Why Democrats Lost the 2024 Presidential Election
It wasn't the price of eggs.
Rest and resist has been the phrase. I did my best to rest this week post-election, but I had to write this article for you. If you find this article helpful and want to counteract far-right propaganda, consider becoming a paid subscriber today.
I find most of the postmortem pontificating about why Democrats lost the presidential election unpersuasive.
There is the typical talk about messaging.
Democrats come across as liberal elites browbeating “middle (white) Americans” and telling them what to do instead of listening to their concerns.
Okay.
There is also all the racism and sexism at play.
But the most oft-cited reason I see for Democrats not getting the votes to win the presidency is prices.
Inflation, they say, made people feel left behind and left out of American prosperity. They wanted results they could feel in their wallets and bank accounts.
Nevermind that the U.S. has done better with inflation relative to other nations and the economy is booming by all accounts.
The economic argument for the Dems loss doesn’t go far enough.
The real issue is why people perceived the economy and a host of other issues the way they did.
The reason, not the only one but a major one, Democrats lost the presidential election is disinformation and misinformation super-charged by billionaires and Russia through a network of right-wing media outlets and institutions.
We often speak of echo chambers in today’s society—the nation’s people are separated into information silos.
This is not a benign reality, nor is it the same reality on the left and the right end of the political spectrum.
Each side has its biases, but one side tends to base opinions on data, facts, and reality and the other side eschews those basic building blocks of information in favor of propaganda and conspiracy.
Yes, each side is prone to their own factual distortions, but not all such errors lead voters to support Donald Trump and the constellation of lies, bigotry, and corruption that comes with his presidency.
I’m a historian so, of course, we’ve got to begin with the past.
The Rise Religious Right Media
In The Color of Compromise, I wrote about the Rise of the Religious Right. That wasn’t just an ideological expansion, it relied on massive mailing lists, churches spreading white Christian nationalism from their pulpits, and a growing collection of media outlets throughout the 1980s and 1990s.
These media outlets included radio shows and personalities such as Rush Limbaugh, and grew even more rapidly with the advent of Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News in 1996.
This combination of news outlets has only become more well-funded and extensive since then.
Russian Interference
The far-right in the U.S. had help…from Russia.
In January 2017, the Department of Justice released a report called "Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions.” It detailed Russian interference in the 2016 election, and officials said they had “high confidence” that Russia intervened by “discrediting Secretary Clinton.”
Russia also used social media in its efforts to influence the U.S. presidential election in 2016. The official report states they “paid social media users or ‘trolls’” to do their dirty work.
The Right Sets the News Agenda
A detailed article in The New Republic by editor, Michael Tomasky, explains why any policy disagreements between Republicans and Democrats must be understood in the context of the right-wing media machine.
Why didn’t a majority of voters see these things? And understanding the answer to that question is how we start to dig out of this tragic mess.
The answer is the right-wing media. Today, the right-wing media—Fox News (and the entire News Corp.), Newsmax, One America News Network, the Sinclair network of radio and TV stations and newspapers, iHeart Media (formerly Clear Channel), the Bott Radio Network (Christian radio), Elon Musk’s X, the huge podcasts like Joe Rogan’s, and much more—sets the news agenda in this country. And they fed their audiences a diet of slanted and distorted information that made it possible for Trump to win.
Tomasky went on to delineate what was different about right-wing media in the 2024 presidential election specifically.
This is the year in which it became obvious that the right-wing media has more power than the mainstream media. It’s not just that it’s bigger. It’s that it speaks with one voice, and that voice says Democrats and liberals are treasonous elitists who hate you, and Republicans and conservatives love God and country and are your last line of defense against your son coming home from school your daughter.
The ability to stay “on message” on the right is part of what gives its media such power. They are flooding the airwaves with the same disinformation until it becomes accepted reality among their consumers despite being untrue.
Stuck in 2020
Mark Cuban, another billionaire and perhaps still part of the problem in his own way, was anti-Trump and tried to give Democratic leaders a heads up.
His word to them essentially read, “You’re behind the times.”
As he went on to say, the national Democratic party seemed “stuck in 2020.”
Misinformation Affects Voting
The dramatic divide between information relaties on the left and the right could merely be interesting, but it has undeniable implications on voting.
The disinformation and misinformation machine affected voters’ perceptions of critical issues.
According to polling from Ipsos, “Diverging realities ultimately affects ballot choices. Americans who answer questions about inflation, crime, and immigration incorrectly are more likely to opt for Trump, while Americans who answer those questions correctly prefer Harris.”
Media echo chambers filled with propaganda, mythology, and conspiracy can sway elections. They can even destroy democracy itself.
Massive Funding Is Needed
So what is to be done?
Do we simply cede ground to the disinformation architects and relegate democracy to a muddled memory?
Some are taking action. Progressive media outlet Courier News posted a thread about their efforts and how to support.
As you might imagine, one way to address the proliferation of disinformation and misinformation is to fund the organizations and outlets that are sharing different perspectives.
This is true of Christian outlets as well. The New Evangelicals, which exists to “reclaim a loving evangelical tradition that informs a better way forward”, expressed a similar sentiment about funding already-in-progress efforts.
Counteract Lies with Truth
For those of us who don’t have access to massive amounts of capital, what we can do is free.
Share better information.
While we can’t, on an individual level, do much about the plethora of right-wing media outlets and the volume of lies they’re able to propagate, we can affect our own circles.
Do not let lies, misinformation, and conspiracies go unchallenged—whether online or in-person. You may not change someone else’s mind, but you will remind them that another reality, grounded in truth and facts, exists.
Realizing that a vast, well-funded, disinformation operation is a major reason why the Democratic presidential candidate lost does not offer any comfort nor change the election outcome.
If, however, we desire different outcomes in future elections, then we must grasp the urgency of how much right-wing media is affecting the perceptions of our neighbors.
There is much more to say—like about the character and lack of critical media consumption by people roped in by right-wing media propaganda—but this is a start.
As unsatisfying as it seems, the way to counteract lies is with the truth. The challenge is to make the truth heard and believed in a noisy, lopsided media landscape.
How have you seen disinformation and misinformation affect the people around you? Where are they getting this info? Comment below.
If you want better information that the propaganda of the far-right, you’ll be encouraged and inspired by these TRUE stories of faith, race, and resistance.
In the weeks before the election a Bible study group I am a part of had one member tell us that she could no longer study with us because “We were evil Christians” She had previously told me that she had never met a Christian who was a Democrat, and that she had never met a Democrat willing to talk about what they believed. I’d offered to do so, but not during the Bible study. When people from the study went out to lunch it became clear that we had no common source of facts to talk from. Haitians were eating dogs and cats—she had seen videos of them doing it. Schools in California send kids home to their parents after sex changes. Isn’t that obviously evil? Democrats are sacrificing babies. Abortion after birth. This stuff seems ludicrous to me (because it is) but there was no ground of facts and place to obtain them that she could meet me at. And by a week before the election how could she even consort with such an evil person as I am to support such evils?
Part of what has stunned me since the election has been realizing that some of my acquaintances stood somewhere in the midst of competing data streams and just concluded that they did not have what it took to sort them out. With those folks I regret that I didn’t talk more and talk more plainly.
Prices and the perception of a bad economy were a big deal but for the devout people in the churches near me it was the “culture wars”—Transgender, homophobic, abortions are child sacrifice…the racism was below the surface—they weren’t white Christian Nationalists—one of the pastors they looked too was a Black man married to a Latina woman—-but they wanted to see a revival of pure Christianity in charge of the nation and they saw Mr Trump as the way to get that.
It wasn't the price of eggs, it was the perceived price of eggs ... and other distortions. When my Trump-supporting brother emailed me a month or two ago to ask why Biden-Harris earned my support, here is one of about 20 bullet points I sent: I appreciate the attention to our country’s infrastructure, low unemployment rate, an inflation rate lower than other developing countries, a healthy stock market. He then switched to perceived moral issues. I suggested he compare the number of times Jesus said anything about abortion or same sex marriage with His frequency of addressing justice issues - the poor, vulnerable, exploited ... Then he replied with what I'm thinking is Fox News talking points. It takes a lot of patience, and research and gathering of thoughts to engage in these civil discussions (as Jemar and you readers well know). I intend to pick this back up with him, even post-election. This proliferation of propaganda that folks - church folks - have been groomed to swallow - hook, line, and sinker - is utterly frightening.