As coastal media elites diagnose what went wrong for Democrats by analyzing self-reporting poll data of people they know little about, the rest of us already know what happened because we’ve been watching it happen for over a decade: Its the memes stupid.

Remember 20 years ago when people would say things like: “I don’t know about politics”, “I don’t like politics”, “Politics is annoying”? People who never read WaPo or NYT or the Atlantic or the Economist would say those things and wouldn’t vote.

Those people are gone. They can’t ignore politics now because it is non-stop shoved in their face on social media. Try to go on Facebook or Twitter, or whatever it is now, without encountering right wing memes. We all know that guy we went to high school with who shares 15 Trump memes a day. Social media is overwhelmed with right wing bots. Listen to a comedy podcast, you won’t laugh but you’ll hear endlessly about how sensitive people are. Look for a movie review and you won’t have to look far before running into endless videos about what is or isn’t ‘woke’.

Harris tried to reach out to those people. She got a bump during the debate, the convention, etc. But after those moments, people go back to a non-stop barrage of right wing social media. A 2 hour debate, seen with your own eyes, can’t overcome 22 hours of endless right wing talking points. You don’t even have to read, its all condensed to a silly picture now, with maybe a couple words.

This election wasn’t about the economy as so many will have you believe. First, the economy wasn’t even bad. But even if we assume the people who voted for him believed it was, why? Because of all the memes saying it was.

What was Trumps plan about prices? I’ll wait. Good, bad, in between. What was it? Nobody ever asked him. Not once, during the course of the election, did anyone make him provide a plan on prices. So how important could that have been if no one thought to even ask about it?

Furthermore, the coastal media doesn’t spend time in the swing states. If they had, they’d have seen hardly a commercial about the economy. Instead, they would have been treated to endless repeats of the same commercials about trans people and immigrants. Even confronting those people about how weird it is for Ohio, a place with few trans people or immigrants, to have wall to wall commercials about those topics, they’ll agree that its weird. But then you turn around and they’re back consuming social media about trans people in swimming pools or immigrants eating cats.

Now, obviously, anyone would tell you that memes have nothing to do with their vote and it was the economy. But, people can’t self-diagnose that. Find me a person who thinks they are influenced by campaign commercials. You’ll not find a one. And yet, they keep making them. Find me the person who claims to have been influenced by Russian memes. You’ll not find one. And yet, Russia keeps making them, and more, and now Iran, China, North Korea, many foreign countries have started meme making. The Musk memes, the AI memes, more and more. Don’t you think it would be weird for everyone to invest all this time and money into making memes, if, as the coastal media and Bernie Sanders believe, we can just take people’s answers about why they vote at face value, despite all these contradictions, and even a mountain of hard data showing people don’t respond to polls accurately all the time, the Bradley effect for example.

The notion that Democrats didn’t appeal to regular people is accurate. But not because they were out there saying they want to give tax cuts to billionaires and cut your social security and break up unions and let health insurers go back to denying coverage again, Republicans did that, and people voted for them. Democrats didn’t appeal to regular people because regular people don’t consume news, they consume memes. Democrats are resisting this because they think people are better than they or smarter than that. They need to stop. This isn’t a call to cynicism. But when people can’t read a NYT or WaPo article but get all their news from memes and comedian’s podcasts, what is that? Is that smarter? Or are we getting dumber on the whole? We can look down our nose at it, or deal with it. We’re in the age of propaganda, and you have to play to win.

Remember when there was all that talk of Kamala needing to do interviews and provide her plans. How many tough interviews did Trump do? How many concepts of plans did he provide? How much did it help her to do interviews? Did she get credit for it? Or did the Trump campaign pull out negative snips and turn those into memes? From the beginning, did people really want her to do interviews and provide plans? Or did were they just reacting to a bunch of MAGA memes saying that she needed to? How many of those people actually read her website and her plans, or even watch the interviews? The notion that we can listen to self-reported reasons from people about why they voted, and cherry picking based on our own agenda or preconceived notions, in order to figure out why Democrats lost, is a wasted exercise when the campaign is littered with examples of why that’s a waste of time.

Consider still, how much people celebrated the death of a healthcare CEO and were outraged by revelations about P Diddy, in the same year they voted for Trump. There is no moral or logical consistency here other than the memes, and other other associated internet content, pushes in a direction, and people follow. Democrats are trying to push against social media, when they need to push social media itself.

The bottom line is, politics is fought in many arenas. Social media is one of them. It’s quickly becoming, if it has not already, the most important one. Democrats have ceded that battlefield completely to Republicans. Democrats have too long had faith that either it is a fad and people will get tired of the conspiracy memes, or that there is some limit to the amount of people who can be influenced by memes. They need to confront that they are wrong. This is a permanent part of American politics now. 20th century America is dead and gone. Their efforts to save it, while a fight worth having, failed, and were maybe futile to begin with. We’re now in a different America, and Democrats need to live in it first before they can win it.

by Zackary Goncz

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