The next phase of the imagination battle begins now
After seven years of work, last Tuesday’s election was not the outcome we hoped for.
When MVP Harris got in, our hope was that she would do what she’s always done - prosecute the case, particularly against conservative economic priorities. For various reasons this did not happen in an effective or broadly persuasive enough way to overcome the wave of global post-COVID anti-incumbent sentiment, at least at the top of the ticket.
The macro indicators of the economy have improved markedly since 2020. The objective reality is that Biden did a good job managing the economy and recovering from the pandemic. But the underlying affordability crises, which started long before the pandemic, is ongoing, acutely real, and has arguably gotten worse. It’s affecting nearly all Americans, and Democrats didn’t meaningfully address this reality, nor have they told a cohesive narrative for how things have gotten so out of whack.
We will have much more to say on this, but for now, this is our first draft of a theory of the case.
The biggest single question the Harris campaign failed to provide an answer for to voters is where all our money went. The answer is that the rich have taken $50 trillion from the rest of us over the past five decades or so. This happened one tax cut, one union suppression campaign, one junk fee at a time. The affordability crisis IS the inequality crisis. This is the problem at the root of all of our other problems.
But in the absence of this clear backbone of a story, the right, the Trump campaign and an army of MAGA influencers were able to fill the media system with divisive nonsense. The real problem, they said, was selfish childless cat ladies or trans kids joining sports teams or Nancy Pelosi or immigrants generally or Haitians or The Wokes or people who said Latinx once in 2021 or people on welfare or - whoever. The Trump campaign’s message at one point was that Kamala broke… literally everything.
This is a ridiculous, absurd message. But in the absence of a strong enough countermessage, it worked on a country that’s in a foul mood and looking for easy answers. Perhaps worse, this same nonsense blame game is continuing since the election, propagated and amplified by numerous Democrats and media figures with huge platforms.
The only way out of this is to tell the story of what the oligarch extremists are doing (dividing us) and why (so they can keep taking all the money) - and, crucially, that change is possible, and that working together across all sorts of differences to take on big challenges and expand freedom is truly the essential American story. The story has to be as clear, strong, consistent and repeated as many times as we heard Kamala start an answer with “I’m from a middle class family.” She did run a good campaign under nearly impossible circumstances. She was and is very disciplined. She was just disciplined on a story that wasn’t strong or resonant enough across the large swaths of voters we needed to win.
So where do we go from here? Clearly what we have been doing isn’t working. The media environment is a hot flaming mess. Democrats simply cannot depend on traditional media as an effective means of carrying their message. Just look at this data from a Reuters/Ipsos survey showing that the more misinformed voters were about basic issues, the more they voted for Trump:
That’s partially an indictment of traditional media, but it’s also an indictment of Democratic campaign strategy. First, Democrats chose not to figure out how to effectively defend Biden’s record from the beginning – our research showed most Democrats running in the 2022 midterms ignored it or ran away from it. So Dems began the 2024 cycle in a very deep hole when it came to voters’ trust on economic issues. The Harris campaign started to make progress on this trust deficit, but the anti-corporate message she began with became watered down as the campaign proceeded. In the end, it wasn’t enough.
Second, the right has a billions-of-dollars and 15-year head start on internet media and audience building. We made a little progress this cycle but we are way behind, and as we’ve found with other media and communications challenges, both the advantages and missed opportunities are cumulative and even compounding. Clearly the strategies of over-reliance on testing, late paid media spending, and cautious (or non) response to the Republicans’ nasty fear-based attacks on race and gender need to be SERIOUSLY interrogated.
Stopping authoritarianism is now going to get much more difficult. We will support efforts to be ready and to refuse authoritarian rule everywhere we can. We will plan for the 2026 elections to claw as much power back as we can to blunt the damage of what looks likely to be a Republican trifecta. And we will work to reimagine and reinvent how we can prepare to win in 2028. Reevaluating every element of campaign, media, and long-term organizing strategy is on the table.
As the writer and activist Elad Nehorai puts it in a beautiful post about this stage of the struggle:
“Imagination. Belief. Connection. These are what give us power. This is what they want to kill in us. This is what will get us to making hope something real.”
It is time to imagine, build, and believe. Take care of yourselves, and more soon.
P.S. In the meantime, as we look for answers and understanding, we are encouraging everyone to give the new social media app Bluesky a try. It has strong moderation tools and a much more even-handed algorithm, and could become an alternative to Elon Musk’s X. Follow our account and many others with this curated “starter pack” that will help get you up to speed quickly.