For years, Democrats have sought to win elections by micro-targeting communities with detailed facts. What if the secret is big, sloppy notions seeded nationwide?
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.