Our first post-truth election

By this point, you know the news. Donald Trump has conclusively won the 2024 election and a second term to the United States presidency. He will take office early next year with a Republican Senate, likely cement a Supreme Court hard-right supermajority for a generation, and start steering the vast ship of the federal bureaucracy towards authoritarianism.

This was achieved, very basically, through significant gains with voters in a lot of smaller counties in battleground states while Harris did not manage to build on Biden or Clinton’s margins in blue cities, and in some places lost ground (including in NYC, where Trump won over 30% of the vote, sharply outpacing the 18% he received in the 2016 election). This was bolstered by gains among populations like Black and Latino men and white women, who surprised observers by trending towards a candidate that has often been defined by his racism and his open misogyny.

The real question of course is the why, and I have a primary answer that is by no means particular to me but unfortunately is one of the most distressing I could give, because it’s the hardest target to hit when thinking of a way back.

By all accounts, the Trump campaign’s organization and ground game, from a purely operational perspective, was a disaster. It had a fraction of the get-out-the-vote effort of the Harris machine, to the point that Elon Musk was reportedly packing random people into U-Hauls in Michigan without even telling them they were Trump canvassers. Hands down, the on-the-ground presence that is supposed to be the gold standard for ensuring turnout for your side does not seem to have paid off at all.

Up until the bitter end, the economy was by all meaningful reports booming, with wages up and unemployment near historic lows. Inflation had been flattened months prior, and the specter of migrant arrivals — long a red-meat issue for the MAGA crowd’s turnout effort — had declined significantly. The proven electoral winner of abortion was meant to drive Democratic votes, particularly given that abortion rights were directly on the ballot in a few winnable states. Trump, meanwhile, was blubbering to half-empty arenas about being a dictator. He had little in the way of detailed policy plans, beyond the Project 2025 template developed by, among others, former members of his administration — a policy book so extreme that he had to publicly disavow it. In light of all this, some liberals even allowed themselves to dream not just of a Harris win but a blowout. Votes are still being tallied, but close to the reverse could happen.

So what gives? How did this shambolic and disorganized campaign helmed by an aging, convicted felon, adjudicated sexual abuser, and coup plotter who was a historically unpopular president ultimately triumph so big? Anyone who tells you that there’s one sure answer — that Harris did not sufficiently provide concessions to Muslim and Arab voters concerned about the administration’s stance on Israel’s war in the region, that voters just cannot bring themselves to support a woman, that Biden stepped aside too late, or whatever else — is being disingenuous. Something like this doesn’t happen just because one single thing along the way went in the direction it did.

Still, I believe there is one sort of more diffuse but very urgent issue here, which doesn’t directly have anything to do with campaign organization or even policy. It’s about what I’ll broadly call the information delivery infrastructure, which encompasses news media and social media and all platforms where people get the information that then solidifies into their political or candidate opinions. A few things to say here: first, most voters ultimately are very low-information and view elections as generally vibes-based. They are not like me or you, a person reading this newsletter. They have certain senses of things going on in their lives — prices are too high, migration is out of control — and they tend to make snap judgments based on what they think they know about how the candidate will address those issues versus what they don’t like about that candidate’s platform.

Up until about three decades ago, this would have been almost completely downstream of consumption of traditional media: newspapers, television, radio, books, and so on. Social media in particular has made this very much not the case anymore, but the information delivery hasn’t simply gone from one centralized mass-media outlet to another. Instead, people are ensconced in often relatively hermetic information landscapes of their own — they see what they are shown, often as determined by algorithm and their pre-existing preferences. To use the example of Latino voters’ swing towards Harris, many of these voters are getting a chunk of their political information from WhatsApp, in chat chains and groups where they are not only freely fed misinformation but see no pushback against that misinformation.

So it’s not just that voters see all these Trump rally moments and hear about the Project 2025 plans, the ongoing legal cases against Trump, and the authoritarian talk and all decide they like it (though, without a shadow of a doubt and with bleak implications for our democracy, many in fact do). A good chunk never heard about it all, or were fed an entirely alternate reality of facts about both Harris and Trump. We have a hard time understanding their analysis because theirs was based on a wholly separate vision into what was actually happening in the race and among the candidates.

For some other chunk of voters, they basically believe that Trump won’t actually do any of the bad stuff they’ve heard about — it’s bluster, it’s Trump being Trump, he doesn’t mean it — and will simply deliver the economic results they want better than Harris would. Most just didn’t hear about or don’t remember the chaos of the first administration, the Covid mismanagement and the immigration crackdowns and the climate backtracking, because of that same reason. It’s outside their information landscape and all they do remember is how the price of eggs was lower, and they want that price to come down again.

Trump is to some extent an avatar of whatever they want him to do, because they do not know about or believe the actual policies he holds, and think simply that he’ll do whatever their priority is, because he’s historically been so malleable. I don’t know how you campaign against a candidate who is all things to some majority chunk of the voters, who is refracted through infinite information bubbles that you can’t really penetrate or even see.

As a journalism academic, I also have no idea how we fix this. There is plenty to criticize about the coverage of Trump during this campaign, and believe me, I have. But I’m not sure even an ideal approach, which really highlighted all his shortcomings and the dangers he posed, would have really moved the needle, because it wouldn’t have landed with the people for whom it needed to land. The final weeks of the campaign saw Trump promise the nation’s health and food safety apparatus to an anti-vaxxer known for embracing conspiracy theories. His former chief of staff said Trump had a big affinity for Hitler, almost a comically on-the-nose scandal for any politician, and it didn’t make a dent.

I don’t think that Musk’s shoddy ground game operation in Michigan made much of a difference, but his turning the platform formerly known as Twitter into a campaign amplifier perhaps did. It’s an information war, and good information will not win it in what I believe to be the first fundamentally post-truth election. Maybe there’s no putting the genie back in the bottle, but the only way I see forward is reorienting the information landscape somehow back around some shared sense of reality, which might mean anything from breaking up the social media monopolies to liberals trying to set up their own robust media platforms and content networks to rival the right’s dominance on sites like YouTube and with networks like Newsmax. We also need more independent sources of media not owned by billionaires who are looking to do business with an authoritarian president and pull punches, and can actually be trusted and ever-present in voters’ lives. Without this, I don’t think any of the old rules of winning political campaigns are worth a damn.

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