened. Also I'd not that the total margin for Trump in PA-MI-WI was 255 thousand votes. Aaaaargh! We need to dump the electoral college.
Nicolle Wallace: 'It's time to get to work'
I am still in shock. Your comment helped some. The Nicolle Wallace clip was excellent also. That led me somehow to Seth Meyers, who is also a rising star with a good team behind him.
Both of these media teams had solid messaging that obviously did not get to nearly enough voters. If it did get attention, it got there in mutated form, with the wrong effect. To Trump, there is no such thing as bad press. No press, to him is the only bad press. With a few lies, some victim play, some bad guy play, he and his cult can turn the attention in his favor.
That he was able to turn 1/6 from a mob event and a coup plot to a "love fest", and get air play of him stating so, should be example enough.
What keeps me in shock is that so many Americans were not able to see though to the fascist core of his actions. Germany and allies had to learn the hard way. The last century. some historians claim, would have been now known as the great German century. without fascism. A speculation for sure, but plausible it seems. It would seem we might learn from their mistakes, but this election outcome did not come from anything close to the best and the brightest. They were amazingly impotent in messaging. This one came from more the gut and spial chord gang. Fueled it seems by a large wave of castration anxiety.
On the day after Armistice Day renamed, let us not forget that WWI cause Sigmond Freud to add Thanatos to his hydraulic model of human behavior. Eros was not enough. Sex drive was not enough. It could not explain the utter stupidity and carnage of WWI. He added Thanatos and the death wish to explain why this horror happened. Are we in the age of Thanatos? Hate seemed to win over Joy and early signs are showing policy change in that direction.
We are told by these fascists that you send your child to school, and they come home a different sex. They don't even call and tell you they are doing it. We all heard this message. Especially they brain stem and gut crowd. The castration anxiety was rampant, and then fear of a vanishing pet to the immigrants was on the run also. What is left of the respectable and honest media too lame to calm the masses. The voters voted on the messages that got through.
People hear what fits easily with their way of thinking. In this age of Thanatos these messages seemed to have stuck. This is only a theory. It is not a theory I am particularly fond of. It does help give a structure to our present dilemma. The facts do appear to fit. We need something to hang our hats on, at least until something better comes along. Writers seem to like the Freudian framework.
Still, we have a president elect with a rampant id, no apparent super-ego and therefore defective ego development. I am not sure how much that charts a winning path forward. Much hard work yet to do.
"Democrats need well-produced, well-funded, compelling content that can go punch for punch with the Rogans and the Theo Vons"
This requires money. Money from billionaires. It seems any wealthy liberal has no interest in financing any media venture. Until there becomes a means to finance such a venture outside the need from billionaire money, all we have is Free Speech TV and limited radio time on Sirius.
Frederick wrote: "Trump is the political equivalent of Chinese finger cuffs. We should have realized long ago that to defeat him, we have to stop poking our fingers and let him hang himself. Stop feeding the hungry ghost before it really is too late."
I don't agree with most of his posts but I agree with that. I have been saying for years that Stumps super power is his ability to drive the media. If he's getting hammered over something or anther he just distracts them with something else crazy or most of the time the media spends so much time blabbering on about some he may do in the future when it happens there is hardly a wimper. Case in point his hush money felony convictions, for years every minute was spent analyzing every word, motion, filing that when the guilty verdicts came much of the country said meh? He gets so much press that most people just become numb. We are entering the same cycle again now cnn, msnbc, etc can't talk about anything except "how bad it is going to be" and how horrible his appointments will be. I agree it's going to get bad and his appointments will suck but why not fucking wait until his policies tank one segment of the economy or another or he gets into some foreign policy jam or one of his cabinet members screws up royally then report on it. It doesn't really mean anything to report on something that hasn't happened yet, it's like reporting on the next hurricane before it has even formed yet. We know it will be bad but we don't know where, when and how so why write about it? there is other news in the world. It seems like much of the media (outside of FAUX who are just straight up propaganda) is caught in this cycle. It's a cycle that Stump is always going to win, when things get bad well people have been hearing about it for months, years so what or it's not as bad as predicted, either way Stump wins that battle. I think Trump is going to fuck this country up and things are going to get far worse but why not wait until it actually happens to "report" on how bad it is. Our media needs to stop anesthetizing it's viewers with bad news that hasn't happened yet, let the pain begin while people are wide awake maybe then they will pay attention, maybe not?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFYLCj-hCsc&list=OLAK5uy_nRYHmzH9v6SZyoEFHswMeYp-np0x_dNaE&index=26
Jennifer Rubin cites this list of media sending out a stream of right-wing biased misinformation, or fascist leaning information or misinformation used for fascist right purposes and propaganda:
The article cites disinformation and misinformation zones found by post-election polling. I have posted about this before over and over. I must go out of my way to get unbiased information.
Here is a partial list of chronic misinformation:
Yes, we have a confused electorate and here are some of the villains. Many operate in the area I am in, and some have a monopoly (slightly masked monopoly in some cases) in many areas.
This blog is a rare window outside the bubble.
Going OT: WTF is up with Trump and Putin? I gather Putin was very slow offering congratulations to Trump. Moscow has generally received the news with approval but state-run media posted nude pics of Melania, a move not designed to curry favor with Trump.
More to the factual point, Michael Walz as National Security Advisor and (not confirmed) Rubio as Secretary of State are not Moscow-friendly picks. Reports are (WaPo) that Trump talked to Putin and asked him not to escalate the war in Ukraine. Trump and Musk talked to Zelinski and talked about at deal "that's good for both sides." I'm not sure what that means but posting nudes of a friend's wife is usually an indication of an argument.
I don't believe what anyone says here – I;m watching what the players are DOING. At the moment, I do not see signs that Trump is going to throw Ukraine or NATO under the bus. (I will watch carefully for indications of Rubio's stance with NATO. If Rubio says the US stands behind it's NATO obligations without qualification, it's with Trump's approval and it's a warning to Putin to go no further with military incursions. )
Trump is not steady or reliable – he can flip 180 degrees on a dime. But something is up. At the moment, it's good news for Ukraine and Europe.
"Moscow has generally received the news with approval but state-run media posted nude pics of Melania"
No links to the pics Doug:) I googled that and yes they ran her nudes in prime time! That's Putin saying: hey asshole just because you have conned the American public I still got the goods, the infamous "pee tapes" and much more so you'll do as I say regarding Ukraine. Putin definitely has goods on Trump he's got him by the balls (if he has any). The large scale invasion of Ukraine happened after Stump lost so now he either has to keep funding it or bring it to and end as Putin demands. Funding that war and forcing Stump to end it may one of the few big things Biden got right in the foreign policy world. I predict complete acquiescence to Putin from Trump. At a minimum Russia will keep every bit of land they have occupied and Zelenskyy will have to go, and Stump will say "whatever you want boss".
Everything that has come out of Trump's mouth since January 21, 2021 has been for the purpose of getting elected. Lies don't need to be true, promises don't need to be kept. The driver behind all of that was to avoid prison and financial judgements.
I don't really know, but now that he has managed to avoid prison, and given that he won't be able to have a third term, maybe all he cares about is having a good time pretending to be president and doing whatever he can to payback his perceived political enemies. Oh, and monetizing the Presidency. Makes it hard to figure out what he's doing and why he's doing it.
I wonder if Susie Wiles made a tough deal with him: I'll get you elected so you can stay out of jail, and you have to behave and have a nice old-school Republican presidency so we can get the old not-bat-shit-crazy R party back from your cult.
"I wonder if Susie Wiles made a tough deal with him"
Well based on some of his cabinet picks I don't think Stump is in on the deal. His homeland, secretary of defense picks are as bat-shit as crazy gets.
I've seen some say that the Dems didn't listen to the voters struggling to make ends meet as a result of inflation; while others say that the Harris campaign presented policy proposals to address the high cost of essentials but the voters weren't listening…("Why should I listen to politicians who haven't made prices go down?")
We could argue who's right and who's wrong, but what I see is a basic language problem. The Dems are the party of the educated. We understand that a) inflation is the rate of price increases, and when inflation goes down it doesn't mean that prices are going down, it just means they aren't rising so fast any more; b) that it takes time for the economy to adjust, where rising wages can catch up with higher prices, and c) for some things prices can come down but for other things higher prices are "sticky".
Ordinary working class people think "inflation" means "high prices", and that if the government says inflation is coming down it means that prices are coming down.
Talking and listening takes two to participate in good faith.
The post-covid inflation is the worst this country has seen since the 1974 – 1980 double dip that doomed Ford's and Carter's reelection bids. Back to the basic point: While it's always important to learn from losses so long as we can figure out real shortcomings to correct going forward, we need to be careful to make sure we don't lose the aspects of our party that are strengths going forward: Our values, our goals, our vision.
Hey man…your wife's hot…got any nude pictures of her. No! of course not. Well then…Would you like to buy some?
Old joke made new again.
Transactional is the word for the next four years. Sticky lives on, but it needs an opposite. What do you call the price of T.V. sets? It almost costs more to buy a wall mount than it does a new T.V. If you want installation, it will probably cost more.
Sorry about the long empty spaces on the end. I am not getting the usual edit screen when I submit for some reason. But I did this time. It may be caused by too many ending return characters.
I deleted the returns with my magic administrative powers.
Thanks
Matt Gaetz for AG, some FAUX booble-head for Defense Sec, Mike Huckabuck for ambassador to Israel (great let Israel find out what the evangelicals are all about), Tulsi Gabbard for DNI, The Snow Queen for Homeland, This is going to be a blast until it all comes crashing down horribly. I feel like I'm about to board a plane that is definitely going to crash.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CrtRucPEbsI
I learned a new word today.
Kakistocracy: Governance by the worst possible people.
Matt is the cherry on top.
"Donald Trump was returned to power by the most badly informed electorate in modern American history."
I'm sorry but this is wrong. I spend a lot of time racing in red states and his supporters know exactly who he is and they voted for him because of it. If they were better informed it would not have made a lick of difference and they weren't going to believe it anyway. It is a sad thing to have to admit about our country but 74 million Americans want an amoral, lying criminal as the avatar of our nation. It hurts but it's the truth.
Racing bubble bigot truth.