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.
