Is a Progressive Joe Rogan Impossible?

Why the online environment has broken sharply to the right

Earlier this week I wrote about how the 2024 presidential campaign played out online. Trump’s team bet hard on the internet while the Harris campaign bet on traditional campaign strategies, and it turns out that the Internet is More Real than Real Life.

It’s important to talk about how and why this happened. I’m a liberal and don’t bother to keep that a secret, but I try to keep things pretty balanced here and I have plenty of criticism for Democrats. What I want to do is analyze the facts of the case in a dispassionate way. Descriptive rather than prescriptive. You can’t understand what happened on Tuesday unless you understand the how culture has changed.

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Kamala Harris lost this week. By some measures, it was a crushing defeat - the first time since 2004 Democrats have lost the popular vote to Republicans. But by international standards, Democrats did quite well. The chart below shows the performance of incumbent parties by year, worldwide:

2024 is the first year on record where every single incumbent party has lost vote share, no matter the country. It’s simply a bad time to be in power, no matter your ideology. But that red dot at the top of 2024 is the Democrats. They did better than nearly any other party internationally.

What that tells me is that there’s limited blame that can be put at the feet of the Harris campaign itself. When everyone is losing, you have to look for large structural changes and not individual campaign decisions. For the most part I think Harris was put in a tough position and performed reasonably well. One could make the argument that Democrats aren’t really to blame here and don’t need to learn any lessons - it was just bad luck and bad timing.

But that argument would be too easy. Democrats performed better in many key Senate races and Congressional races than they did in the presidential race. Despite losing these states to Trump, Dems won the governorship in North Carolina and Senate races in Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada and Arizona. Candidates like Colin Allred, Sherrod Brown and Jon Tester outperformed Harris’s vote totals despite losing. The point being - there are things Democrats can do to improve their performances. And it starts with understanding how the national party has changed over the last decade or so.

A Party of Scolds

When I was growing up, my vague perception of politics was that Democrats were the cool party and Republicans were the party of lame, upright scolds.