It's been edifying to watch Democrats and their pundits explain why Trump won. There’s an abundance of explanations: so many that I bet you can find one that suits your prepossessions. Kamala's own people have resolved to blame Joe Biden, which seems like piling on in light of the President's recent struggles with baby biting. But that people are blaming black men, young men, Latino men (they don't blame Latinx men anymore), or any podcaster with testicles, leaves me reflecting on my toxic and reactionary (yet sort of fun!) masculinity. But that everyone’s blaming white women reassures me that, even though I’m not at all cool, I’m on average cooler than white women, which is the single achievement of which I’m most proud, yet also the easiest. Maybe Kamala should’ve run on “Whip Inflation Now” or more "I'm for they/them." Maybe Liz Cheney is cursed. I don't know, really!
I do know that, if every left-handed person with brown eyes had voted for Harris, she would’ve won. They’re just as responsible as white women for the debacle, and responsible in the same counterfactual sense. Some white women are also left-handed people with brown eyes, which is amazing. The real question is why Harris didn't do more to appeal to people like that; that's why she lost. Well, having way too many explanations for Harris' defeat is a lot like having no explanation at all.
I don't know why Kamala lost. But I do have a notion of why many of the people I know, and me, were surprised she lost. We were ensconced in the mainstream media. Our sources were The Washington Post, CNN, The New Yorker, NPR, The Atlantic, Slate podcasts. I begin each day, as I have since I was a child, reading the Post. Then I roll around the circle of familiar legacy publications and networks. One reason I do this is so I can criticize and berate: I'm liable to immediately start arguing on X with an op-ed column. Brian Stelter has blocked me. I’ll likely be outraged by the smug and self-defeating slant of all these outlets on any given day, and I've written about that many times. I enjoy outrage, so I tune in.
I'd have done better this year talking to people at the grocery store, as Russ Smith reminds me.
And yet, these are still my sources of information, and I do demand heavy coverage of the Washington Commanders. Even as I ragged on the extremely tendentious news coverage in the Post, I still managed to absorb what the Post was saying as some sort of standard common wisdom. On the campaign's last weekend, the first paragraph of Post's top story ran like this:
Donald Trump spent his last Saturday of the presidential race making a trio of meandering, profane speeches in which he spoke repeatedly about women – saying they have to be protected “at home in suburbia,” complaining that he is not allowed to call women beautiful and calling himself the “father of fertilization” – a disjointed appeal to female voters as he faces a gender gap against Vice President Harris in public polls.
And here's the second paragraph:
Harris spoke in Charlotte, reprising her closing argument that Trump is not “someone who is thinking about making your life better,” as she cast a spotlight on his threats and inflammatory rhetoric. She called him a candidate “who is increasingly unstable, obsessed with revenge, consumed with grievance,” and warned he would walk into the Oval Office “stewing over an enemies list.”
In other words, in their top news story on the weekend before the election, the Post delivered Harris' talking points in the first paragraph. Then again in the second. In general, these outlets portrayed Trump as sexist and in terrible cognitive decline, as "wandering" or "meandering," "disjointed," "incoherent," and "bizarre." They managed to get that into purportedly neutral news accounts by quoting pet "experts," if not by flatly inserting the insults in news stories, as they often did, as in that article.
Also, very revealingly about themselves, they interpreted his jokes as symptoms. "Father of fertilization" is pretty darn hilarious. The Post tried to fact-check it.
And they portrayed Trump's rallies as relentlessly negative expressions of American "carnage." They emphasized, continuously, his "dark" vision of the country and contrasted it with Kamala's "uplifting" and "optimistic" one, expressing the ultra-primitive belief that positivity outsells negativity. Trump, they intoned many times, was running a dark and dangerous campaign, but also a completely disjointed and incompetent one, as his personality disintegrated before our eyes.
All that made his victory surprising. Unaccountable, really, though accounting for the outcome should have been these organizations' job.
CNN has not broadcast entire Trump speeches since 2016. They believe their viewers need protection from the alleged disinformation. So they assemble the bits they think are worst, and talk about each of them for days. This procedure created a false overall picture of Trump's campaign. There were lots of negative moments, lots of ridicule, lots of false claims. But there was also a constant invocation of unity, even racial unity. Trump wants to deport aliens, it’s true. He wants to unite Americans, and he's relentlessly positive about the future of the country. The New Yorker didn't even notice that, because they were trying to help Kamala's campaign, every day in every way.
The rally speeches that the Post described as “meandering” and “divisive” ended in this typical fashion:
We stand on the shoulders of American heroes who crossed the oceans, settled the continent, tamed the wilderness, laid down the railroads, raised up the great, great, beautiful skyscrapers, won two world wars, defeated fascism and communism, and made America into the single greatest nation in the history of the world and the best is yet to come. You will see that. Proud citizens like you helped build this country and together we are taking back our country. We are returning power to you, the American people. With your help, your devotion and your drive, we are going to keep on working, we are going to keep on fighting, we are going to keep on winning, winning, winning. We are one movement, one people, one family, and one glorious nation under God.
People who get their news from PBS or The Washington Post didn’t have an accurate overall picture of what Trump was saying this year. CNN will not permit him or people who like him to be heard on their channel without a bunch of tendentious fact-checks (Kamala was not border czar!) And so their audience knows what he's saying and how people are reacting to it only as screened through the mainstream media's attempts to save democracy by electing Democrats.
The best post-election analysis I've seen is this one in The New York Times. Shawn McCreesh attended many Trump rallies beginning to end. "At dozens of events, I watched as he connected with all sorts of people in all sorts of places. Suburban mothers in Washington, D.C. Military personnel in Detroit. Evangelicals in South Florida. Bitcoiners in Nashville. College football fans in Alabama. Firemen in Lower Manhattan." He describes Trump as "a ferociously effective campaigner," whereas the News Hour depicted him as incompetent and in decline.
At any rate, I was surprised by the result, specifically in Pennsylvania, where I voted. And so now I have to get out of this bubble I'm in. It's weird that I'm in it at all, since I so often disagree with it (though I did vote for Harris), but it really is “legacy:: I'm still reading like my Washingtonian parents. I often focus extremely critical scrutiny on what I'm seeing, but there's a lot that I don't see at all from in here.
—Follow Crispin Sartwell on X: @CrispinSartwell
