Democrats Don't Have To Be Perfect—But In Today's Media Environment They'll Always Be Seen As Failures

If you analyze the interaction between media, the economy, and public opinion in a systematic way, the distorting effects of media become obvious.

Here’s a hopefully novel attempt to illustrate how modern media may have exacerbated the public’s sense of economic disaffection, when, in the past, voters wouldn’t have been nearly so sour. It’s why I don’t think Democrats are going to regroup productively if their 2024 postmortems home in on governing and messaging errors at the expense of clear-eyed thinking about the role of media, and their indifference to building or earning it.

For all the unfolding recrimination, a fairly strong consensus has already formed across the left that last week’s election results are part of a global, post-Covid, post-inflation backlash against incumbents. And for what it’s worth, I agree with this consensus; Occam’s razor applies too neatly to start the analysis elsewhere.

But for some, this is case closed: conditions made people mad, so the key is to create better conditions. You can’t run the economy too cool, but you can’t run it to hot, either. It has to be juust so for voters to act in their best material interests and return the incumbent party to power.

And if you question whether the case might be so open-shut, the pushback can be fierce. It’s as if the liberals most wedded to kitchen-table theories of politics worry that if the story turns out to be more complicated, Democrats will stop caring about people’s economic struggles and rebuild their politics around nonsense.

I think a more complicated explanation is also more practicable, and wouldn’t require Democrats to lose a shred of empathy.

For instance, if the main lesson of the 2024 election is “don’t get caught holding the ball after a worldwide catastrophe,” it’s not very practicable at all. There was probably no Goldilocks policy regime that would’ve allowed Democrats to avoid the global backlash, and even if there were, they’d have been very unlikely to land on it.

But also, the reductive analysis leaves important questions unanswered. Why are voters everywhere so much more lastingly resentful about inflation than any other economic turbulence? Why were they unresponsive to the unusually good economy we’ve enjoyed for multiple quarters running, the way academic theory predicted? Why did Harris lose millions of Biden votes a year and a half after inflation normalized, when in 2020 Trump gained millions of votes against the backdrop of a raging pandemic, a weak economy, and a deeply uncertain future?

One could tweak theory everywhere it departs from reality—invent new caveats and exceptions, so that the outcome seems obvious in hindsight. Or one could ask whether Democrats suffered prolonged inflation scare mongering across all levels of media, while Trump managed to skate through historic real-time failures, because the media ecosystem, on the whole, is more favorable to him.

It’s not that past hardship explains nothing, and it’s certainly not that Democrats should stop iterating their policy agenda to help as many people as possible when they’re in power. It’s that the story doesn’t make sense without analyzing the mediated component. If media plays only a trivial role in shaping public opinion of an economy’s strength or weakness, why would Republicans have bothered lying about it at scale? Why wouldn’t they simply allow the backlash build organically?

CREDIT IS CLAIMED

We can’t go back in time and arm Democrats with a better information environment, or shrewder earned-media strategies.

But we can use our imaginations.