Why Harris Lost Uninformed Voters

Reuters/Ipsos poll finding that Trump voters were far more likely to get basic facts about the state of the country incorrect.

My dad has a farm out in San Joaquin Valley and some kids of the hired help and the neighbors mingle together. One day, two resident boys, one White and the other Mexican, both middle schoolers, were showing me a funny Louis C.K. skit on YouTube. When the video ended, I was shocked to see that their recommended feed was full of Republican-sponsored videos: Steven Crowder, Tim Pool (officially funded by the Russians) and a right-wing guy named Patrick Bet David. It was mixed in with a lot of non-political, male-oriented content, usually of comedians being edgy or young men making money. One thumbnail had an image of Trump smirking and a woman pouting with some silly title like “DEI woman owned by Trump.”

I was born in late 1996 which puts me in-between Millennial and Generation Z. As a teen, I got my regular political news from Jon Stewart on Comedy Central. I would get daily news from The Young Turks which was one of the only news sites on YouTube in the early 2010s and skewed liberal. To understand the other side I watched Fox News. I also listened to The Alex Jones Show because his conspiracy theories were genuinely hilarious to me (until he promoted the Sandy Hook one).

At the start of every Alex Jones episode, a narrator would say in a spooky voice: “Info Wars, Because There’s a War On For Your Mind.”

Indeed, there is a war on for your mind, and Democrats have surrendered that war to Republicans. Half the country cannot agree on what color the sky is because we get our news sources from radically different places. This is a trend-line in which Republicans and Democrats rate the economic health of the nation. It is shamelessly partisan, and the Republican response in particular is completely nonsensical.

Trump got elected in 2016 and Republicans go from just one-quarter to nearly the entire party thinking the economy is good. It’s also weird, but less so, that Democratic approval dropped by a quarter, but okay it’s still over half of Democrats. First-term Trump simply continues Obama’s record trajectory of adding manufacturing jobs and he fails to pass an infrastructure bill. But he’s unnecessarily deficit spending and ballooning the national debt for no clear reason (we weren’t in a Recession) so obviously Republicans feel good about that.

Coronavirus hits and there’s bipartisan consensus that the economy is in a Depression. Yet during the election campaign of 2020 and the darkest days of the pandemic when thousands were dying daily, Republicans suddenly changed their mind and immediately thought the economy was good again. Oops never mind! Biden gets elected and magically the economy is back to being bad, according to Republicans. Democrats are being fairly partisan too but in general, their opinion mostly follows GDP, the stock market and unemployment trends. The Republican opinion follows nothing but whoever is in office.

How did we get here? Everyone knows in the pre-social media days, Republicans only watched Fox News and maybe CNBC, and Democrats just watched all the other news channels. However, the new frontier of news is now content on social media, some of which doesn’t advertise itself as news, but is packed with politics and funded by political operatives.

Conservative lobbying groups, think tanks, and yes, Russian agents have capitalized on the fact that inattentive Americans get their news from social media. Having lost two elections to Barack Obama, the first “viral president”, and dealing with an increasingly liberal, multi-racial, and youthful electorate, Republican think tanks and donors realized that the new frontier of Information was going to online media. They recognized early on that people had watched compilation videos of feminists arguing with street protesters or liberals getting owned and realized the potential with certain demographics like men.

Before their YouTube debut, conservative YouTube hosts Ben Shapiro and Steven Crowder were nothing child pundits on Fox News. Corporations paid for Shapiro and Crowder to start media companies and transition their content online. Their content bait was to go on college campuses and debate under prepared and oblivious teenage undergraduates who were emotional and lacked media training. Their editors would cut their clips up with titles like: “Ben Shapiro OWNS Trans SJW with Facts And Logic”. Skillful editors, media companies and view bots would then circulate these clips onto TikTok and Facebook, capturing people into a right-wing echo chamber. Even the Russian government was recently outed by the Department of Justice for funneling massive sums of cash to pro-Trump podcasters like Tim Pool, Dave Rubin and Benny Johnson.

Women and girls who are frustrated about their economic prospects are being pumped with conservative propaganda on TikTok and Instagram, funded by right-wing think tanks, showing pretty women living lives as “traditional wives” without civil rights or income. On the male side, most of the top podcasters, gamer affiliated, YouTube “alternative media” channels, financial channels etc. that appeal to men are implicitly pro-Trump or anti-Democratic party. They’re not exactly political streamers, but they are very entertaining, and in the event politics does come up, they will boost Trump. Under the guise of so-called “alternative media” they are given free reign to lie without correction or editors to be held accountable.

Democrats have relied on the self-evidence of their positions to sway voters, and that just doesn’t work anymore. People today exist in media ghettos where information is catered by algorithms and platform owners. Conservatives and corporations learned that lesson and spent billions of dollars to ensure that half the country’s social media consumption is infested with bots and edited videos that appeal to cultural grievances like opposing trans people, glorifying Trump or blaming Biden for inflation.

Kamala Harris didn’t lose solely to disinformation on social media apps about the economy. However, this presidential election was heavily swung by people who voted exclusively for president and not down the ballot, and they chose Trump. Trump won voters do not seek out political news. These types of lowly-informed voters backed Barack Obama decades ago. Uneducated or not, they’re important to any coalition. The Democrats cannot solely rely on highly informed voters and college-educated voters.

NBC polling found that people who read print media and follow news from the national mainstream media favored Biden / Harris over Trump. Whereas Trump supporters largely are men who get news from YouTube (women evidently skew TikTok in the poll). Republicans will argue that this is just because it the legacy media cannot control public opinion. But the problem is that when my local newspaper lies, the local editor is held accountable. When Fox News lies about say, the 2020 election results, they’re forced to settle in court for $787 million. When self-described independent media on YouTube lies, nobody can hold them accountable.

Politically uninformed voters who don’t seek out news are not truly apolitical, rather their politics is influenced through partisan-funded content such as scrolling on TikTok and coming across anti-Biden content. Or listening to the Joe Rogan Experience, which several of my apolitical male friends do, which is heavily slanted to Republicans.

Now, liberals made their own online media spaces and podcasts, but it doesn’t target the low informed voter that Obama and now Trump carry. Moreover, the liberal and leftist reluctance to debate or counter right-wing propaganda, driven by a misguided 2010s-era progressive ethos of not validating the right, effectively conceded online media spaces like YouTube to right-wing content creators for perhaps a generation. Not only have conservatives dominated YouTube, but they’re currently attempting to undermine whats left of liberal online dialogue.

Right-wing media ecosystems and eventual echo-chambers are usually established like so:

Step 1: claim the current narrative or media system is untrustworthy and biased against conservatives. This is usually due to fact-checkers not approving of conservative claims.

Step 2: funnel tremendous amounts of corporate or donor cash into offering “alternative” news services that don’t resemble news in anyway such as editors or accuracy.

Step 3: Do the unethical behavior you accused your opponents of doing in the name of fairness.

Twitter was once a powerful and prominent left-wing source of ideas, but it wasn’t left-wing by mandate, it was left-wing by popularity. Twitter was one of the few spaces in America where right vs. left-wing, rich vs. poor, elite vs. commoner battled on equal terrain. Elon Musk, having been radicalized by his transgender daughter cutting him off and being a laughing stock on Twitter, spent $44 billion to acquire Twitter and stem its left-wing influence.

Elon’s false flag justification was that his ideas weren’t popular because Twitter was biased against conservatives, but Matt Taibbi who broke the infamous “Twitter Files” concluded these allegations had no merit, not that it mattered. Elon bought it, promptly converted the institution into an unusable Nazi cesspit, and instructed his engineers to artificially boost right-wing content, causing the advertisers to flee and for regular users to quit. Right now, Elon Musk is directly engaging with and circulating tweets by neo-Nazis proclaiming Europe is being ruined by brown immigrants. And J.D. Vance is threatening to dissolve military alliances if Europe tries to regulate content on Twitter in response. Bleak.

Unfortunately, Democrats do not have billionaires willing to throw down money for propaganda of this magnitude. The internet ecosystem for Democrats doesn’t look great. Twitter is increasingly unusable; Mark Zuckerberg is cozying up to the Trump Administration. TikTok is popular but its refusal to bend to United States regulators and popularity in left-wing protests may find it banned under the Trump Admin. YouTube appears to be the Democrat’s best hope but right now it’s dominated by the right.

When I read my parent’s Facebook news feed — and they’re Democrats — a lot of news stories are about blaming every issue on Joe Biden from right-wing blogs. Facebook circulated news stories to the top about how immigrant killers were coming over the border thanks to Joe Biden, even though Trump ordered Republicans to reject the immigration bill. Huge misinformation about the billions sent to Ukraine which was mostly surplus weapons we don’t use. No circulation of Trump’s tariff proposals at all. Nonsense posts from bots implying Biden caused housing prices to skyrocket with illegal immigrants. Fake conspiracy theories about vaccines from RFK Jr.

Both things are true: the cash influx of investment in the last four years under Biden to stop a COVID-induced Recession probably put a strain on many lower-income households via inflation, despite low unemployment and income inequality being reduced for the first time in years. Even though low and middle-income wages increasing, consumers likely prefer lower prices over higher wages. And while in aggregate, low-income households recovered under Biden, the voters incentivized to turn out may have been the ones left behind. It’s also a case of lagged indicators. It takes a while to recover an economy. Unfortunately, Biden and his staff was too incapacitated to articulate any of his policies. I almost forgot he was president.

It’s exceeding difficult to have any conversation about the economic well-being of this nation when Americans have such polar opposite opinions about the economy. I know this will be disputed, but already, Morning Consult’s economic sentiment tracker is showing Republicans en-masse saying the economy is better just solely off of Trump’s victory. That makes zero sense and is simply partisan.

To re-iterate, it’s not that social media was the sole cause of Kamala Harris’ failure. An overly prepared and cautious speaker was a weak candidate against a demagogue with high levels of charisma. Harris alienated the Democrats with a campaign aimed at Neo-Conservatives and upper-class Republicans in a rather foolish gamble that they genuinely believed in their Christian platitudes. She ran on abortion and Trump’s morality in a nation that cares first and foremost about its bank account and taxes.

But I’m looking at some of my friends who didn’t go to college or the boys on the farm who secretly admire or like Trump. They don’t wake up and read an amalgamation of news outlets on Google News every morning like I do. They don’t know anything about Trump that hasn’t been catered to them on corporate-funded propaganda passed off as male-oriented hobby videos, TikTok clips and anti-liberal compilation videos.

The number 1 thing that can be done to fight this is to fight propaganda directly. Funding counter-propaganda for the Democrats will take time; especially since corporations are wary of populist left ideas. But now is the time to go on these right-wing shows, find these right-wing debaters, and trounce them. Everyone’s obsessing about whether Kamala Harris should’ve gone on Joe Rogan’s podcast. I don’t know if it would’ve swung anyone. But Harris’ decision to back out — while Trump and J.D. Vance happily come on to appeal to lesser educated men — is emblematic of why we have lost so much ground with the online and uninformed crowd in the last 10 years.

The next Democratic president has to be comfortable and completely fluent it the correctness of our arguments and the tactics of the opposition. It sucks that the presidency is about personality performance not policy, but that’s what it is. I don’t want him to be president, but Gavin Newsom going on Fox News and just roasting Ron DeSantis for fun is the kind of president we’re going to need in 2028. I hope they’re a woman, though.