Republican Victory and the Ambience of Information
For years, Democrats
have sought to win elections by micro-targeting communities with detailed
facts. What if the secret is big, sloppy notions seeded nationwide?
November 13, 2024
Dawn had not yet broken on
the election results last week when Democrats began their favored ritual of
falling out of love. Reasons were enumerated why Kamala Harris, the candidate
who weeks earlier had been a magnet for enthusiasm, was an obvious poor choice
to run for President. She was too coastal, it was suggested, too centrist, too un-primaried, too woke, too female. What were they
thinking? The remorse is familiar, regardless of the outcome. When Joe Biden
ran for President in 2020, many Democrats lamented that the Party hadn’t
produced a stronger option—but Biden went on to receive more votes than any
candidate in American history. Hillary Clinton transformed, in the Party’s
view, from a historic nominee to a terrible candidate almost
overnight. Barack Obama was widely acknowledged as a great candidate—even a
once-in-a-generation one—who barely made it to a second term. John Kerry, a “legitimate, good candidate,”
lost the popular vote; Al Gore, almost universally considered to be a terrible
candidate, won it. One might conclude that the Democrats’ ability to hold the
heart of the American public has amazingly little to do with the ideal
dimensions of the candidate they put forth, and that their perennial trying and
failing to find the perfect figure, followed by rites of self-flagellation, is
a weird misappropriation of concern. The Republicans don’t lament the
inadequacies of their candidates, clearly. The Republicans have thrice sent
Donald Trump.
If the problem this year
wasn’t the person, was it policy? Our distance from the close of the polls is
still measurable in days, and yet voices have settled into hot debate about
which issues Harris undersold, at the cost of the election. She leaned too much
on reproductive freedom, we
hear, or gave fatally little attention to concerns about immigration or
the Palestinian cause or
the Israeli cause. The
campaign missed what spoke to men, perhaps
particularly Black men, or Latino men—or was it women? Also, not enough
about the kitchen-table economy.
To anyone who studied the
Harris campaign up close, many of those accounts don’t track. The
Vice-President talked about illegal immigration, and her work to curb it, all
the time. Mobilizing Black men in swing states was among the campaign’s most
deliberate projects. The Democrats were faulted for hazy policy long after they
released a ninety-two-page party platform and an eighty-two-page economic chaser filled
with figures, graphs, footnotes, and detailed plans. Harris spoke at length
about taxes and the kitchen-table economy all across the country.
Why didn’t the speeches
register? Why did people persist in thinking that Harris was short on policy;
that Trump’s programs would boost the American economy, despite a widely broadcast consensus from sixteen
Nobel Prize-winning economists to the contrary; or that he would lower taxes
for working people, though the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy calculated that he would increase them?
Even many of Trump’s critics think his first term marked a high point for
border patrol, though more unauthorized migrants have
been forced to leave under Biden. (Why was Biden’s Presidency widely dismissed
as desultory, when, in fact, as my colleague Nicholas Lemann recently put it, “he has passed more new
domestic programs than any Democratic President since Lyndon Johnson—maybe even
since Franklin Roosevelt”?) How did so many perceptions disprovable with ten
seconds of Googling become fixed in the voting public’s mind? And why, even as
misapprehensions were corrected, did those beliefs prevail?
Democrats, during their
hair-shirt rituals, gaze into their souls and find “bad messaging.” There is
talk of a poor “ground game,” an élite failure to “connect.” But the Harris
campaign set records or near-records for fund-raising, volunteer
enrollment, and in some districts voter registration; it is
hard to imagine what a better ground game or a closer connection might have
looked like in three months. And the messaging, which hewed to the middle-class
experiences of Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz, neither of whom is
Ivy-educated or grew up rich, was hardly misguided in a race that ostensibly
came down to the economic and exclusion anxieties of working people. Yet
Democrats did make a crucial messaging error, one that probably (as the line
goes) lost them the election. They misjudged today’s flow of knowledge—what one
might call the ambience of information.
Harris’s approach this
year was distinct from her failed effort to run a more identity-centered
campaign in the Democratic primary of 2020. Instead, it leaned on strategies
that had carried her toward her two most improbable electoral victories: her
first race, for San Francisco district attorney, which she entered while
polling at six per cent, against a powerful progressive incumbent and a
well-known law-and-order centrist, and won by more than ten points; and her
election as California’s attorney general, which at least one major California
paper initially called for her opponent on Election Night, before Harris gained
ground in the continuing count and, in a reputation-making vindication of her
strategy, pulled ahead. Her magic in those elections had come largely through
micro-targeting—a focussed, intensely local effort to engage voters on tailored
terms and to mobilize small communities that traditional campaigning missed. In
the early two-thousands, this was the cutting edge of ground strategy. Harris’s
political peers regarded her as one of its first virtuosi.
On the trail with the
Vice-President, reporting a profile for Vogue, I was struck
by how reflexively her mind and methods ran to the local frame. When I noted,
in an interview, that one of her policy signatures seemed to be investing in
community-development financial institutions (C.D.F.I.s)—which offer capital
access to struggling communities—Harris lit up and elaborated a
neighborhood-centered theory of market-based improvement. She touted C.D.F.I.s’
contributions to “the economy of the community.” Laying out her middle-class
economic-opportunity programs, she invariably talked about a woman who had
run a nursery school on her block.
If Americans still arrive
at a theory of the world through their communities, the boundaries of those
communities have broadened and diffused. Harris’s micro-targeting home run in
San Francisco came before the iPhone. Her second unlikely victory, in the race
for California attorney general, roughly coincided with
Facebook’s introduction of a proprietary sorting algorithm for its News Feed.
In the ensuing years, there were major changes to the channels through which
Americans—rich Americans, poor Americans, all Americans—received information.
As early as 2000, the political scientist Robert Putnam, in his landmark study
“Bowling Alone,” noted that
technology, not least the Internet, had an individuating, isolating tendency
that eroded the network of civic bonds—he called it social capital—that joins
and holds people in groups.
It is wrong to suggest
that people now relate only through digital screens. (People still show up at
cookouts, dinner parties, track meets, and other crossings.) But information
travels differently across the population: ideas that used to come from local
newspapers or TV and drift around a community now come along an unpredictable
path that runs from Wichita to Vancouver, perhaps via Paris or Tbilisi. (Then
they reach the cookout.) Studies confirm that people spend less and less
time with their neighbors. Instead, many of us scroll through social networks,
stream information into our eyes and ears, and struggle to recall where we
picked up this or that data point, or how we assembled the broad
conceptions that we hold. The science historian Michael Shermer, in his book “The Believing Brain,” used
the term “patternicity” to describe the way that people search for patterns,
many of them erroneous, on the basis of small information samplings. The
patterns we perceive now rise less from information gathered in our close
communities and more from what crosses our awareness along national paths.
The Democrats didn’t look
past national-scale audiences—Harris sat with both Fox News and Oprah. But she
approached that landscape differently. The campaign, it was often noted, shied
away from legacy-media interviews. It instead used a national platform to tune
the affect, or vibes, of her rise: momentum, freedom, joy, the middle
class, and “BRAT” chartreuse. When
she spoke to wide audiences, her language was careful and catholic; one often
had the sense that she was trying to say as little as possible beyond her
talking points. The meat and specificity of her campaign—the access, the
detail, and the identity coalitions—were instead concentrated on
coalition-group Zooms, and on local and community audiences. Harris
micro-targeted to the end.
Donald Trump did the
inverse. He spoke off the cuff on national platforms all the time. He said
things meant to resonate with specific affinity or identity subgroups, even if
they struck the rest of listening America as offensive or absurd. (“In Springfield,
they’re eating the dogs!”) As my colleague Antonia Hitchens reported, his campaign was boosted by a
traditional get-out-the-vote ground effort late in the game—despite this
apparently not being a priority for Trump—but the canvassing was less about
delivering policy information than about tuning voters’ ears like satellites to
the national signal. (Election fraud was a theme.) Trump’s speeches at rallies,
many people noticed, had a curious background-music quality: they went on
forever, aimlessly, and people would come and go at will. The actual speeches
didn’t seem to matter; they existed simply to set a vibe and keep certain broad
suggestions (immigration big problem! Biden Administration so
corrupt!) drifting into the ether. Trump seemed to think that much of the
voting public couldn’t be bothered with details—couldn’t be bothered to
fact-check, or deal with fact checkers. (“Who the hell wants to hear
questions?” he asked at a town hall in October before deciding to dance and
sway to music for more than half an hour.) Detail, even when it’s available,
doesn’t travel widely after all. Big, sloppy notions do.
Planting ideas this way
isn’t argument, and it’s not emotional persuasion. It’s about seeding the
ambience of information, throwing facts and fake facts alike into an
environment of low attention, with the confidence that, like minnows released
individually into a pond, they will eventually school and spawn. Notions must
add up to a unified vision but also be able to travel on their own, because
that’s how information moves in a viral age. And national media is key. Trump’s
command of the ambience of information wouldn’t have been possible without his
own platforms, such as Truth Social, as well as allies such as Fox News’
C.E.O., Suzanne Scott, who in 2020 excoriated her team after
they fact-checked Trump, and Elon Musk, who, hoping for executive-branch power
over his own sector, largely funded more than a hundred and seventy-five
million dollars’ worth of pro-Trump outreach, was read into early voting data,
and tweeted lies, conspiracy theories, and mistrust of media on his network, X,
which boosts his posts. The communications researcher Pablo Boczkowski
has noted that people increasingly take in news
by incidental encounter—they are “rubbed by the news”—rather than by seeking it
out. Trump has maximized his influence over networks that people rub against,
and has filled them with information that, true or not, seems all of a coherent
piece.
This is the opposite of
micro-targeting. The goal is for voters to meet ideas coming and going so often
that those notions seem like common sense. The pollster and
political-marketing-language consultant Frank Luntz assembled a focus group of
men who had previously voted for a Democratic nominee but were voting for Trump
this year. Many of their rationales were based on untrue information settled
deep in the ambience of information. “Nothing against people from California,
but the policies in California are so bad I wouldn’t be surprised if the state
goes bankrupt,” a participant in Indiana said. (California has the largest
economy in the U.S.) “Kamala from California is too
radical . . . she’s too far left.” (Biden’s policies tended to
be to the left of Harris’s, when they didn’t align.) These are not convictions
that someone acquires from a specific source, neighborhood, or community.
Of all the data visualizations that
were churned out in the hours following the election, the one that struck me
most was a map of the United States,
showing whether individual areas had voted to the left or to the right of their
positions in the Presidential race in 2020. It looks like a wind map. And it
challenges the idea that Trump’s victory in this cycle was broadly issues- or
community-based. The red wind extends across farmland and cities, young areas
to old, rich areas to poor. It is not the map of communities having their local
concerns addressed or not. It’s the map of an entire nation swept by the same
ambient premises.
In a country where more
than half of adults have literacy below a sixth-grade level,
ambient information, however thin and wrong, is more powerful than actual
facts. It has been the Democrats’ long-held premise that access to the truth
will set the public free. They have corrected misinformation and sought to drop
data to individual doors. This year’s contest shows that this premise is wrong.
A majority of the American public doesn’t believe information that goes against
what it thinks it knows—and a lot of what it thinks it knows originates in the
brain of Donald Trump. He has polluted the well of received wisdom and what
passes for common sense in America. And, until Democrats, too, figure out how
to message ambiently, they’ll find themselves fighting not just a candidate but
what the public holds to be self-evident truths. ♦
