Sun Kill Moon – A premature autopsy of the 2024 election
Everyone else is talking about it, so I said why not me too? I’m going to try to cover what I see as the major reasons that I believe that Donald Trump won and Kamela Harris lost the 2024 presidential election. The votes are still being tallied (really California?) so we won’t have more intricate data for at least a few more weeks but I believe we can use exit polling and available information to piece together a narrative of what happened.
There is an excellent breakdown of Exit Polling from NBC News on their website; I will share this link in the show notes and encourage everyone to take a look. I will be referring to this data set throughout the episode.
On the question “which one of these five issues mattered most in deciding how you voted for president?”, Trump received majorities in 3 of the five major questions. 
Let’s take a look at the three issues that Trump won: the economy, immigration, and foreign policy.
Broadly speaking, and if I had to be pinned down to a single answer, I think Harris lost because of the economy. 
Per NPR, “Harris narrowly lost the suburbs, and maybe more notably, voters who make between $30,000 and $100,000 a year voted for Trump. Harris won those who make more than $100,000 a year, a group Republicans used to win.”
$30,000 is what someone who makes $15 an hour and works a 40-hour work week makes in a year. I’m assuming that people making less than this may have gone for Harris because of governmental programs they disproportionately rely on like the increase in childcare tax credits, an expanded affordable care act, Medicaid, and Medicare, programs which Trump has been more hostile to on the campaign trail.
I believe that people making over 100K were voting more on cultural issues than on economics, given that they are less likely to carry consumer debt in large numbers, more likely to own their homes outright, and be less impacted by small increases in prices for groceries and gas. In my experience, white collar workers are more likely to have gone to college, have co-workers who are from different racial and ethnic backgrounds (some of whom are immigrants on work visas), and are more likely to live in urban cities and see the benefits of cosmopolitanism as opposed to those who live in rural areas or the suburbs (which Trump won).  
What about the group in the middle? For a brief period of time, Joe Biden ran on Bidenomics, touting the record low unemployment numbers and rising wages of the economy. This was short-lived, however, because of the rate of inflation, which soured many in the electorate. 
Why were so many unhappy with the economy? Aside from the rising inflation, which is the rate at which prices for goods are increasing over time, were the rising interest rates. Rising interest rates are most damaging to low- and mid-income voters. Why? If you have credit card debt or are looking to purchase a home, the cost of borrowing increases. This is also true for adjustable rate mortgages and other debt instruments.
I asked Claude GPT to produce a monthly budget for someone with credit card debt who makes 15/hour. This is (roughly) what it came up with. 
Housing & Utilities:
- Rent: $800-900 
- Utilities (electric, water, gas): $150-200
- Internet: $50-70
Transportation:
- Car payment: $250-300
- Car insurance: $100-150
- Gas: $150-200
- Maintenance savings: $50
Food & Necessities:
- Groceries: $300-350
- Household items: $50
Other Fixed Expenses:
- Credit card payment: $100 (minimum, but try to pay more if possible)
- Phone bill: $50-70
Personal Care:
- Clothing: $50-75 
- Personal care items: $30-40
Emergency Fund/Savings:
- Monthly contribution: $50-100
Rough total: $2,030-2,585
A few things pop out upon reading this. 
A. Someone who is paying 20% of their income in taxes and contributions, takes home roughly $2080 a month, or at the higher end of these estimates, $500 less than their expenses. This person would have had to make at least $18 an hour to break even, given the numbers we’re looking at.
B. It’s likely, at least where I live, that someone making this much money would need roommates. The rent estimate is pretty low for a single apartment by a wide factor.
C. A $300 payment on credit card debt would be needed in order to pay off the average credit card debt (around 6K per person) in 2 years. This means this person would be even more in the hole.
D. The above does not have any allocation whatsoever for children. If someone did have a child, the numbers would (obviously) look even worse. 

This person would have to either get a second job or find a way to cut back (severely) on their (already) relatively meager lifestyle. There is no budget items for travel or entertainment.
One of the frustrating things about the punditry class’ assessment of the election and the current economy was the focus on inflation – is it rising, is it falling, how fast, and when. If they had expanded their definition to incorporate personal finances, they would have seen the broader picture of an economy that really wasn’t working for the average person (see the above example).
During the Biden years, Credit card debt reached record highs, car repossessions are up, and 401K withdrawals are increasing too. I felt that the news media failed to really talk about the effects of rising costs and instead focused on the rate in which the prices rose or fell.
Not understanding the economic hardships of the average person, in my opinion, was the main reason that the Democrats lost this election. 
There were other secondary and tertiary reasons that Harris lost. 
The other major reason that Trump won was immigration. I thought the media coverage on this issue was myopic and didn’t take into account a broader look at the recent history of immigration in the United States. In his book, Our Was the Shining Future, David Leonhart covers the history of immigration from roughly the 1960s. To make a long story short, starting almost immediately upon the signing of the Immigration and Nationality Act by LBJ in 1965, the number of legal immigrants increased, as immigrants who qualified to enter the country could also bring extended family members with them. By 1990, per Leonhart’s episode on the Daily Podcast, the number was 1,000,000, nearly 3 times the stated quota for legal immigration. Comprehensive immigration reform was passed in 1986 granting amnesty to roughly 1 million immigrants in the country at that time but the number of immigrants did not decrease and there has been no major comprehensive immigration bill passed since, despite efforts under both Bush and Obama to do so. Under the Biden administration, the number of border crossings nearly tripled from Trump’s numbers and doubled from the numbers of the Bush and Obama administrations, again per the Daily podcast.
It’s difficult to untangle the economic impacts from immigration itself but, for those most impacted, we saw a swing towards Trump. Per an article in the Texas Tribune entitled, “Trump’s near sweep of Texas border counties shows a shift to the right for Latino voters”, “[Trump] captured 55% of Latino voters in the state, according to exit polls. He also won 14 out of the 18 counties within 20 miles of the border, a number that doubled his 2020 performance in the Latino-majority region.”
We also saw a rise of dissatisfaction in major cities after the governors of both Florida and Texas sent migrants to places like Chicago, New York, and Martha’s Vineyard.
I believe the shift that Trump saw in both border counties and large cities was due to the increase of immigrants under Biden.
The third category Trump won was foreign policy, which is usually not a driver of American elections, unless Americans are directly in wars. It’s harder to see why someone would pick Trump over Harris, if this was their main issue they were voting on. I did a podcast episode on the foreign policies of both and, on major issues, there isn’t a significant break. If I had to make an educated guess, I’d say it’s due to the steadily growing unpopularity of the war in Ukraine. Per a Pew Research poll from March of this year, the percentage of people polled who said that the US was providing too much support to Ukraine increased from 7% in March of 2022 to 31% in April of 2024. Adding to this is the conflict in Palestine, where there is fear that a broader war may extend to the rest of the region.
I believe that one of the major reasons for the decline in the support for Ukraine was the Biden administration’s inability to communicate why it was important for the US to continue support, even in the face of what appeared to be a stalemate (or worse). 
I want to look at two other major factors that played a role – campaign strategy and the media. Before that, let’s hear from our sponsor.
Much has been written about Donald Trump’s ability to gain ground with men under 30. It’s true that he won this demographic (per the NBC exit polling) by a couple of points. Another more startling stat (that unfortunately doesn’t break down gender) is that in the 2020 election Biden won first time voters by a nearly 2:1 margin (64 to 32). This time, that number was 54% for Trump and 45% for Harris, per the NBCWashington website.
How was Trump able to do this? Podcast appearances on male-heavy shows like the Joe Rogan Experience and televised appearances at NASCAR and UFC helped. I think what goes uncommented upon was the ability for Trump to paint Harris as the war candidate, which was helped when Harris campaigned with Liz Cheney, daughter of Dick Cheney. The Cheneys, I believe, were a Rorschach test – if you cared deeply about the news (and gathered news from traditional sources), you would recognize Liz Cheney as the Vice Chair of the Senate committee to investigate January 6th. If you gathered your news from Tik Tok, Instagram, and Twitter, you would recognize Liz Cheney as Dick Cheney’s daughter and think of her as a connection to the Iraq War, which Trump has railed against for years. Tying Biden and Harris’ support to the continued support to the war in Ukraine (as mentioned above), helped Trump’s narrative of being the anti-war candidate, as did Harris’ speech at the DNC Convention where she vowed to have the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world. 
A meme that I saw a few times on Reddit was the “me and the boys in Taiwan because of Taylor Swift”, which was ultra – realistic footage (I believe) from a video game of American soldiers being attacked in a near-future scenario. How much this drove young male turnout to vote for Trump is hard to say but I did see, after the election was over, surprise from teachers that this idea had taken hold.
One of the two issues that Harris won on (of the five mentioned earlier) was abortion. The Harris campaign, perhaps trying to repeat the successes of the 2022 midterm, leaned heavily into rhetoric involving abortion and ads that portrayed the Republicans (and Donald Trump) as extreme on this issue. Donald Trump was able to downplay his involvement in the Dobbs decision to the extent that he was able to make this less salient to many voters – from an NPR article after the election, nearly 3 in 10 voters in 3 states (Arizona, Missouri, and Nevada) voted both to protect abortion rights and vote for Trump. Enough voters, it seemed, were able to vote for both abortion protections and Trump, effectively not penalizing him for the three justices that Trump appointed to the Supreme Court in his first term who helped end Roe.
Another fundamental aspect of the Harris campaign was to paint Trump as unfit for office due to his myriad of legal issues, most notably his felony conviction for falsifying business records related to the 2016 election. Trump was also found guilty for a civil violation for sexually assaulting the writer E. Jean Carroll. After the election, we’ve seen additional criticism heaped on Attorney General Merrick Garland for slow walking the investigation into Trump’s involvement with the January 6th insurrection. I have a theory on why Trump was not penalized for these actions (to the extent it wasn’t disqualifying for millions) that I will expand on a bit later.
It's difficult to separate a campaign strategy from a candidate. It’s also difficult, due to the historical circumstance of Biden stepping down with a little over 100 days before the election, to tease out how much of Trump’s victory was due to the efficacy (or lack thereof) of the Biden administration and how much of it was due to Harris. It’s quite possible that with a full campaign (say beginning after the 2022 mid-term) that Harris would have been able to more eloquently craft her message and target specific constituencies with policy proposals that appealed to them. It’s also possible (and in my opinion likely) that a primary would have provided us a different candidate, one who would have more easily distanced themselves from the unpopularity of the Biden administration. 
Ultimately, the most important and lasting question is this: did Trump win the election or did Harris lose it?
I believe that Harris lost the campaign (with a Joe Biden sized asterisk attached to that statement).
It’s true that Harris had less than an ideal amount of time and I have real sympathies for her – I imagine she’s going to be asking herself “What if?” for the rest of her life – there are nearly an infinite number of choices a campaign makes and it’s nearly impossible to accurately gauge which led to her defeat. Harris seems to be an intelligent and loyal public servant who cared about people. If she was running for a third Biden term (like Al Gore did with Clinton and George HW Bush with Reagan did before her), I think she would have won. Easily. 
Many pundits pointed out (usually the day after the election, btw) that there was an anti-incumbency mood across the entire globe, driven by the public’s reaction to inflation. Most Americans are not sophisticated to understand the macroeconomic trends that cause or sustain inflation but they do understand that their money isn’t going as far as it used to. When Barack Obama won a second term, he was able to communicate to the American people that the economy was not where anyone wanted it to be but it was on the way to recovering from the 2008 financial crisis. This begs the question – did Americans blame Biden for inflation? 
Under both Trump and Biden trillions were spent in order to prop the economy up and keep unemployment down. 
In the 2020 exit polls (per CBS), people whose #1 concern was the economy preferred Trump to Biden by a factor of 83% to 17%. In my eyes, this implies that in both 2020 and 2024, Biden, not Trump, was blamed for COVID related inflation.
Could Harris have crafted a message that spoke more to the anxieties of people and create policies that gave them hope that better times were ahead?
Of course. Many have argued that her campaign did that – and lost.
The media landscape is fractured more than ever before, the American people are getting information tailored to them specifically – this is true for music (algorithms tailor what you hear based on your preferences), gaming (procedural generation allows for levels that are never the same for any two players), and streaming (content is recommended based upon past preferences). It’s also true for news – as more and more Americans get their news from digital sources, we are less and less working from a shared set of facts. 
In the book, Losing the News, Alex S. Jones described hard news using an analogy – there is an iron core (about 15% of a newspaper) that is worthy of being called news; essentially, this is your five “Ws” – who, what, when, where, and why. Everything else, the other 85%, is wrapped around this iron core and is opinion, spin, op-eds, and satire. Without the iron core, however, the foundation for an informed public implodes. 
Jones was very concerned about what he saw (his book came out in 2009) as the trend away from hard journalism and newspapers to opinion and digital. He proved to be prescient.
Per Pew Research, the circulation of daily newspapers (sans Sunday) has dropped from roughly 55 Million in the year 2000 to less than 21 million in 2022. 
In this void, we’ve developed separate informational echo chambers that appeal to our own pre-conceived biases and believes, with no crossover. The news has always been biased – as Jones says in his book, in the early part of the 20th Century, there were over a dozen newspapers in NYC alone, each with their own slant on the news – pro-capitalism, Marxist, anarchist, etc. However, in the early days of television, there was what was known as the equal time rule, which made it difficult for any broadcaster to favor a political viewpoint over another (between the two parties). In the age of digital media, however, the equal time rule does not apply.
In addition, like the music industry before it, news media is scrambling to find new ways to bring in enough revenue to keep the lights on and is, often, an industry that is not able to adapt to change quickly. With fewer people buying newspapers, the journalism that works best when a thoughtful audience spends time and attention to remain informed is forced to try to adapt to television journalism (which Neil Postman warned us about nearly 40 years ago) and even worse (Tik Tok and Twitter). 
Was Harris a victim of the new media ecosystem? Her supporters have said that she was and point to the fact that Trump had not been penalized for skipping out on interviews with unfriendly outlets, meaning traditional media, while Harris was. 
Pod Save America interviewed several high-ranking campaign members and they stressed (repeatedly, over and over again) how little time the campaign had to work with (which is a fact) and that they had to introduce Harris to the American people (which is an opinion). Trump did not need to be introduced to the American people, as he had been president for four years and had been a famous person since the 1980s. 
I think this is less of a double standard and more a reflection of the simple truth that campaigns make decisions about how they will campaign with the goal of putting their candidate in the best possible position to win. We saw this again when the Harris campaign tried to engage Trump with a second debate (against Harris – it would have been Trump’s third overall, if you count the debate with Biden), which he declined.
Surrogates for Harris also point to the fact that podcasts and YouTube videos are not held to the same journalistic standards as traditional media and that these outlets were where Trump was able to build a base of younger (mostly male) voters. This is true.
This raises a larger question that I will return to later in this episode. 
As I stated above, the campaign, the candidate, and the message are all three separate things that often times get bundled together and are difficult, if not impossible, to untangle when trying to understand what went wrong. 
Let’s look – briefly – at the candidate. On his website, Nate Silver, the polling guru formerly of 538, said that, “Kamala Harris is a replacement-level politician”. He then goes on to define this term, which comes from sports. Sports and politics are not the same thing and, while I think the analogy is a bit tenuous (at what level does someone pass into the “big leagues” of politics?) it points to a truth that wasn’t covered very much, at least not by traditional media sources, in the 2024 campaign – the truth being that Harris wasn’t historically speaking very accomplished. 
Every president since I’ve been born has either been a sitting VP (George HW Bush), a former senator (Barack Obama, Joe Biden), or a former governor (George W Bush, Bill Clinton)…or Donald Trump. 
Before he was president, George HW Bush was a congressman, a UN ambassador, a director of the CIA, and, finally, a VP to a very popular president. 
Biden was in the senate for 36 years before becoming VP. He was also the VP to a very popular president.
Clinton and Bush were both governors, which are executive positions.
The odd men out here were Obama who was a senator from 2005 to 2008 and Trump, who never worked in public service before being elected president in 2016. It’s important to note, and many seem to have forgotten, that the 2008 crash happened at the end of the campaign and was the nail in the coffin of the Bush presidency – I honestly don’t believe that there was a Republican candidate who could have beaten Obama at that point in history. You can also point to Obama’s stance against the Iraq War, which was a principled position that went against the viewpoints of the elders of the Democratic party, Joe Biden included.
I can’t argue that Trump was more accomplished in 2016 than Harris was in 2024 – I don’t think anyone would. I would also have argued that, in 2016, Trump was historically unaccomplished when looking at past presidents. 
However, by 2024, Trump and Harris both had accomplishments in office and, because of the position of president, most Americans knew what these were for Trump. Harris had to explain these to the American people in a more effective manner than she did when she ran for the Democratic party nomination in 2019. 
What were these accomplishments? Probably her biggest accomplishment, in terms of national appeal, was holding out for more money against the banks after the 2008 financial crisis. California was the epicenter of the subprime mortgage crisis and her negotiation with the banks resulted in a pile of money that was much larger what it otherwise would have been for Californians impacted by the mortgage crisis. There have been criticisms that the money wasn’t enough and that the state didn’t track sufficiently who got the money. Others have argued that the government dragged its feet in helping those in need. Still others were angry that the office didn’t prosecute any of the subprime originators of the loans to the extent they could have. 
I still think this is by far the greatest thing she has done as a public servant.
The rest of her accomplishments as AG are, in my opinion, mixed. I also don’t think she did anything of real note in her short term as senator or as vice president.
Does this make her “replacement level” as a presidential pick? As I noted above, I’m still not sure how you draw the line between the majors and the minors but, apart from Obama and Trump, it’s hard not to look at the resumes of other recent presidential picks and not be underwhelmed by Harris. 
You may be saying, “Well, I disagree but you’d have to admit that on CHARACTER that she is better than Trump, right? RIGHT?”
Allow me to return to a point from earlier. I call it the Chuck Berry defense of Donald Trump.
Chuck Berry is one of the most important figures in the history of rock and roll music. If Trump blows up the national debt to the point where we have to sell Mt. Rushmore and Jann Werner buys it and turns it into Mt. Rockmore, Chuck Berry, along with Elvis, will be at least two of the faces on the mountain (along with probably Jimi and Janis). He influenced the Beatles, the Stones, and AC/DC. He had huge huge hits at a time when the country was still very, very segregated. He was the first musician ever inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. 
He also cheated on his taxes, was accused of armed robbery as a teenager, and allegedly video taped women while they were peeing at his home (without their consent). He also may have brought an underage girl across state lines with the purpose of sleeping with her, which was a violation of what was called at the time as the Mann act.
I believe that working poor people instinctively understand that you can both be good at your job and a horrible person at the same time. At this point in my life, I consider myself middle class or upper middle class, depending on how one determines these categories. I’m also squarely in the white-collar worker space and have not been a retail or blue-collar worker for many years. 
When I was, I worked with bosses who came into work drunk, cheated on their spouses, and who sexually harassed subordinates. I’ve also worked with people who either were on drugs, who dealt drugs, or who used drugs off the clock. 
I don’t think my experience is really that different than the average working person in this country.
Maybe it’s due to the rise in remote work or in the idea of a separation between work and private life that we see more frequently among white collar workers, but there seems to be an incredulity to this idea among the punditry.
You also have to consider the skepticism of many when it comes to the charges against Trump that he was found guilty of. There have been many who have called these “lawfare”. I’m not going to go into whether or not I think these are valid characterizations of the many charges against Trump but I do think it’s important to say that there have been questions as to the reasons for these charges ranging from centrists to far right voices. 
The exception to this is, of course, the federal cases, specifically the Jack Smith case. 
I think the inability for Merrick Garland to bring Trump to trial related to January 6th may go down in history as the worst thing that the Biden administration did during its four years. 
I thoroughly believe that if Trump had been found to be feloniously guilty for his role in January 6th he would not have been re-elected.
Because this did not happen, I believe that a majority of working poor people compared their situation now to when Trump was president…and held their noses and voted for him, despite his character flaws.
A campaign can be described as the series of decisions made in order to convince undecided voters to vote for your candidate and to encourage decided voters to vote because their vote is valuable and necessary to win.
As noted earlier, I believe they mostly followed the midterm blueprint with a focus on abortion and democracy, with the hope that they could diminish Trump in the eyes of enough people on the fence to get them to not only not vote for Trump but to cast a vote for Harris.
While the campaign had less than an ideal amount of time, one thing they didn’t seem to lack was money. Per Forbes, “the Biden—now Harris—campaign committee raised $997.2 million and Trump’s campaign committee raised $388 million in total between Jan. 2023 and Oct. 16, 2024, the most recent date for which Federal Election Commission filings are available, ending with $118 million and $36.2 million in cash on hand, respectively.” 
I don’t believe this included Super PAC money, where Trump may have had an advantage – even so, I don’t believe, even included his Super PAC money, that Trump outraised Harris. We’ll have final numbers soon but my guess is that she will have raised him something like 1.5:1. 
I think Harris ran a traditional campaign with ads that supported her focuses – on her YouTube channel you’ll see campaign ads related to abortion, Trump being unfit for office, and celebrity endorsements for Harris. Pretty standard stuff. 
Like the candidate herself, I think the ads were, mostly,…fine. Nothing spectacular or remarkable but managed to convey the message they were trying to convey to the audience they wanted to reach.
On the other hand, Trump was able to use podcasts and YouTube channels to speak to younger, lower propensity voters. I believe this is the reason we saw such a shift for first time voters when compared to Biden in 2020. Again, we’ll have better data later but for now, I’m guessing that this was due to men. 
Richard Reeves, the writer of Boys and Men, was on PBS after the election pointing to the lack of male enthusiasm as one of the primary reasons that she lost. He also, very gently, raised issues with a speech given by Michelle Obama where she chided men for being insufficiently concerned about reproductive health when considering whom to vote for. I think this, along with the inability for Harris to provide men, especially young men, with policies that spoke to their economic anxieties, was a weak spot of the campaign. They did try to rollout the idea of a first time homebuyers program, which has been rolled out, under different guises for both Bush and Obama before. As more single women are buying homes than single men, it’s hard to see this as a program targeted to young men. 
The worst ads of the campaign were targeted at men. One YouTube channel that showed the White Dudes for Harris ad (which was sponsored by the Beige Rainbow Super PAC) had a top comment, as of today, of “This might be the cringiest and most out of touch ad I've ever seen”. It actually got worse with The Real Men ad, directed by Jacob Reed, a former writer for Jimmy Kimmel. This may be the worst political ad I’ve ever seen in my life. It’s almost as if the creator was actively trying to anger heterosexual men. It did the opposite of its intended purpose to a dizzying degree. It’s as if you took the “How Do You Do, Fellow Kids?” and hit it with a shovel until it had no brain cells left. 
To be fair, neither of these were created directly by the Harris campaign, it should be said. They did have ads that were clearly targeted at men but were, I would argue, the same “just okay” quality that the rest of her ads were. It would be difficult to make the argument that the campaign cared as much about men as they did about women when looking at the strategy, policies, and spend. 
Trump was able to do what Harris couldn’t – motivate these low propensity male voters to come out and vote for him. Did he do anything underhanded to do this? I would argue that he did what we ask politicians to do all the time – go to us and ask us for our votes. It seems to have faded as a major reason for her loss in 2016 but Hillary Clinton did not campaign in the state of Wisconsin once during her presidential campaign. 
It's true that podcasters and YouTubers are not held to the same journalistic standards. This is true for TikTok Influencers, as well, many of whom supported Harris. John Oliver was interviewed by the New York Times where he said specifically that he was not a journalist. Jon Stewart, Jimmy Kimmel, Steven Colbert, and Seth Myers are all very clearly not fans of Trump either.
Journalists have an obligation to report the truth as they understand it. Could they have focused more on Biden’s accomplishments like the CHIPs act and less on the comments a comedian made at Trump’s MSG rally? Yeah. They could have. Is it clear that would have made a difference in this election? Not really. 
I’m sympathetic to the idea that the focus was too much on the horse race and not enough on the policies of either side. I don’t think either side was particularly well served – for instance, with all the talks of how tariffs would be for the country, it wasn’t until after the election that I saw PBS interview someone who viewed tariffs from a positive, or at least not entirely negative, angle. Was that my fault or PBS’ fault? I’m not sure if they interviewed someone before with certainty so I can’t say. I like to think of myself as a well-informed voter but I do think the media could have better served the policy discussions behind the candidates’ platforms.
For instance, I wish the media had covered the cost of deporting millions of migrants from the United States, in both time and money to major agencies. I also wish more pressure had been put on Harris to explain how, realistically, Roe could have been restored given the makeup of the Senate and House – a quick aside, The Lincoln Project, a group of Never Trumpers, former Republicans now backing Democratic candidates, ran an ad narrated by Doc Rivers (because when you’re thinking of how you’re going to vote for president of the United States, you think of…average NBA coaches?) where he said that Harris would, I am quoting, “secure woman’s rights on Day One.” Legislatively, there is no way for her to restore Roe on day one of her administration – it would take an act of Congress to do this, which could potentially take years. Even realizing this is something of a vague statement, is it a lie? If you believe it is referring to Roe, then I would argue it is in fact a lie. Did the media writ large, given how much time Harris spent on abortion, really interrogate this enough? In my opinion, they didn’t. I also think it’s important to note that Harris ended up running behind Democratic Senators up for election; per Vox, “Democratic Senate candidates overperformed Harris in almost every key race”.
Ultimately, I do think the media could have covered the race better and, especially moving forward, I think there should be introspection as to how to cover policy and the intricacies of how bills become laws and how laws are implemented. These things are inherently boring to the vast majority of Americans and always will be but this doesn’t change the job of the media to inform the public, which is their primary reason for being. 
The media always is caught in the crosshairs between parties. There is a fine line between reporting on what an administration does and cheerleading for the administration. Since we’ve had politicians and the media, politicians have been frustrated by the media’s inability to give the message that the politicians want them to. This is not a new issue. Trump did present a unique challenge to the media that they were never really able to adapt to – how do you cover someone who is a presidential candidate and a convicted felon? Do you mention it every time? Do you mention it when it’s relevant? How do you report the civil case conviction for sexual assault? The same way you would if it had been a criminal conviction? What about January 6th? At what point are you tipping the scale? At what point are you no longer impartial?
Perhaps unsurprising different media outlets covered this to varying degrees, almost always to the outrage of the Democrats (see my Chuck Berry analogy). When I listen to, for instance, Boston Public Radio (WGBH), Jim Braude seemingly makes it a point to not go 30 seconds without reminding his audience that Donald Trump is a convicted felon.  
If you believe like I believe that the election was decided on the economy, there are fewer things in life that are more relevant to the average person than their own personal finances. Another way of saying this, the media can be honest and the media can lie but I know how much money I’m making at the end of the day and I know how much things cost. If you believe this to be true, the media’s influence on this specific election was always going to be, at best, marginal, regardless of its biases and mistakes.
Finally, the message. We’re running long here so I’ll try to make this brief: I believe that Trump’s message, while being disingenuous in parts, was also very clear – you’re being ripped off and I’m here to stop it. Harris’ campaign was much more varied and less cohesive, which makes sense given the broader coalition of voters she was trying to pull into the tent, from Never Trumpers to Leftists. Thus, her policy proposals came off more like a grab bag that a vision that someone could articulate quickly. Based on the Pod Save America episode with her staffers, I believe Harris legitimately cared about the policy to allow Medicare to pay for home health care aides for seniors. I don’t know if Harris had a signature policy but this may qualify, along with the proposal of building 3 million more homes and the first time home buyers credit mentioned earlier. If Harris indeed lost this election due to young people (she improved over Biden on voters over 65, per 2020 exit polls), it may have been that young people felt, with some evidence – see Scott Galloway’s Ted Talk – (the US is destroying young people’s future), that Harris’ proposals were not enough to get their votes. 
A recent LA Times article entitled, “Young men swung to the right for Trump after a campaign dominated by masculine appeals” backs this up. Writer Matt Brown quotes Santiago Mayer, the executive director of Voters of Tomorrow, which engages young liberal voters. “I think most young voters just didn’t hear the message,” 
Mayer said the Harris campaign’s pitch to the country was “largely convoluted” and centered on economic messaging that he said wasn’t easily conveyed to younger voters who were not already coming to political media.
“And I think that the policies themselves were also very narrow and targeted, when what we really needed was a simple, bold economic vision,” said Mayer.”
Last thoughts – these are premature considerations. We’ll know more once the full data has been released. As many have noted, Harris received between 6 and 7 million fewer votes than Biden did in 2020. Once we have all the numbers, we can look at how many people voted for Biden in 2020 and stayed home, voted 3rd party, wrote in candidates, or switched to Trump in 2024. If Harris had received the same vote total that Biden got in 2020, she would have won the popular vote by roughly 4 million votes, instead of losing to Trump. 
This was a winnable election – it’s a 50/50 country with two parties. If you don’t think every election is winnable at the national level (and certainly, if the Dems who raised over 1B in the Harris campaign didn’t think it was winnable, they would have been committing fraud), get out of politics. There are a million other jobs out there. This one isn’t for you.
As always, I’ll have show notes with links for you to check out. I would highly recommend checking out the panel discussion with Bill Galston, Ross Douthat, and Bill Kristol put on by the Program on Constitutional Government at Harvard. It’s a long video but very interesting to see the perspectives of people who have been in politics for decades and how they have shifted their views over time. 
Thank you for listening to this episode of Elegant Ramblings. If you’ve enjoyed what you’ve heard, please consider liking and subscribing to the channel on iTunes or YouTube. Hope you enjoyed. Bye for now.