In the wake of Vice President Kamala Harris’ defeat, recriminations have flourished inside the Democratic Party with different factions blaming different policies or groups to explain the loss. Critics, however, describe a deeper structural problem with how the modern Democratic Party runs campaigns, which lines the pockets of party insiders, bloats campaign budgets and boxes out influences from outside party elites.
The Harris campaign broke campaign finance records, raising nearly a billion dollars, but ending the race $20 million in debt, spending millions on consultants and hundreds of millions of dollars on paid media.
According to Shakir, Democratic strategists often see cutting a new 30-second ad as a sort of cure-all to a campaign’s problems and a way for campaigns to address a weakness without re-evaluating the message or stances they’ve taken. “There’s no room you walk into in which saying we should run an ad sounds like bad advice," he said. “The bigger problem to me is when there is a flaw or problem in the campaign it often wrongly becomes understood that there is a 30-second ad that can cure it. If we have a problem with Latino men, or young people or working-class people in Pennsylvania, how about another 30-second ad for that?”
According to Shakir, it doesn’t have to work this way but media firms and campaigns often push for more expensive production strategies like more shoots, or oversaturating airwaves, because it’s an opportunity for everyone to get paid. In some cases, Shakir said, even senior campaign staff will get a cut of ad spending.
If you looked at the districts / states where the has a big ground and ad game, those places performed a percent or two better than the places they didn’t campaign in.
The ground game worked, but the broader national message and messaging strategy didn’t work as well as the republican’s. In places where there was no aggressive campaign spend from the GOP or DNC, the Dems often underperformed by an extra percent or two.
Maybe it’s the new media landscape that the GOP is so good at controlling, or maybe the Dems core message wasn’t strong enough, or maybe it was because Harris had to do what Trump had been campaigning on for 4 years, or maybe people are hurting and think the grass will be greener. People will probably debate this shit for decades.
But, IMHO, the media and ground game did quantifiably move the numbers in Harris’ favor. But she was down by 3% or 4% and only clawed back 1 or 2 with media.
Young people aren’t watching CNN and MSNBC.
Hell, even millennials aren’t watching them.
Harris threw in her lot with a dying media format while not hitting the YouTube/podcast circuit hard.
I’m not saying she needed to go on Rogan, fuck Rogan. I’m saying the numbers bear out that not that many people are watching traditional media outlets in traditional ways.
Here’s an article crowing about 6 million viewers on election night. How do you think MSNBC fares on a non-election night? It’s a joke.
The same article admits that the MSNBC live YouTube channel of their election coverage had about 30 million viewers, which is, let’s just say quite a few more, and yet those numbers still pale in comparison to massive YouTube channels like MrBeast (slight retch) which clocks in at 330 million subscriptions.
The reality is that the YouTube and podcast sphere of influence absolutely fucking dwarfs traditional cable television networks and over-the-air networks.
And despite that, even if she had hit the YouTube and podcast circuit, I’m not sure how much it would have moved the needle because I think the real issue is that Republicans succeeded with No Child Left Behind actually gutting our education system. I don’t think talking policy works with people who read and speak at less than a sixth grade reading level, which at this point is a significant portion of the country. Trump spoke in word salad, but he never used big words that made them feel dumb. In fact, I’d wager the arguments that came from the right that Kamala spoke in a word salad are entirely related to the fact that they didn’t understand half the words she said, so to them, that’s a “word salad” of words they don’t understand.
IMHO, it’s probably a combo of stuff. She also went up against a guy that is a master at making himself the center of attention for bat shit crazy stuff, then claiming the press is overreacting to what he said.
Harris was able to control the spotlight for the first couple weeks of her campaign. But after the novelty of her unorthodox campaign died down, and the debate memes were behind her, she didn’t really have any keys to jiggle in front of Americans. American’s turned their focus back to the clown, and Harris kind of went back to the old Biden campaign strategy.
