Facts vs Feelings

The challenge of information in the modern age.

Disbelief, confusion, dread, and despair are just some of the feelings the over 68 million Harris voters have felt since the election.

Those feelings are understandable and even expected.

A person who tried to steal an election before causing an insurrection, stole national security secrets, was convicted of 34 felonies, found liable of sexual assault, fraud, and defamation, said he wants to be a dictator who could terminate the Constitution, wants to round up people into camps and give them serial numbers, wants to revoke the broadcasting licenses of all networks that challenge his lies, calls those who oppose him the enemy from within and said he could use the military against them, publicly told Putin to go ahead and attack our allies, and who will enact the horrible Project 2025 not only won the election but won the popular vote after losing it the last two elections. 

A Republican presidential candidate hadn’t won the popular vote for twenty years.

How did this happen?

Pundits, analysts, historians, and political enthusiasts will explore the data in every direction to develop clues and theories applicable to various voting groups. But I believe we can summarize all of it with one word: information.

After Kamala Harris lost the election, Senator Bernie Sanders released a letter claiming that Democrats abandoned the working class, and that is why they lost the election. This isn’t true, and it is disappointing to see Bernie write such lies, but politicians are going to politic.

I responded to Bernie’s letter on Twitter with the following:

• Unions are the strongest they've been in decades. 

• Wages among the lowest earners grew the fastest.

• The child tax credit was expanded.

• A minimum corporate tax was enacted.

• A tax on stock buybacks was added.

• High inflation was brought down to normal levels without a recession.

• Millions of jobs were created.

• Unemployment has remained low.

• Manufacturing returned to the US.

• Prescription prices were lowered.

• More Americans have healthcare than ever before.

• Billions were given to student debt relief.

• The American Rescue Plan got Americans back to work, covered Cobra payments, and even directly gave Americans money.

Let's stop pretending that nothing was done by this administration when it inherited a pandemic, a migrant crisis, and high inflation and managed not only to address all of those issues through Republican obstruction but accomplished much more as well.

There's always more to do, and mistakes happen, but to act like Democrats abandoned the working class is ridiculous.

Bernie's post received immense attention, with over 33 million impressions as of this writing, and my response received over 1 million. This created an unexpected opportunity to see how people viewed this information. There were two main types of opposing comments to my post.

The first was people saying they didn’t know about any of the items on that list, to the point that some people felt it couldn’t be true (it is). When voters don’t know what you’ve accomplished while in office, particularly on issues that directly relate to their day-to-day lives, they won’t be enthused to show up and vote for you.

Votes are still being counted, particularly in California, where only 55% of the total is accounted for so far, but this is the current vote breakdown, which won’t dramatically change once tabulation is complete:

• Harris: 68.2 million votes

• Trump: 72.8 million votes

And here is 2020:

• Biden: 81.3 million votes

• Trump: 74.2 million votes

Trump’s vote total is extremely similar, and as the final counts come in, it may end up just about matching 2020. However, the Democratic vote dropped by 13 million votes. That is even more striking when you look at the key battleground states that secured Trump his win and how small the margin of those victories was:

• Pennsylvania: 135,000 margin of victory

• Michigan: 80,000

• Wisconsin: 30,000

A 245,000 increase in turnout across those states would have flipped them blue and given Harris the win.

Not only did people say they didn’t realize all of the accomplishments the Biden-Harris administration made for the working class, but they also said they had never heard Harris campaign on them.

And yet, Harris discussed several of her economic plans on the campaign trail and released an entire economic plan on her website, which addressed them in more detail. Here is the table of contents for that PDF:

As we can see, Harris and Biden were both heavily focused on improving the lives of working-class Americans, but the information didn’t get to those voters. Even worse, the concept that “Democrats abandoned the working class” comes from Trump. That was his rhetoric to turn people away from the Democratic party, and it was so effective that Democrats and independents who caucus with Democrats are now repeating it.

That isn’t the only Trump propaganda that got picked up by Democrats to use against themselves. A prominent Democratic pundit/analyst/author stated after the election that the Democrat’s brand had become:

• Trans surgeries for prisoners

• Tampons for boys

• Unlimited migrants

• Pronouns

• Hamas painted as victims

None of this is the Democrat brand. It is more MAGA propaganda to paint the Democratic Party as extreme left in the way that MAGA is extreme right.

Trans surgeries for inmates went into effect in 2018 during Trump's presidency. There were challenges in the courts that prevented the first operation from happening until 2022, which is how they spun it as a Democratic agenda.

Tampons: the law being discussed required free tampons for menstruating students and at no point said they needed to be in boys' bathrooms, nor did the schools put them in boys' bathrooms.

Migrant crossings are lower now than they were when Trump left office. As soon as the Covid emergency ended, Biden signed an executive order that would have prevented most border crossers from being able to request asylum. It was called the Circumvention of Lawful Pathways, and the courts blocked it.

Democrats did not campaign on pronouns or make any point about them.

Perhaps the most ridiculous is claiming that the Democrat brand is about treating Hamas like victims when Biden and Harris both received significant criticism from voters on the far left for their support of Israel and providing weapons that are being used in the war in Gaza.

Republicans embraced social networks, podcasts, influencers, and YouTube to spread their message years ago. At the same time, Americans are turning to mainstream and legacy media, such as newspapers and news television, less and less.

Democrats have continued to rely heavily on this legacy media to dispel disinformation and get their policies out to the public. That doesn’t work anymore, and Democrats have not developed an influencer network that is capable of reaching even a fraction of the audience that Republicans can.

And that is important for another reason, which connects to the second type of comment I saw in response to Biden-Harris's achievements for the working class: how people feel.

The most frequent comment in response to my post was that while that list of accomplishments was true, it didn’t feel like Democrats had focused on the working class because grocery prices were high and people were still struggling to make ends meet. Instead, they felt ignored by the party.

The pandemic and subsequent high inflation weren’t just an American problem; they were global, and so were the feelings about those in charge at that time.

Across our peer nations, democratic/liberal/progressive candidates have been losing elections because when the public feels that they are struggling, they blame the people in charge no matter what the factors were or how much those leaders accomplished.

Economically, America fared much better than the rest of the world. Inflation was tackled quicker and brought down lower. A recession was avoided. All of the jobs lost during the pandemic were replaced, along with millions more. Unemployment has remained low, wages have been outpacing inflation for years, stock markets are high, and the US has the best economy in the world. But many Americans don’t see it or, more importantly, feel it.

A final example of facts vs feelings is crime. Crime has fallen throughout the Biden-Harris administration. The violent crime rate of 2023 was lower than in 2019, meaning all of the violent crime increases from the pandemic were wiped out and then some.

According to quarterly reports, 2024 saw an even more dramatic drop in crime and may end up being the largest drop in violent crime in US history. Even if it doesn’t achieve that goal, violent crime is at its lowest in 50 years.

How do Americans feel about that?

What accounts for the massive gap between Democratic, Independent, and Republican views on crime? Where they get their information.

Mainstream media only slightly covered lowering crime rates up through 2023. But this year, as the 2023 crime reports were finished and showed the large drops that had happened in the previous year and early 2024 stats came out showing an even more significant drop, the news began reporting on it.

Republican influencers, pundits, podcasters, and YouTubers, on the other hand, have continually said crime is on the rise while showing clips of shoplifting, assaults, or even murders to their audience. If all you ever hear is that crime is rising while seeing clips of crimes, you’re going to believe crime is out of control.

Influencers have a way of making voters connect to issues on an emotional level that regular news media cannot.

Republican organizations (and even foreign enemy nations like Russia) invest heavily into the far-right influencer network to the point that there are influencers making millions from it, and the GOP is more than happy to pay because they are reaping the benefits.

Until Democrats accept this new reality and build out their own supported and funded influencer network, they won’t be able to drive the narrative, connect emotionally with voters, and will continue to lose elections.