Summary
CNN analyst Van Jones attributed Vice President Kamala Harris’s loss to Donald Trump in the presidential election to the Democrats’ ineffective media strategy.
Jones argued that while Democrats focused on traditional campaigning, Republicans built a powerful alternative media ecosystem, leveraging podcasts, online shows, and platforms like X to reach key voter demographics, especially young men.
Trump bypassed mainstream outlets, appearing on popular programs such as Joe Rogan’s podcast, which helped him dominate swing states.
My take from the outside (i.e. not American), so hopefully I can be objective.
American politics and therefore the American electorate appears almost entirely tribal: you’re either on the red or the blue team (or a third party team that is sufficiently small to ignore.)
The swing states just happen to be states where the balance between red and blue is pretty even, allowing outsized impact of relatively minor variances in voter turnout.
Tribalism within the red team appears far far stronger than within the blue team. Strong enough that anti-democratic actions that support the team are acceptable; e.g. voter suppression, gerrymandering, failing to adjust the electoral college based on asymmetric population growth.
The states’ electoral systems are corrupted not by anti-democratic actions, but because such actions are possible. The crisis is that the system that was required when states had to send representatives in person by rail or horse to the capital is obsolete.
TL;DR: y’all need some constitutional amendment and electoral reform.
There’s other stuff too, but you got a large part of it. It is sports politics more than anything else, and the more left side has all sorts of fractures within that interferes with cooperation while the right side locks in step when called to act.
I will say that the US doesn’t have a monopoly on such behavior. Watching politics in Europe there’s some commonality of political games as well, the teams are just made up differently and play with different rules. Similar frustration from the fans though when important issues come up and things get stupid.
The US has political baseball where the blue team is a collection of players with different strategies who want to play the game in different ways.
Internationally, a lot of countries play cricket.
Some countries play Go.
Of course! Though I can’t think of another democratic country that quite as readily and enthusiastically wear political affiliations on their sleeve (literally).
It’s a dedication to a team that I personally only experience in terms of the dominant sports.
Best I can do is fascism and open corruption.