Triumph of the feels

In 2004, the US made the disastrous decision to re-elect George W. Bush. The UK press and public were almost uniformly aghast. After the election was called, the Guardian's G2 magazine appeared on newsstands with a solid black front page except for tiny white lettering in the center: Oh, God.

I will admit to some sense of shocked superiority and disdain at the time, here in the UK, for the unthinkable blunder committed by our American cousins.

Twenty years later, a chastened UK looks on as America does it again. After Boris Johnson and Brexit, we know now just how thinkable such a blunder is. Our appalled gaze is tempered with humility. We understand—at least to the limited extent we understand our own disastrous democratic misfire.

Donald Trump lost the election in 2020 largely because of his terrible mismanagement of the COVID pandemic together with a growing desire for voters across the world to be anti-incumbency. At the end of his presidency, he had a job approval rating of 34% and a record-low average of 41%.

Four years later, people’s memories have been massaged by time so that the retrospective job approval rating for his previous tenure has jumped to 50%.

Perception is a funny old thing that doesn’t always jibe with reality.

Take inflation, one of the core components of Trump’s recent surprise election victory. People’s perceptions of inflation have been incredibly negative. And as we have seen in previous elections, ideas of inflation can act like a noose around an incumbent nominee’s neck. (We can argue about whether Kamala Harris was an incumbent nominee, but she was effectively saddled with it.) Average wages have grown above inflation for 18 months in a row. But it’s really difficult to argue with people’s subjective feelings about inflation and how expensive things are by showing them graphs of average incomes and macroeconomic data.

Though facts aren’t interested in emotions, perceptions trump reality, pun intended.

The unfair fight between brain and gut

Trying to explain the reality of these macroeconomic statistics is a tough ask when set against people’s feelings. The economy was seen as one of the most important issues in the election and the Democratic ticket suffered from the lag between the time of inflation lowering and the time of realizing the reality of this. As 538 showed, this lead time has been influenced heavily by the COVID pandemic.

The Republican strategists know this all too well. You see, it’s all about the feels. This election was not won on a solid platform of granular policy detail. Trump won on feels. “Make economy good, immigration bad.” Kamala Harris produced an 82-page book to detail her economic agenda. Trump, on the other hand, couldn’t care for details: “I’ll say 100, 200, I’ll say 500— I don’t care!” This was one of his many vague claims about the level of tariffs he would put on all imports into the US. As many have pointed out, showing much more knowledge of basic economic mechanisms, these tariffs would act as a sales tax on US consumers, creating incredible inflationary pressure.

Yet one of the most frequent, mindless comments from his supporters (and bots) during the election was that Harris had no policies.

He appears to have had no desire to exhibit economic knowledge to his voters, let alone be anything but carefree with his declarations. Because the feel here was “Protect America, China bad, make China pay.”

Except China won’t ultimately pay for across-the-board tariffs, the American consumer will.

In a widely spread but unconfirmed anecdote, this disparity between fact and feels is particularly apparent:

“My husband works for a small manufacturing company and here in south-western PA that means most employees are Trump voters. When the president of the company sat them down today to tell them their annual Christmas bonus would not come this year because they now need to purchase at least a year’s worth of products prior to January 21 due to the proposed tariffs, they did not understand. My husband said that their president had to explain what a tariff is and how it will directly hurt their company. They all thought the foreign company paid the tariff. This is a level of ignorance voting against their own interests here in PA, where we failed American women and children last night.”

Though I cannot confirm this actually happened, it has been seen elsewhere:

The general principle is abundantly clear. Low-information voters appear to have voted against their own interests (again) in opting for Donald Trump (again). Not only are widespread tariffs of up to 2000% (yes, that was another number he threw out at one point) incredibly inflationary, but so too will be the forced deportation of 13 million immigrants. The labor shortage will cause wages to shoot upwards—a simple function of supply and demand.

But “Biden/Harris economy bad, Trump plans good.” That is literally all the detail so many voters needed to make their decision. In 2019, the UK's Boris Johnson handily won the election with the simple mantra "Get Brexit done!" No real detailed policy agenda, just a basic idea, with the help of a lot of disinformation and control of the media landscape.

The message part is easy. The Democrats shouldn't find it difficult to define a simple narrative for the nation and distill it into emotional currency.

The Republicans have made this an art form. Importantly, though, the feels approach to Republican electioneering has been bolstered by their massive control of the information spaces and explicit or incidental use of disinformation.

Sorry, but it was always going to go this way

Here is my controversial opinion: No Democrat in this cycle, particularly in the meager 107 days that were available after Joe Biden stepped down, would have won the 2024 US election.

We are now in a period of the blame game. The US wasn’t ready for a woman of color. They chose the wrong vice presidential nominee, they should have chosen Josh Shapiro. They chose the wrong presidential nominee. They were too far left. They were too far right. They didn’t appeal to men and concentrated too much on toxic masculinity. They didn’t concentrate enough on black/white/Asian/Hispanic old/young men/women. They were too pro-Israel. There were too pro-Palestine.

On and on and on and on.

Some of these gripes may well have contributed to some degree, but the Democrats were destined not to win this election. Why? Not to completely ignore the global trend of anti-establishment anti-incumbency, but it was disinformation, misinformation, lack of information, and information-space control.

Looking at the top 20 podcasts list on Spotify, we see a proliferation of right-wing shows. The top three are all conservatives: Joe Rogan, Tucker Carson, and Shawn Ryan. Add to them many of the rest of the list such as Charlie Kirk, Dan Bongino, Theo Von, Megyn Kelly, Ben Shapiro, Candace Owens, and you can see that the podcast world has an incredibly rightward skew.

Of course, we can ask whether the information space drives political thought or whether it is a reflection thereof, but the domination is clear.

The same can be said in other forms of media. Fox News famously has a gargantuan reach compared to other cable news channels. The Sinclair Broadcast Group monopolizes local TV news stations to the point where newsreaders are given identical conservative scripts to convince their audiences, even though the local channels may have CBS or ABC in their titles. Sinclair has a right-wing grip on local news media. Then there is the conservative phenomenon of American talk radio. You would be hard-pressed to turn the dial of the car radio and find a liberal source of information the length and breadth of the United States.

And then there is Twitter. Or X. Or MuskWorld. The South African tech bros Elon Musk, David Sacks, and Peter Thiel have their fingerprints all over the Republican campaign and are likely to form an American political oligarchy in the next administration. And that's not to mention their desire for "techno-fascism" (yes, that's a thing). We now know from the Wall Street Journal analysis that X amplifies conservative voices at a ratio of 2 to 1 over liberals for new accounts.

New X users with interests in topics such as crafts, sports and cooking are being blanketed with political content and fed a steady diet of posts that lean toward Donald Trump and that sow doubt about the integrity of the Nov. 5 election, a Wall Street Journal analysis found.

We know from leaked coding that he amplifies his own voice not just to his 200 million followers but forcibly upon accounts that don’t follow him. Unless you have blocked him, every time you turn on X, his voice will be at the top of the feed.

The problem here is that his voice drips with disinformation. Musk's disinformation travels faster and wider, as an NBC analysis found:

NBC News analyzed more than 700 of Musk’s election-related posts since July collected by the NBC News Decision Desk and found that, in the cases in which he expressed suspicion about voting, sometimes pushing conspiracy theories, he received significantly more engagement — as measured by likes, comments and reposts on X — than he did when he posted on other election topics. 

The difference in reach was vast: 5.2 times more likes, 4.2 times more comments and 9.1 times more reposts, when comparing the median election-doubting post to the median election post that didn’t cast doubt on the process. 

Indeed, another of their must-read articles is titled, “How Elon Musk turned X into a pro-Trump echo chamber.” Another analysis has shown that just on the subject of election integrity, the majority of Musk’s posts were disinformation. Concerning Musk’s 17,000 posts from this year alone that the report looked at, the “team fact-checked Musk's posts on election security and found that 55% contain misleading or false statements, or amplify posts that do.”

The non-profit organization Center for Countering Digital Hate carried out yet another study. CNN reported the following:

On his social media platform, Musk has posted a seemingly endless stream of political messages, many in support of Trump and far-right political narratives, generating more than 17.1 billion views since the July endorsement, according to the Center for Countering Digital Hate. Musk’s enormous megaphone generated twice as many views as all political ads on the platform combined during the period, the equivalent of spending roughly $24 million in campaign ads, the group said.

Simply put, X has become the propaganda arm for the Republican Party and Donald Trump.

Moreover, it wasn’t until recently that Facebook changed their algorithms back since they hugely benefited the right, although they still favor extremist parties.

The Democrats have no answer. They are not remotely on the same communications page.

The vast majority of the electorate in the US (and most countries, to be fair) are low-information voters who are vulnerable to disinformation, misinformation, and lack of information. Garbage in, garbage out. Poor decisions are made when we have a lack of access to decent information and requisite knowledge.

When it comes to ideas of masculinity or election integrity, disinformation prevails, erupting from the various megaphones that the GOP has in its media toolbox. It’s not so much that these ideas led to an electoral victory, but their distortion and amplification did. There was no counter-narrative, or if there was then there was no alternative media landscape in which it could take hold.

All the mechanisms of messaging are dominated by the right wing.

One of the most powerful advertisements that was run around the country to the tune of $95 million of ad spending, carefully targeted at particular demographic sections of the electorate, concerned Democratic support for gender reassignment surgery for immigrants in prison. Check those identitarian boxes. This became a widely discussed hot-button topic that gained huge political traction. The Republicans have learned over the decades, from the War on Christmas to Democrats stealing guns, that the culture wars generate more heat than light, and that irrational heat map guides the way to the ballot box.

How many actual examples are there of the surgery mentioned in the ad?

Two.

A subject that concerned two people created more motivation to vote than the building of 3 million houses or stimulus for small businesses or the protection of reproductive rights for women.

This is the importance of messaging, of amplification, of distorting importance.

The idea that Donald Trump would be the right choice to support the working class is laughable when the facts are that Joe Biden (the only president in history to have done so) literally walked a picket line and bent over backward to rescue pensions for unions like Teamsters.

But if people don’t know these things, they can’t throw them into their election calculus.

During the four-day DNC, a convention that was impeccably organized and delivered, seven Republican political players crossed the aisle to give powerful speeches endorsing Kamala Harris.

Fox News, as easily the most watched cable news channel in the country, didn’t televise a single one of them. Their viewership, often sitting as we all do within their own echo chamber, wouldn’t have been presented with this permission structure to cross the aisle themselves. This sort of media behavior starves the electorate of necessary information, or distorts it through an ideological lens.

For high-information voters, the discussion of Trump’s fascism, as claimed by his own administration members, was all over the news and in the information spaces we frequented. But we must be wary of projecting our own knowledge and understanding onto the rest of the voters around us. The vast majority of the population would have had little knowledge about this to the point that it would influence their evaluation of Trump and their decision to vote accordingly.

While there will always be an argument for much greater politics or civics education within schools and colleges and in society at large, there will always be the problem of low-information voters. People often don’t have the time or inclination or capacity to become knowledgeable enough to make decent political decisions. This leads to an overwhelming vulnerability to the pull of attractive (but often dangerous) feels that are frequently vague and devoid of rational basis.

Long games

As the US is on the brink of a slide toward isolationism and Christian nationalism, as it gears up to forcibly deport 13 million people with their American-citizen children and prepares for trade wars with every other country on Earth, we can see how the country got there.

The right wing has played an incredibly effective long game. Talk radio. Sinclair Broadcast Group. A plethora of podcasts. Fox News, Newsmax, OANN. Musk and X. The list goes on.

If Democrats want to win the next election, then they can’t just rely on the anti-incumbency tendency in modern democracies. They certainly can’t merely rely on decent policies, though they would definitely want those too. No, they need narrative for the American people that can be summed up into feels. And they need something to spread those feels far and wide, deep and high. The messages need to be constant, unrelenting even—both loud and subtle.

George Soros, bogeyman of the right wing, himself the victim of torrents of disinformation, knows this—he really does. The liberal philanthropist recently bought a $400 million stake in 227 US radio stations. He's got a plan, but he shouldn't be alone. This has to be the strategy of the left and center. Spending hundreds of millions on a last-minute ground game to get out the vote is all good and well, but the serious money needs to be spent much, much earlier. Years and years earlier.

Task 1: Create a narrative, a unifying message for the voters. Task 2: Get it out there.

You don’t really have a message if you are unable to communicate.

The future of American politics lies in the battle over the mechanics of messaging.