In most of the recent polls, Texas Democrat Beto O’Rourke is running behind in his quest to win a U.S. Senate seat from incumbent Republican Ted Cruz. But, if O’Rourke wins next Tuesday, much of the credit will go to his unprecedented Facebook messaging. Alexis C. Madrigal explains at The Atlantic:

Through October 20, O’Rourke alone had spent $5.4 million advertising on the platform, according to Facebook’s Ad Archive Report. J. B. Pritzker, Kamala Harris, Andrew Cuomo, Claire McCaskill, and Heidi Heitkamp had spent $5.5 million total. O’Rourke’s opponent, Senator Ted Cruz, had spent only $427,000 on Facebook, about 1/13th as much as O’Rourke…Much of O’Rourke’s Facebook-ad buy seems to be going toward short videos of the candidate talking to crowds or directly to the camera.

Not that O’Rourke is neglecting TV and Google, as Madrigal notes:

The two Texas Senate hopefuls are relatively close in spending on television ads. While O’Rourke had spent more than $15 million on television ads through mid-October, Cruz and associated pacs had spent $12 million and were on pace to nearly catch up there. O’Rourke has also spent $1.3 million on Google ads, also top among all candidates, though by a much narrower margin (Rick Scott has spent more than $1 million). Cruz has spent little on Google—$181,000—according to the company’s political transparency report.

But O’Rourke’s online campaign has already proven to be a tremendous success in terms of fund-raising, and “his unexpected fund-raising success—pulling in $62 million through September 30—has catapulted the relatively unknown congressman from El Paso onto the national stage.”

Perhaps, even more importantly, O’Rourke’s campaign has also invested heavily in assembling a first-rate video production team.

But O’Rourke’s own video team has proved able to get and recognize hot footage, according to Kasra Shokat, a digital-media strategist at the consultancy Winning Mark. “He has invested a ton of infrastructure that can turn around and produce video on a dime and get those up quickly,” Shokat said. “That’s the kind of engaging content that works really well.”…Shokat said he’s begun to recommend that campaigns, especially those of charismatic talkers, hire full-time video help to create content.

Through widespread re-postings of his diverse videos, “it’s looking like O’Rourke’s total spending on Facebook has generated into the hundreds of millions of impressions,” notes Madrigal. It seems a wise bet. When a political campaign has a charismatic candidate, who is an underdog, maximizing face-time can only help.

“Facebook remains the primary platform for most Americans,” report Aaron Smith and Monica Anderson at pewinternet.org. “Roughly two-thirds of U.S. adults (68%) now report that they are Facebook users, and roughly three-quarters of those users access Facebook on a daily basis. With the exception of those 65 and older, a majority of Americans across a wide range of demographic groups now use Facebook.”

“O’Rourke’s remarkable fund-raising might not be duplicative by candidates with less star power or in less contentious races, “warns Madrigal. “But if O’Rourke’s Facebook-heavy campaign surprises, even with a closer-than-expected loss, his approach could be a blueprint for state-level candidates devoting more resources to the platform.”

Yesterday J.P. Green noted an article in Campaigns & Elections underscoring the high regard Repubican party political operatives have for Facebook as a media outlet for their ads — despite the efforts of Sen. John Thune (R-SD) to discredit Facebook as tainted by liberal bias.
But Thune’s record suggests more than a little hypocrisy, as Steve Benen noted at Maddowblog:

…John Thune says he’s concerned about Facebook’s “culture” and the integrity of its mission statement, but again, how in the world is that any of his business? Isn’t the Republican model based on the idea that the free market should decide and if online consumers don’t like Facebook’s “culture,” we can take our clicks elsewhere?
But even more striking still is Thune’s uniquely weak position. When the South Dakota Republican became Congress’ leading opponent of net neutrality, Thune made the case that any political interference in how the Internet operates is inherently unacceptable.
Worse, in 2007, Thune railed against the “Fairness Doctrine,” arguing at the time, “I know the hair stands up on the back of my neck when I hear government officials offering to regulate the news media and talk radio to ensure fairness. I think most Americans have the same reaction.”

For the sake of argument, so what if Facebook had more “liiberal” content? Fox News, Breitbart and the Drudge Report display relentless conservative bias every day, and no Senators are trying to intimidate them to change their polices to reflect a more liberal point of view. Not all media has to be nonpartisan.
But Facebook has 1.6 billion “users,” and dwarfs all other websites in some key metrics that measure influence, which explain Thune’s meddling.
In reality, however, the political content of Facebook is mostly determined by the public, as its “users” choose which articles, videos and other content to share with their FB friends. It’s different for every user, from moment to moment. Liberals see mostly liberal content, and the same principle applies for both conservatives and moderates. Facebook does provide a powerful forum for peer-to-peer political education. But everyone can choose what to read and view and what to ignore, and that includes content spotlighted by Facebook’s administrators and staff.
But Brian Fung’s Washington Post article, “Facebook is making some big changes to Trending Topics, responding to conservatives” raises a disturbing possibility that facebook is caving to political pressure. As Fung reports,

Facebook said Monday it will stop relying as much on other news outlets to inform what goes into its Trending Topics section — a part of Facebook’s website that despite its small size has grown into a national political controversy amid accusations that the social network is stifling conservative voices on its platform.
Under the change, Facebook will discontinue the algorithmic analysis of media organizations’ websites and digital news feeds that partly determines which stories should be included in Trending Topics. Also being thrown out is a list of 1,000 journalism outlets that currently helps Facebook’s curators evaluate and describe the newsworthiness of potential topics, as well as a more exclusive list of 10 news sites that includes BuzzFeed News, the Guardian, the New York Times and The Washington Post.
…Facebook’s policy change Monday appears to be aimed at defusing the palpable tension between it and Republicans outraged over reports that Facebook’s Trending Topics could be biased against conservatives. Facebook’s announcement ending the scraping of news sites and RSS feeds for Trending Topics came in a response to Sen. John Thune (S.D.), the top Republican on the powerful Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee. Thune demanded on May 10 that Facebook answer a series of questions in light of the mounting outcry over the perceived bias.

Facebook has reponded that “Suppressing political content or preventing people from seeing what matters most to them is directly contrary to our mission and our business objectives.” But the changes regarding the selection of ‘Trending Topics” content suggest otherwise.
Most Facebook users will probably not notice much change in political slant and tone. That will still be largely determined by user posts. But the possibility that Facebook’s content policy can be influenced by political intimidation, especially from the politician who leads the opposition to net neurtrality, is disturbing.

At The Nation, read “Resistance Is Not Enough. The Left Must Address the Grievances of the Working Class” by Anthony Flaccavento, author of Building a Healthy Economy from the Bottom Up: Harnessing Real-World Experience for Transformative Change and cofounder of the Rural Urban Bridge Initiative.: “The deluge of antidemocratic, generally inhumane actions taken by the Trump/Musk presidency are fulfilling our worst fears. So what should we do in response?…For most left-leaning activists, the answer is resistance. Resistance to Trump’s cabinet nominees; resistance to his mass deportations; resistance to Elon Musk’s ongoing evisceration of critical federal agencies. Team Trump’s destructive plans and actions cry out for resistance—in the streets, the courts, and anywhere else we might have impact. One example of the resistance platform is Indivisible’s “Practical Guide to Democracy on the Brink.” The essence of their strategy is encapsulated in one short sentence: “For the next two years, ‘no’ is a complete sentence.” This is “a time for defense,” they advise, rather than “proposing our own policies.”…the left’s almost singular focus on defense—without offering an equally compelling vision that addresses the grievances of rural communities and working-class people—is a grave mistake. If we don’t make our commitment to an economy and politics that serves everyday people loud and clear, we will undermine efforts to fight Trump and further solidify the estrangement of the working class. Our outrage and resistance must encompass the ongoing betrayal of farmers, unions, and workers and US manufacturers and small businesses…As New York Times reporters summarized their conversations with Black and Latino voters who went for Trump in 2024, “Democrats’ dire warnings about threats to democracy felt far less compelling compared with the urgency of their own struggles to pay the rent.” Pushed by some of the most prominent consultants and pundits on the left, that was an unforced error that may have cost Kamala Harris the election. We cannot afford to make that mistake again…the Trump/Musk onslaught of anti-worker, anti-farmer, pro-corporate actions are an opportunity to offer a plan of our own to unrig the system most Americans hate…We can begin by lifting up some of the Democrats who won in Trump-leaning districts, emphasizing their pro-worker or pro-farmer positions and pledges to confront corporate power. From Chris Deluzio in western Pennsylvania to Marie Gluesenkamp Perez in rural Washington, to Pat Ryan in New York’s Hudson Valley, the Democratic tent includes people who know that fighting for the little guy against Wall Street’s housing grab or for farmers’ rights over John Deere’s profits is both the right policy and a winning politics…As Representative Khanna put it in a recent New York Times op-ed, “The alternative to Mr. Trump cannot be a defense of institutions as they are. We need to stand for national renewal driven not by nostalgia for some golden past or simplistic anti-system slogans, but by offering transformative solutions to deliver future prosperity for all Americans, rekindling our bonds as citizens and healing our divides in the process.”

Galen Druke of 538/ABC News conducted a discussion with Washington Post data scientist Lenny Bronner and New York Times polling editor Ruth Igielnik on the topic, “Democrats Aren’t Popular. What Should They Do about it?” It went like this:

Former Rep. Tim Ryan has an article worth reading at MSNBC.com, “The right way for Democrats to communicate about Trump,” subtitled “If Democrats want to reach working class voters, they must acknowledge, empathize and recapture the narrative from Donald Trump.” As Ryan observes, “When I reflect on November’s election, two glaring omissions are missing from the Democratic Party’s messaging: acknowledgment and empathy. The lesson Democrats should take away from Kamala Harris’ loss to Donald Trump is the importance of meeting people where they are emotionally. If Democrats don’t do that, their message isn’t going to stick…Democrats should have acknowledged the tough spot a lot of Americans were in. They should have shown voters they’re empathetic. But we also can’t just look in the past and talk about what the Democratic Party should have done. Democrats in Congress have a real opportunity to right that ship and show voters what the party really stands for… There’s an analog element to this, members should be holding town hall meetings as often as they can. They need to get on the local news. It’s time to start building the case for the American people. But that doesn’t mean Democrats should run around with hair on fire over every issue…Don’t take the bait on everything coming out of this White House. Sometimes the smartest strategy is just to play possum. As Democratic strategist James Carville recently suggested in a guest essay for the New York Times, maybe the most daring political maneuver Democrats could implement right now is to “roll over and play dead.”

How would you rate Democrats response to Trump’s speech Tuesday night? It was a tough call, and they ended up playing it safe, maybe a bit too safe. Democratic Rep. Al Green (TX-9 ) was removed from the SOTU for standing up and protesting Medicaid cuts early on during Trump’s speech. There were a few other Democratic walk-outs, but most Democratic members just sat there and grumbled, sometimes loud enough to be heard. It was the “We must maintain decorum and civility” strategy, with some Democratic members waving little signs with protest messages that looked more like those personal fans people used to use when it got hot in D.C., back before air conditioning. That may have been the right strategy. People forget all about the last SOTU within a few days after it is delivered. Why risk anything, when no one cares that much, so shortly after the event? Then there is the strategic priciple, “When your adversary is making himself look bad, get out of the way.” When your political opponent is delivering a speech that history books will characterize as drenched with bile, pique and resentment, why turn a two-day story into a week of coverage that could backfire? But, what if all the Democrats walked out on cue, right after a personal insult directed their way?  We’ll never know if that would have been a better strategy. But it seems like a question worth considering before the next SOTU. There is something to be said for a dignified walk-out, when confronted with personal insults. Nothing wrong with modeling civility, while those across the aisle howl like demented cheerleaders, and their leader finishes his sour speech to a half-empty hall. That’s not such a bad look for Democrats either.

As we all watch the ongoing assault on the federal government, I keep asking myself: “Did Trump really campaign on this?” I looked into it at New York, and I think this should be a question Democrats ask regularly.

Amid the chaos of federal hiring freezes, grant freezes, the wild DOGE effort to arbitrarily slash federal payrolls and cancel programs and contracts, and congressional Republican efforts to cut trillions of dollars in spending to pay for tax cuts, you frequently hear that Americans are getting what they said they wanted in November. Even if you laugh, which you almost have to do, at Donald Trump’s absurd claims of an incredible, unprecedented landslide victory and an unlimited mandate to do anything he wants, laws be damned, there remains an underlying sense that he told voters what he’d do and they either supported it or weren’t paying attention.

But that’s just it: Trump didn’t do that. Yes, he promised the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants, pledged to melt down the polar caps with a “drill, baby, drill” energy policy, and made it pretty clear any sort of anti-discrimination efforts are as doomed as U.S. support for Ukraine. Trump told voters a lot of things; some of it was dead serious, and other bits were probably for entertainment value. But he did not promise a slash-and-burn austerity budget and a radically downsized federal government. And Trump certainly didn’t reveal that he would give Elon Musk, his campaign’s chief funder, personal power to take over federal agencies and terrorize their personnel, mugging and laughing like a cartoon villain the whole time.

It wasn’t in the Trump campaign platform

There were 20 planks in the Trump-Vance 2024 campaign platform. None of them involved gutting the federal budget and firing tens or hundreds of thousands of federal employees.

• Plank No. 6 promises “large tax cuts for workers, and no tax on tips!” but says nothing about the high-end and corporate tax cuts Trump is now pushing or, even more crucially, how to pay for them.

• Plank No. 9 pledges to “end the weaponization of the government against the American people” (a pretty clear hint that the new administration regards Trump supporters and only Trump supporters as “the American people”). Perhaps that suggests forced turnover in the Department of Justice, but nowhere else.

• Plank No. 15 pledges to “cancel the electric car mandate and cut costly and burdensome regulations,” but again, this is a million miles away from reductions across federal agencies.

• Plank No. 16 calls for ending “federal funding for any school pushing critical race theory, radical gender ideology, and other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content on our children.” Instead of this very specific pledge, we’re getting a governmentwide demolition of anything related to gender or race and the firing of any employees who dare utter a list of ideologically forbidden words.

There’s nothing in the platform remotely resembling DOGE, the Office of Management and Budget’s effort to wrest the spending power away from Congress, or the radical shifts in resource allocations necessary to implement a radical federal budget by Congress.

It wasn’t in the RNC platform, either

Was there anything like what we are now seeing in the (more detailed) Republican National Convention platform? There is this one sentence in the section on inflation: “Republicans will immediately stabilize the Economy by slashing wasteful Government spending and promoting Economic Growth.” Okay, that’s in the ballpark, but every candidate in either party opposes “waste.” That doesn’t suggest the arbitrary $2 trillion savings goal Musk has advanced or the $1.5 to $2 trillion of spending cuts contained in the draft House budget resolution under consideration right now. For the most part, the party platform (and Trump’s campaign rhetoric) suggests that “unleashing” energy production is the real key to controlling inflation and growing the economy. And the document includes both a variety of new spending initiatives and redundant promises to leave Social Security and Medicare alone (Medicaid is not mentioned in either the campaign or party platforms).

Trump didn’t talk about it on the trail

How about Trump’s own utterances? His acceptance speech in Milwaukee was a 90-minute presentation of his case for returning to the White House. Again, there was no real hint that massive federal spending cuts would be deployed to deal with inflation or reduce budget deficits; instead, Trump plainly said wildly increased energy production would slay inflation and that tax cuts would pay for themselves through increased growth. In accordance with his focus on energy policy, Trump did make one specific spending cut promise: “They’ve spent trillions of dollars on things having to do with the Green New Scam. It’s a scam … And all of the trillions of dollars that are sitting there not yet spent, we will redirect that money for important projects like roads, bridges, dams and we will not allow it to be spent on the meaningless Green New scam ideas.” So yes, he did warn us about that, though again, there was no sense that federal spending was at crisis levels requiring radical austerity budgeting; it was more a matter of spending being directed to ideologically unacceptable goals.

Trump and his campaign spilled many millions of words via speeches, ads, and surrogate appearances without giving any real indication that a pre-Trump tea-party-style attack on federal spending, programs, and personnel was in the offing. But you know who did provide some pretty clear warning signs of the chaos to come? The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 blueprint.

Decimating the federal government is a Project 2025 plan

One of the four major “promises” addressed in Project 2025’s main report (Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise) is “Dismantle the administrative state and return self-governance to the American people.” The foreword to this document argues for executive-branch usurpation of congressional authority over federal spending with this justification of power grabs to come: “The Administrative State holds 100 percent of its power at the sufferance of Congress, and its insulation from presidential discipline is an unconstitutional fairy tale spun by the Washington Establishment to protect its turf.”

Russell Vought, now director of the Office of Management and Budget, penned a chapter on the office of the president that treats as paramount the goal to “bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will” by any means possible. A subsequent chapter on “Managing the Bureaucracy” calls bluntly for an end to the civil-service system as we have known it, and other chapters envision radical reductions in federal involvement in domestic-governance areas ranging from education to housing to transportation. The entire document faithfully reflects a pre-Trump conservative austerity agenda as old as the original opposition to the New Deal and as recent as George W. Bush’s and Paul Ryan’s assaults on entitlement programs. But it’s not what Trump campaigned on; indeed, he repeatedly disclaimed any knowledge of or agreement with Project 2025’s work, notably in this July 2024 Truth Social post:

“I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.”

Yet a Politico analysis of early Trump executive orders found 37 separate Project 2025 recommendations embedded in them, some lifting language directly from its published recommendations.

Much of what the Trump administration is doing right now is an amalgam of Project 2025’s goals achieved initially through the patented chaos tactics of Elon Musk and subsequently by Trump appointees under Russ Vought’s direction. If it can get its act together, the Republican-controlled Congress is expected to rubber-stamp legislation that decimates the federal government in part to finance tax cuts and in part for the sheer ideological hell of it. Some Trump voters may be happy with this massive bait-and-switch. But for others, it will come as a nasty surprise.

“The Democratic Party begins 2025 with several looming questions about its future,” Stephen Fowler writes in “After major 2024 defeats, the Democratic Party searches for a new direction” at apr.org. “Among them: how to recover from losing the White House and the Senate, in an election that saw Democrats lose ground across nearly every demographic group; who will lead its national party apparatus; and how it will handle President-elect Donald Trump’s second term….But as Trump prepares to retake the White House Monday, Democratic leaders have highlighted other results that show November’s losses are not fatal….For example, many down-ballot Democrats outperformed the top of the ticket in competitive races, with the party managing to gain one seat in the House. That shrunk the margin for an already-tight GOP majority that struggled with infighting during the last Congress….Democrats also saw record fundraising last year, and point to years of behind-the-scenes investment in voter data and campaign resources that they say has created a more coordinated and robust party infrastructure for future election cycles….At an in-person forum in Detroit Thursday, candidates seeking to help run the DNC largely agreed on the path forward for Democrats to regain power and the trust of voters who stayed home or supported Trump: year-round organizing efforts, more resources for state and local parties and spreading the Democratic message beyond traditional and friendly media sources.”

In “Democrats’ future crisis: The biggest states that back them are shrinking” Jonathan J. Cooper reports at AP, via pbs.org: “With America’s population shifting to the South, political influence is seeping from reliably Democratic states to areas controlled by Republicans. Coming out of a presidential election where they lost all seven swing states, Democrats are facing a demographic challenge that could reduce their path to winning the U.S. House of Representatives or the White House for the long term….If current trends hold through the 2030 census, states that voted for Vice President Kamala Harris will lose around a dozen House seats — and Electoral College votes — to states that voted for President-elect Donald Trump. The Democratic path to 270 Electoral College votes, the minimum needed to win the presidency, will get much narrower….“At the end of the day, Democrats have to be able to win in the South or compete in the South” if they want to control the levers of government, said Michael Li, senior counsel for the Democracy Program at New York University School of Law’s Brennan Center for Justice. “Otherwise, it’s a really uphill battle every time.”….The Brennan Center, which is left-leaning, projects Democratic states in 2024 would lose 12 seats in the next census. The right-leaning American Redistricting Project forecasts a similar blue-to-red shift but pegged the loss at 11 seats, not 12.”

Cooper continues, “To control the White House, House or Senate, Democrats will likely need to do better in the three southern swing states. Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina lean conservative but have elected Democrats at a statewide level….Alternatively, they could try to achieve their long-elusive goal of turning Texas blue or reverse the recent trend toward Republicans in Florida, once a swing state that has shifted hard to the right…. And while Harris won more than half of Hispanic voters, that support was down slightly from the roughly 6 in 10 Hispanic voters that Biden won, according to AP VoteCast. Roughly half of Latino men voted for Harris, down from about 6 in 10 who went for Biden….Democratic resurgence will require much more investment in state parties and a frank assessment of how to appeal to parts of the country that supported Trump, said James Skoufis, a New York state senator running to be chair of the Democratic National Committee….“It requires a reorientation of how we speak with voters,” Skoufis said. “It requires emphasizing our working class values again. And if we’re being honest with ourselves and we’re owning some of what just happened two months ago, we need to shed this perception that we are an elitist party.”

From “2024 Election Post-Mortems: The Elephant Under America’s Political Rug” by Washburnb at Daily Kos: “The oligarchs have acquired and weakened the ability of legacy news media icons like the WaPo and LA Times to warn their readers about the corporate takeover of the US government. The oligarchs and their theofascist allies have also built a modern, think-tank-driven media ecosystem designed to push RW propaganda and misinformation 24/7 for 52 weeks a year. That media ecosystem includes corrupted and shrunken social media platforms like Facebook and X(Twitter). Even TikTok is vulnerable because of its ownership by a Chinese oligarch with ties to the Chinese government—not to mention the national security issues that ownership raises….President Biden’s January 15th farewell address sounded a clear alarm about the corporate/oligarch takeover of American democracy. His labeling of this authoritarian movement as a new tech industrial complex echoed President Eisenhower’s 1961 warning about the threat of a rising military industrial complex to American democracy….The Democratic Party and its progressive allies must build a progressive,grassroots-based media/think tank ecosystem that can effectively counter the RW narrative of fear-based cruelty and domination. This work must be done as the Dems mount an effective 50-state/12-months-a-year campaign to reclaim the White House, Congress, and SCOTUS….It’s time for all of us to reclaim and rebuild our American democracy. Let’s agitate, educate, and organize our communities to build the future that we want for our children and their descendants….No one is going to save American democracy from oligarch-financed theofascism but We the People. President Biden made this point perfectly clear at the conclusion of his January 15th farewell address.”

There’s an old saying that, when you point your finger at someone else, your thumb is pointing back at you. In a perverse way, it characterizes the Democratic search for scapegoats following losses to Republican presidential candidates.

“It’s the crazy progressives who tanked Democratic prospects, with their looney woke policies.” Or, “No, it’s the pandering to conservatives which makes Democrats look corrupt to working-class voters.” If you suspect that both are partly true, you may be guilty of rational analysis.

Democrats have screwed up badly on a range of “cultural” issues, implementing unpopular policies like lax enforcement of America’s borders. On the other hand, palling around with Liz Cheney did not secure the coveted 270 EVs for the Donkey Party leader.

I may be wallowing in the false equivalency fever swamp here. But really, there is rarely a one-dimensional explanation for big political changes.

One factor that gets overlooked in pundit analysis is that people expect more from Democrats, and they don’t expect much from Republicans. It’s a lot easier for Democrats to disappoint voters, than it is for Republicans to do likewise. The bar is a lot lower for Republicans. A great many of their voters expect them to do nothing, and they almost always meet these low expectations.

Nearly all of the significant social and economic reforms passed during the last century were passed and signed into law by Democrats, frequently over the opposition of Republicans. If you think this is an exaggeration, quick, name a popular legislative reform that was passed by Republicans over the opposition of Democrats. That’s why you see memes like the one below, and there are zero memes depicting ‘Great Republican Contributions to the Lives of America’s Working People.’

Yes, Democrats have recently screwed up this legacy with excessive wokism. Think of the recent presidential election as a painful and costly course correction. But it’s more likely that Democrats will learn the lesson and recalibrate than it is that Republicans will become the enduring party of American workers and their families.

In “The Democrat who won in Trump country,” Noel King interviews Rep. Marie Glusenkamp Perez, cross-posted here from Vox:

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, politics editor of The Liberal Patriot newsletter and author of major works of political analysis, is cross-posted from The Liberal Patriot

Democrats have lost two of the last three presidential elections to Donald J. Trump. Donald Trump! And they now face a governing trifecta of House, Senate, and presidential control by their (semi-fascist?) opponents.

Clearly, something has gone dreadfully wrong. A clue can be found in the shocking decline of nonwhite working-class (non-college) support for Democrats in this election. Harris carried nonwhite working-class voters by a mere 32 points, a 16-point decline from Biden’s 48-point margin in 2020. (Obama carried them by 67 points in 2012!) This latest decline swept across both black and Latino working-class voters.

What on earth is going on? Whatever happened to Democrats’ identity as the party of the working class? After all, it has been Democrats’ seemingly unchallenged hold over the nonwhite working class that has made that identity even semi-plausible, as white working-class voters have slipped farther and farther away from the party. But now that’s gone too.

Trump dominated the working-class vote in 2024. And look what’s happened to the Democrats’ image over time:

As another indicator, look at this one:

Yup, the party of the working class no longer. So why might working-class voters, especially nonwhite working-class voters, be finding it ever more difficult to see the party as their tribune? A key reason is the overriding sense that Democrats’ priorities have changed over time and that the welfare of the working class is no longer front and center in their calculations. This chart illustrates the shift:

Democrats of course argue that while their cultural views may have shifted left over time and some of these views may be unpopular (actually, most are), they are nevertheless just as focused on the welfare of the working class as they’ve ever been. This ignores the basic reality of opportunity costs. The time, energy and resources spent on the Democrats’ cultural left agenda is time, energy, and resources taken away from promoting the economic welfare of the working class. Working-class voters are well aware of this tradeoff, even if progressive activists and “the Groups” are not. As a result, working-class voters tend to connect their economic criticisms of the Democrats to the party’s apparent preoccupation with cultural issues pushed by their liberal college-educated supporters—issues working class voters either don’t care about or are actively hostile to. This connection is clearly dragging the Democrats down with these voters.

The salience of this connection is demonstrated by post-election data from the Blueprint strategy group. The third most potent reason—after too much inflation and too much illegal immigration—for voters to choose Trump over Harris in a pairwise comparison test was “Kamala Harris is focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues rather than helping the middle class”. And among swing voters, this concern about focus was the most powerful reason.

And look at what swing voters who chose Trump thought were extremely or very accurate criticisms of the Democratic Party:

A recent article by Jennifer Medina in the New York Times illustrates how these views are expressed by nonwhite working-class voters:

“Democrats flipped,” said Daniel Trujillo, who owns a barbershop in East Las Vegas and watched many of his customers shift from supporting Barack Obama to favoring Mr. Trump. “They went from being for the working class to, if you’re not college-educated and have money, you’re not worthy.” He said he had watched with delight as his customers increasingly warmed toward Mr. Trump.

“The right turned blue-collar and went full border-control, strong-economy and law-and-order,” Mr. Trujillo added. “Who doesn’t want that?”

Who indeed? Later in the article, Medina notes:

Even as they held onto their faith in the American dream, many nonwhite working-class voters said they had come to see the Democratic Party as condescending, overly focused on issues irrelevant to their day-to-day lives. They bristled over social issues like the concerns of transgender children or the party’s focus on abortion rights. They felt scolded by liberals on Covid precautions—and crushed by the pandemic’s economic fallout.

Some sounded every bit as aggrieved as the white working-class voters who first fueled Mr. Trump’s MAGA movement, voicing similar complaints about migrants being given easier access to housing and food than homeless veterans living on the streets.

These views and their antagonistic relationship to Democratic orthodoxy are further illustrated in an excellent article by Simon van Zuylen-Wood, “The End of Denial: How Trump’s rising popularity in New York (and everywhere else) exposed the Democratic Party’s break with reality,” that focused on the red shift this year in the Queens borough of New York City. He observes:

Through the resistance years and into the COVID era, liberal institutions from universities to media organizations to nonprofits cathartically swung left, which bred further denial about what voters cared about and were experiencing. A partial catalogue of progressive denialism, listed in no particular order: that alienating left-wing positions or rhetoric were confined to college campuses; that the externalities of pandemic shutdowns, such as grade-school learning loss, were overblown; that the rapid adoption of new gender orthodoxies, especially in settings involving children, was not a popular concern; that the “defund the police” movement would be embraced by communities of color; that inflation was overstated; that the pandemic crime wave was exaggerated; that concerns over urban disorder represented a moral panic; that Latinos would welcome loosened border restrictions.

Van Zuylen-Woods’ reporting indicates how absurd this denialism is when matched against the lives—the “lived experience”, as it were—of ordinary residents of Corona, Queens:

Carlos Bermejo owns an Italian Latin restaurant called La Pequeña Taste of Italy. Bermejo, who emigrated from Ecuador, says the street vendors undercut his sales and the streetwalkers deter customers and attract crime. “In the summer, in the window, maybe like ten ladies,” he said. Inflation was another concern: Facing rising costs of his own, he says he had to hike the price of his standard aluminum-container takeout from $10 to $12. When I asked whom he voted for, he looked at me like I was kidding: “Donald Trump. You gotta do that. Everybody knows that.”

Several blocks away, the manager of a grocery store complained of a spike in thefts—he didn’t want me to use his name to avoid risking further incidents—as well as of street vendors pouring their grease directly into the sewer, which he said attracted rats that wound up in his store basement. He says he voted for Biden in 2020 and Trump this time around. Carmen Enriquez, a substitute teacher from Ecuador who lives nearby in what is technically Elmhurst, says she’s a registered Democrat who voted Republican this year for the first time. She complained that migrants had received free shelter and benefits while existing residents struggled. She directed her ire at not only the Biden administration but also Ocasio-Cortez, who appeared at a local rally last year to support migrant vendors, and State Senator Jessica Ramos, who co-sponsored a bill several years ago to decriminalize sex work…

One of the most interesting people I spoke with was 57-year-old Mauricio Zamora, who lives just off vendor-packed Corona Plaza on 103rd Street. Zamora runs a Facebook page and an active WhatsApp group for an organization he founded called Neighbors of the American Triangle, named after a minuscule nearby park he started maintaining during the pandemic when it became a magnet for drinkers…

He says that thanks to the chaos on Roosevelt, he has been getting fined for random garbage in front of his home, which he owns. He feels some of his local representatives, meanwhile, have prioritized tolerance over law and order. Using our translator now, he claimed they showed up only for “LGBT mobilization or when the lady prostitutes do a rally.”

In short, Democrats have lost the plot in the view of more and more nonwhite, especially nonwhite working-class, voters. How can they find it again? The obvious answer would be to sever the party’s connection to unpopular and unworkable social policies and re-establish a focus on the material welfare of working-class voters.

The simplest way to do this, in turn, would be to forcefully denounce said policies and unambiguously break from the forces in the party that are pushing these policies—“the Groups” and their allies that insist being a Democrat is inseparable from being a progressive as they define it. But this is hard because it entails conflict and conflict with the Groups is something Democrats have been determined to avoid.

This is foolish, not least because the theory upon which this deference was based—that the Groups actually represented groups of voters—was incorrect. As Ezra Klein, generally a loyal liberal Democrat, has been compelled to admit:

[I]t’s very important to look at the power of this nonprofit complex in the Democratic Party. Because part of what that power has been based on…is a sense that the way to understand what …collections of voters want…is by listening to what the groups purporting to represent them want…

“[I]n the case of nonwhite voters, it proved really, really deceptive. So the groups that were, in a sense, representing Hispanic voters within the Democratic coalition — they were part of what was leading Democrats, many of them in 2020, to say they were going to decriminalize border crossing, unauthorized border crossing. But that wasn’t what Hispanic voters wanted.

It was many of the groups representing Black Americans that pushed the Democratic Party toward “Defund the Police” rhetoric…But that was never popular, and certainly is not now popular, among Black Americans.

And so there’s been this dynamic where you have these groups that are claiming to speak for very, very wide swaths of the electorate and persuading Democrats of things that those parts of the electorate simply don’t believe. In the room where the Democrats are sort of making these decisions, you have staffers from these groups, and they’re often maybe the only Black person in the room or maybe the only Hispanic person in the room, so they’re granted a degree of deference.

But it has proved to be a misleading form of politics. Because these aren’t mass-membership groups. And this is a place where I think the Democratic theory, political theory, has just actually and truly failed. The Democratic Party moved into a position of thinking it was doing more than it ever had before to win over the allegiance of this multicultural electorate.

And it has lost huge amounts of support among that very same multicultural electorate. Because the people it was listening to as its guide to how to win them over were nonrepresentative.

In short, it was a catastrophic error which should now be rectified. And that will inevitably entail conflict. Adam Jentleson put the issue squarely in a recent New York Times op-ed:

Democrats cannot [achieve electoral dominance] as long as they remain crippled by a fetish for putting coalition management over a real desire for power…Democrats remain stuck trying to please all of their interest groups while watching voters of all races desert them over the very stances that these groups impose on the party.

Achieving a supermajority means declaring independence from liberal and progressive interest groups that prevent Democrats from thinking clearly about how to win. Collectively, these groups impose the rigid mores and vocabulary of college-educated elites, placing a hard ceiling on Democrats’ appeal and fatally wounding them in the places they need to win not just to take back the White House, but to have a prayer in the Senate…

[W]hen Kamala Harris was running for the Democratic nomination in 2019, the A.C.L.U. pushed her to articulate a position on surgeries for transgender prisoners, needlessly elevating an obscure issue into the public debate as a purity test…

The same year, a coalition of groups including the Sunrise Movement and the Working Families Party demanded that all Democrats running for president embrace decriminalizing border crossings. When candidates were asked at a debate if they would do so, every candidate on the stage that night raised a hand (except Michael Bennet). Groups like Justice Democrats pushed Democrats to defund the police and abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Positions taken a few years ago are fair game in campaigns, and by feeding into Republican attacks these efforts helped Mr. Trump and left the people and causes they claim to fight for under threat.

In other words, if anyone was being thrown under the bus, it was the very voter groups the Groups purported to represent! It’s high time for Democrats to turn the tables and throw the Groups under the bus. It’s the road back to the working class if the Democrats care to take it. Otherwise, they’ll be stuck being America’s educated, affluent party relying on their redoubts in blue metropolitan areas for political support. That would be a sad fate indeed for America’s historic party of the working class.

“Why Does No One Understand the Real Reason Trump Won?” by TNR editor Michael Tomasky is cross-posted from The New Republic:

I’ve had a lot of conversations since Tuesday revolving around the question of why Donald Trump won. The economy and inflation. Kamala Harris didn’t do this or that. Sexism and racism. The border. That trans-inmate ad that ran a jillion times. And so on.

These conversations have usually proceeded along lines where people ask incredulously how a majority of voters could have believed this or that. Weren’t they bothered that Trump is a convicted felon? An adjudicated rapist? Didn’t his invocation of violence against Liz Cheney, or 50 other examples of his disgusting imprecations, obviously disqualify him? And couldn’t they see that Harris, whatever her shortcomings, was a fundamentally smart, honest, well-meaning person who would show basic respect for the Constitution and wouldn’t do anything weird as president?

The answer is obviously no—not enough people were able to see any of those things. At which point people throw up their hands and say, “I give up.”

But this line of analysis requires that we ask one more question. And it’s the crucial one: 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.

Let me say that again, in case it got lost: Today, the right-wing media sets the news agenda in this country. Not The New York Times. Not The Washington Post (which bent over backwards to exert no influence when Jeff Bezos pulled the paper’s Harris endorsement). Not CBS, NBC, and ABC. The agenda is set by all the outlets I listed in the above paragraph. Even the mighty New York Times follows in its wake, aping the tone they set disturbingly often.

If you read me regularly, you know that I’ve written this before, but I’m going to keep writing it until people—specifically, rich liberals, who are the only people in the world who have the power to do something about this state of affairs—take some action.

I’ve been in the media for three decades, and I’ve watched this happen from the front row. Fox News came on the air in 1996. Then, it was an annoyance, a little bug the mainstream media could brush off its shoulder. There was also Rush Limbaugh; still, no comparison between the two medias. Rush was talented, after a fashion anyway, but couldn’t survive in a mainstream lane (recall how quickly the experiment of having him be an ESPN color commentator went off the rails.) But in the late 1990s, and after the Internet exploded and George W. Bush took office, the right-wing media grew and grew. At first, the liberal media grew as well along with the Internet, in the form of a robust blogosphere that eventually spawned influential, agenda-setting web sites like HuffPost. But billionaires on the right have invested far more heavily in media in the last two decades than their counterparts on the left—whose ad-supported, VC-funded operations started to fizzle out once social media and Google started eating up the revenue pie.

And the result is what we see today. The readily visual analogy I use is: Once upon a time, the mainstream media was a beachball, and the right-wing media was a golf ball. Today, the mainstream media (what with layoffs and closures and the near death of serious local news reporting) is the size of a volleyball, and the right-wing media is the size of a basketball, which, in case you’re wondering, is bigger.

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.

And that is why Donald Trump won. Indeed, the right-wing media is why he exists in our political lives in the first place. Don’t believe me? Try this thought experiment. Imagine Trump coming down that escalator in 2015 with no right-wing media; no Fox News; an agenda still set, and mores still established, by staid old CBS News, the House of Murrow, and The New York Times.

That atmosphere would have denied an outrageous figure like Trump the oxygen he needed to survive and flourish. He just would not have been taken seriously at all. In that world, ruled by a traditional mainstream media, Trump would have been seen by Republicans as a liability, and they would have done what they failed to do in real life—banded together to marginalize him.

But the existence of Fox changed everything. Fox hosted the early debates, which Trump won not with intelligence, but outrageousness. He tapped into the grievance culture Fox had nursed among conservatives for years. He had (most of the time) Rupert Murdoch’s personal blessing. In 2015-16, Fox made Trump possible.

And this year, Fox and the rest of the right-wing media elected him. I discussed all this Thursday with Matthew Gertz of Media Matters for America, who watches lots of Fox News so the rest of us don’t have to. He made the crucial point—and you must understand this—that nearly all the crazy memes that percolated into the news-stream during this election came not from Trump or JD Vance originally, but from somewhere in the right-wing media ecosystem.

The fake story about Haitian residents of Springfield, Ohio eating cats and dogs, for example, started with a Facebook post citing second- and third-hand sources, Gertz told me; it then “circulated on X and was picked up by all the major right-wing influencers.” Only then did Vance, a very online dude, notice it and decide to run with it. And then Trump said it himself at the debate. But it started in the right-wing media.

Likewise with the post-debate ABC “whistleblower” claims, which Gertz wrote about at the time. This was the story that ABC, which hosted the only presidential debate this election, fed Team Harris the questions in advance. This started, Gertz wrote, as a “wildly flimsy internet rumor launched by a random pro-Trump X poster.” Soon enough, the right-wing media was all over it.

Maybe that one didn’t make a huge difference (although who knows?), but this one, I believe, absolutely did: the idea that Harris and Joe Biden swiped emergency aid away from the victims of Hurricane Helene (in mostly Southern, red states) and gave it all to undocumented migrants. It did not start with Trump or his campaign or Vance or the Republican National Committee or Lindsey Graham. It started on Fox. Only then did the others pick it up. And it was key, since this was a moment when Harris’s momentum in the polling averages began to flag.

I think a lot of people who don’t watch Fox or listen to Sinclair radio don’t understand this crucial chicken-and-egg point. They assume that Trump says something, and the right-wing media amplify it. That happens sometimes. But more often, it’s the other way around. These memes start in the media sphere, then they become part of the Trump agenda.

I haven’t even gotten to the economy, about which there is so much to say. Yes—inflation is real. But the Biden economy has been great in many ways. The U.S. economy, wrote The Economist in mid-October, is “the envy of the world.” But in the right-wing media, the horror stories were relentless. And mainstream economic reporting too often followed that lead. Allow me to make the world’s easiest prediction: After 12:00 noon next January 20, it won’t take Fox News and Fox Business even a full hour to start locating every positive economic indicator they can find and start touting those. Within weeks, the “roaring Trump economy” will be conventional wisdom. (Eventually, as some of the fruits from the long tail of Bidenomics start growing on the vine, Trump may become the beneficiary of some real-world facts as well, taking credit for that which he opposed and regularly denounced.)

Back to the campaign. I asked Gertz what I call my “Ulan Bator question.” If someone moved to America from Ulan Bator, Mongolia in the summer and watched only Fox News, what would that person learn about Kamala Harris? “You would know that she is a very stupid person,” Gertz said. “You’d know that she orchestrated a coup against Joe Biden. That she’s a crazed extremist. And that she very much does not care about you.”

Same Ulan Bator question about Trump? That he’s been “the target of a vicious witch-hunt for years and years,” that he is under constant assault; and most importantly, that he is “doing it all for you.”

To much of America, by the way, this is not understood as one side’s view of things. It’s simply “the news.” This is what people—white people, chiefly—watch in about two-thirds of the country. I trust that you’ve seen in your travels, as I have in mine, that in red or even some purple parts of the country, when you walk into a hotel lobby or a hospital waiting room or even a bar, where the TVs ought to be offering us some peace and just showing ESPN, at least one television is tuned to Fox. That’s reach, and that’s power. And then people get in their cars to drive home and listen to an iHeart, right-wing talk radio station. And then they get home and watch their local news and it’s owned by Sinclair, and it, too, has a clear right-wing slant. And then they pick up their local paper, if it still exists, and the oped page features Cal Thomas and Ben Shapiro.

Liberals, rich and otherwise, live in a bubble where they never see this stuff. I would beg them to see it. Watch some Fox. Listen to some Christian radio. Experience the news that millions of Americans are getting on a daily basis. You’ll pretty quickly come to understand what I’m saying here.

And then contemplate this fact: If you think they’re done, you’re in fantasy land. They’re not happy with the rough parity, the slight advantage they have now. They want media domination. Sinclair bought the once glorious Baltimore Sun. Don’t think they’ll stop there. I predict Sinclair or the News Corp. will own The Washington Post one day. Maybe sooner than we think.

I implore you. Contemplate this. If you’re of a certain age, you have a living memory of revolutions in what we used to call the Third World. Question: What’s the first thing every guerilla army, whether of the left or the right, did once they seized the palace? They took over the radio or television station. First. There’s a reason for that.

It’s the same reason Viktor Orban told CPAC in 2022: “Have your own media.”

This is a crisis. The Democratic brand is garbage in wide swaths of the country, and this is the reason. Consider this point. In Missouri on Tuesday, voters passed a pro-abortion rights initiative, and another that raised the minimum wage and mandated paid leave. These are all Democratic positions. But as far as electing someone to high office, the Man-Boy Love Party could probably come closer than the Democrats. Trump beat Harris there by 18 points, and Senator Josh Hawley beat Lucas Kunce, who ran a good race and pasted Hawley in their debate, by 14 points.

The reason? The right-wing media. And it’s only growing and growing. And I haven’t even gotten to social media and Tik Tok and the other platforms from which far more people are getting their news these days. The right is way ahead on those fronts too. Liberals must wake up and understand this and do something about it before it’s too late, which it almost is.