Dr. David Karpf
Associate Professor in the George Washington University School of Media and Public Affairs. He teaches and conducts research on strategic political communication in the digital age. He writes weekly at https://davekarpf.substack.com/
Email: dkarpf@gwu.edu
U.S. Election 2024
36. The tilted playing field, and a bygone conclusion (Dr David Karpf)
37. Looking forwards and looking back: Competing visions of America in the 2024 presidential campaign (Prof John Rennie Short)
38. Brat went splat: Or the emotional sticky brand won again (Prof Ken Cosgrove)
39. Election 2024: Does money matter anymore? (Prof Cayce Myers)
40. Advertising trends in the 2024 presidential race (Prof Travis N. Ridout, Prof Michael M. Franz, Prof Erika Franklin Fowler)
41. Who won the ground wars? Trump and Harris field office strategies in 2024 (Sean Whyard, Dr Joshua P. Darr)
42. Kamala Harris: Idealisation and persecution (Dr Amy Tatum)
43. Kamala Harris campaign failed to keep Democratic social coalition together (Prof Anup Kumar)
44. Revisiting Indian-American identity in the 2024 U.S. presidential election (Dr Madhavi Reddi)
45. Harris missed an opportunity to sway swing voters by not morally reframing her message (Prof John H. Parmelee)
46. In pursuit of the true populist at the dawn of America’s golden age (Dr Carl Senior)
47. Language and the floor in the 2024 Harris vs Trump televised presidential debate (Dr Sylvia Shaw)
48. Nullifying the noise of a racialized claim: Nonverbal communication and the 2024 Harris-Trump debate (Prof Erik P. Bucy)
49. A pseudo-scientific revolution? The puzzling relationship between science deference and denial (Dr Matt Motta)
50. Amidst recent lows for women congressional candidates, women at the state level thrive (Dr Jordan Butcher)
What is there, really, left to say?
Back in 2016, I contributed an essay to this collection titled “The #Lolnothingmatters Election.” My core thesis was that Donald Trump had managed to win despite running a ludicrously poor campaign.
Here I sit, eight years later. Donald Trump has won an even more resounding victory. And I cannot say that his campaign was more professional or sophisticated than the first time. If anything, he has gotten sloppier with age. His rallies drew smaller crowds, the attendees drifting away before the speech ended. Signs of cognitive decline were obvious to anyone who bothered to look. His small-donor fundraising was around a quarter of what he raised in 2020 , though a handful of billionaire benefactors stepped in to make up the difference. His field operation was outsourced to Charlie Kirk and Elon Musk – political neophytes who reportedly made a litany of rookie mistakes.
He was convicted of 34 felony counts. He had three other major trials pending. He promised to pardon the January 6th insurrectionists. He insisted that everyone was thrilled with the overturning of Roe v Wade. He was incapable of acknowledging that he lost in 2020.
The final weeks of the campaign were awash with negative Trump headlines. Where Donald Trump in 2016 benefited from general public underestimation – few people took seriously that he might actually win – absolutely everyone in 2024 knew that it was possible for Trump to win, and what that would represent.
Kamala Harris, meanwhile, ran about as effective of a campaign as one could. She replaced Joe Biden three months before the election, but three months is, in fact, plenty of time to run a competent electoral campaign. She assembled a cross-ideological coalition, offered policies that spoke to the needs of the electorate, and ran a scandal-free, disciplined campaign.
And yet, here we are. Ultimately, 2024 was not another “#Lolnothingmatters Election.” Rather, it was an election where the things that mattered lay outside the boundaries of what a good campaign can influence.
The United States had a stronger post-pandemic economic recovery than any other developed nation. But U.S. voters do not grade on a curve. Donald Trump promised that he would make inflation go away. It was nonsense, but it was appealing nonsense.
Across the globe, every governing coalition during the post-pandemic recovery has faced crushing defeats. The COVID pandemic was a civilization-wide traumatic event, and we have not collectively processed that trauma. Instead, we have assigned blame and demanded change. Joe Biden was an unpopular president, just as every other nation’s president or prime minister was unpopular. Kamala Harris, as Biden’s successor, inherited the blame. And Donald Trump, despite his disastrous mismanagement of the 2020 pandemic, represented a return to the before-times.
I have written before, in other settings, that the central conflict in American politics is not liberal-versus-conservative, but simple-versus-complicated. We have two conflicting metanarratives.
One story goes something like this: “government and governance are fundamentally simple. The reason things have gone wrong is crooks and idiots in charge. If we get rid of the crooks and idiots and replace them with the right people, everything will be fixed.”
This is the siren song of the authoritarian demagogue. Trump has performed it for years. He insists that the government is a mess because of the crooks and idiots screwing things up. Put him in charge, he’ll fire them, and conditions will improve. (One would hope that this story would have lost some appeal due to lived experience. Many of his cabinet secretaries spoke out against reelecting him. Many of his senior officials are now in prison for their own corruption scandals. Alas, nevertheless…)
The other story is, in essence, a liberal technocratic narrative: “government and governance are fundamentally complicated. The reason things are going wrong is that governing a large, pluralist society is really hard and includes a thousand hard-to-navigate tradeoffs. Well-meaning people can make government work better at the margins. But change is frustratingly slow and always incomplete. None of the hard problems can be easily fixed, or else they would have been fixed already.”
The latter story has the benefit of being, well, true.
Yet, as a scholar of strategic political communication, it has long struck me that the “it’s simple” story is much more compelling. It contains all the elements of an effective story. There is a hero, a villain, a victim, and a plot resolution. And there are crooks and idiots in positions of power. It isn’t as though every government bureaucrat and politician is brilliant or a saint.
The playing field is slanted in favor of authoritarian demagogues. And the worse that objective conditions become, the more appealing their rhetoric becomes.
Inflation hurt. The aftermath of the pandemic stings. Donald Trump promised to return us to a bygone, better time. Kamala Harris was stuck with the unenviable task of keeping people committed to making complicated social systems work better at the margins.
The malaise – the objective conditions on the ground – mattered to the ultimate outcome, far more so than the architecture of either candidates’ campaign.
So now we will hand the government over to a vindictive authoritarian, unchecked by laws or norms or the judgment of future electorates.
This will not go well for the United States. And, what’s worse, I am not convinced that there were any choices the Harris campaign could have made that would have prevented it.