Lessons and Hope After the Defeat

There’s no way around it: Donald Trump’s unequivocal win in the 2024 election will almost certainly have devastating effects. His promised tariffs will hike prices, causing inflation to spiral higher. His mass deportations will sunder families, depress economies, and increase the costs of goods and services. He will appoint hundreds of ideologically driven far-right judges, including to the Supreme Court, who will determine policy for the rest of our lives. He will abandon Ukraine and likely Taiwan, encourage Benjamin Netanyahu to do whatever he wants, ally himself with dictators, and turn both foreign and domestic policy into tools of enrichment for himself and his wealthy buddies. He will do all he can to turn every agency, from the Department of Justice to the IRS, into tools of harassment and retribution. America is about to become far more like Putin’s Russia than we want to admit. It’s all extremely bleak.

But there are valuable lessons and a ray of hope buried in the bad news.

1) This was a tough election to win. Democrats faced enormous headwinds going into this election. Almost every incumbent party in industrialized democracies has gotten electorally obliterated in post-COVID elections due to generalized anger about many things, especially inflation and the cost of living. Joe Biden accomplished many wonderful things for the country but is the most unpopular incumbent president since Harry S. Truman. The Democratic Party recognized the need for a replacement far too late, and Vice President Kamala Harris had too little wiggle room to distance herself and escape the vortex.

Even so, Harris ran an effective campaign. Data is still coming in, but it appears that she performed significantly better in battleground states than in deep blue or deep red states—which means that insofar as it went when she and Trump went head-to-head in messaging, she outperformed the national baseline. But that’s also the bad news.

2) Democrats cannot cede control of the media environment and make up for it during campaign season. The Harris campaign dominated fundraising, ad spending, and the field operation. It didn’t matter much. The average nationwide shift to Republicans was about 6 points.

Republicans now dominate all new media arenas and most old media as well. Impressions of conservative content dwarf that of the left and center-left across social media, from YouTube to Facebook to TikTok. Elon Musk turned Twitter, the closest thing the world has to an international public square, into X, a far-right conspiracy dystopia filled with neo-Nazis and Russian bots. Fox News dominates cable news, and Sinclair has taken over much of local TV broadcasting. On the radio, Rush Limbaugh clones and Christian supremacist pastors dominate the radio dials. Anyone on the right with even an ounce of talent or charisma gets extensive checks—sometimes directly from Russia!—to write, create, and produce content.

There is nothing even close to this on the left, and much of what does exist is devoted to bashing the Democratic Party. Instead, the center-left throws billions at paid media and field organizing in the final year of an election cycle for minuscule returns compared to the right’s long-term investments in altering the information landscape.

Combined with social media algorithms that reward outrage farming, this results in an electorate awash in anger and disinformation and locked in a right-wing media bubble that facts and common decency do not permeate.

3) Scripted is the kiss of death in modern presidential politics. The vibes and poll numbers for Harris were best preceding and, in the run-up to the Democratic National Convention, when she and Tim Walz were winging it on messaging and more willing to go off script. No matter what the polls and focus groups may have suggested, “They’re weird” worked better than stumping with Liz Cheney. Trump ran a campaign with almost no discipline, but it didn’t cost him anything. The more disciplined Harris became, the more she struggled. The more carefully Harris sought moderate Republican votes, the less buzz she seemed to receive. She had an exceptional debate performance, which caused Trump to slink away in fear of a rematch, but she reverted to a careful and conciliatory approach. It probably wouldn’t have made enough difference to win, but lessons should be learned.

The last Democrat to win a convincing and unequivocal landslide was a charismatic unknown named Barack Obama. Joe Biden succeeded in 2020 mainly because of his unscripted gaffes, not despite them. Democrats need to learn to embrace authenticity and the risks that come with it. The alternative is far worse.

4) There is still hope. Despite Trump and his allies’ desire to turn the United States into Putin’s Russia or Orban’s Hungary, the American system of government that makes it so hard to create positive change also limits the risks of adverse change. Amending the Constitution is nearly impossible. Federalism means that blue states can offer significant legal resistance to the worst MAGA actions. State laws will still apply to vigilantes doing violence on conservatives’ behalf. Much of the judiciary will not give way to Trump as quickly as Aileen Cannon or Samuel Alito. Republicans do not have a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, and even if they hold the House, they will be vulnerable to dissenters there. The military will not readily obey orders to fire on American protesters, and anyone who obeys that order will be subject to prosecution once Trump leaves office.

Moreover, Trump is 78 and in declining physical and mental health. There is no question that Trump has a charisma that causes many people who disagree with him on policy to treat him as an economic genius who will help their pocketbooks but not a serious threat to their social rights. Those people are about to find out the hard way—but in any case, Trump’s special gift does not apply to J.D. Vance, Josh Hawley, or Ron DeSantis. The public sees them as the far-right goons they are. No obvious popular successor to Trump is waiting in the wings for 2028.

Americans are also forewarned. Half of us see and know Trump for the threat that he is. The broadly liberal American culture that made Barbie an astonishingly successful film, Taylor Swift the biggest pop star in history, and that proudly embraces marriage equality and reproductive choice isn’t about to start doing the bidding of manosphere trolls like Charlie Kirk or Matt Walsh.

Finally, Republicans still must govern an angry and divided country. The GOP has always been much more talented as an opposition party than a governing one. No amount of far-right media will be able to hide the negative consequences of Trump’s misrule. Elon Musk has even promised that Americans will suffer “temporary hardship” due to his economic shock policies.

If democracy continues to exist, and especially if liberals can fight back better in social media spaces, the backlash can and should be fierce in 2026 and 2028. Fascism rarely prevails for long. With strength and courage, we can toss it out of power before it does too much damage—and then hopefully reform the systems that allowed it a chance to win office temporarily. America has found its way out of the darkness before and can do so again.

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