In 2024, Donald Trump won the popular vote by 1.5 points. Trump and Democrats alike treated this result as an overwhelming repudiation of the left and a broad mandate for the MAGA movement. But by any historical measure, it was a squeaker….
In July of 2024, Tyler Cowen, the economist and cultural commentator, wrote a blog post that proved to be among the election’s most prescient. It was titled “The change in vibes — why did they happen?” Cowen’s argument was that mass culture was moving in a Trumpian direction. Among the tributaries flowing into the general shift: the Trumpist right’s deeper embrace of social media, the backlash to the “feminization” of society, exhaustion with the politics of wokeness, an era of negativity that Trump captured but Democrats resisted, a pervasive sense of disorder at the border and abroad and the breakup between Democrats and “Big Tech.”
I was skeptical of Cowen’s post when I first read it, as it described a shift much larger than anything I saw reflected in the polls. I may have been right about the polls. But Cowen was right about the culture.
Reading Cowen’s list with the benefit of hindsight, four factors converged to turn Trump’s narrow victory in votes into an overwhelming victory in vibes. The first is the very different relationship (most) Democrats and Republicans have to social media. To Democrats, mastering social media means having a good team of social media content producers; Kamala Harris’s capably snarky team was just hired more or less en masse by the D.N.C.
To the Trumpian right, mastering social media — and attention, generally — means being, yourself, a dominant and relentless presence on social media and YouTube and podcasts, as Trump and JD Vance and Elon Musk all are. It’s the politician-as-influencer, not the politician-as-press-shop. There are Democrats who do this too, like A.O.C., but they are rare.
Biden has no authentic relationship with social media, nor does Harris. They treat it cautiously, preferring to make fewer mistakes, even if that means commanding less attention. Since the election, I have heard no end of Democrats lament their “media problem,” and I’ve found the language telling. Democrats won voters who consume heavy amounts of political news, but they lost voters who don’t follow the news at all. What Democrats have is an attention problem, not a media problem, and it stems partly from the fact that they still treat attention as something the media controls rather than as something they have to fight for themselves.