So, Here We Are

Let’s start with a fact that we can all agree to: voters who turned out for Biden in 2020 did not show up in 2024. In 2020, Biden got 81,283,501 votes. Trump got 74,223,975. In 2024, Trump stayed basically at that same level this year with 74,535,879, as of the writing of this post. Harris has 70,858,899 as of this moment. Votes are still being counted, but not much will change.

This is important. Just as he has done in polling for years, Trump was at his ceiling. He just can’t do better that this. But the Dems lost about 11 million voters since 2020. (And, no, conspiracy theorists, they were not just made up votes in 2020. You can say it until you die, but it won’t make it real.)

Were these people simply not as inspired as they were during COVID? Were they not inspired by Harris? If so, why didn’t we see that lack of enthusiasm in polling or focus groups? Were we too blinded to see, cozy in our information bubble watching videos of celebrities supporting Kamala? Or, was the MAGA niche market influencer machine pulling them away? Did some of them fill the hole in Trump’s support left by those evacuating never-Trumpers? Or, did they just decide to stay home?

We need to find this out.

But as we wait for the pollsters and focus group profs to unearth that, we need to understand how the right has been setting up the conditions for this. While we can talk about what Harris or the Democrats may have done wrong in the campaign, I’m of the opinion that, in hindsight, none of the available Democratic presidential options could have overcome the system that the right wing has been putting in place for decades.

The road rules

The rules of the road we drive on today were established over 50 years ago. As prescribed by the Powell Memo, the right has created hundreds of “think tanks” under the cover of very loose tax laws allowing for “charitable giving” to what are essentially propaganda factories. Their jobs have expanded, but they were initially designed to convince the public that economic things like trickle down economics was a real thing that benefited workers.

Read Dark Money, by Jane Mayer on how that world of taxpayer-supported propaganda scams came to be. Many of us have been fighting dark money since the Supreme Court legalized that form of corruption. I’d never be able to run a campaign in this state without APS, for instance coming out hard against me. It might have been that shareholder protest I ran against them to fight their dark money being spent at the Corporation Commission.

But anyway, those “think tanks”, like the Goldwater Institute here in Arizona or the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) nationally, have undermined public education, boosted for-profit religious teaching at taxpayer expense, undermined efforts to get money out of politics and generally held Arizona hostage. Most the iconic Arizona corruption can be traced back to this clown car, one way or another.

Non-economic spin-offs from the “think tank industrial complex” pushed an religious agenda. The marriage of convenience with run-of-the-mill Christian conservatives in the 1970s and 80s metastasized to total control over the Republican party in just the last few years by the most extreme wing of the Christian nationalist theocracy movement.

It further extended to environmental protection, among other areas. The fossil fuel industry buried its own studies showing that climate change was real over 40 years ago, and spun out think tank studies that distracted the public with greenwashing stories about “carbon capture” or “clean coal.” Following the cigarette industry’s model, and with a handy piggy back ride from Fox News, the petrochemical industry was able to delay any meaningful response to global warming by 30 years. Just think about how much further ahead Arizona could have been as the “solar capitol of the country” were it not for Fox.

Sadly, those who will be hurt the most are the same people that Fox and the right wing have been able to convince to think that Democrats abandoned them.

And they are not entirely wrong. After a decade of losses in the 1980s, the left turned to Bill Clinton’s conservative Democrats to find a “third way,” a way out of the hinterlands and back in to power. It came with a price. Supporting NAFTA was a short-term win that eventually drove working class voters away from Democrats and toward Trumps populism. The most stinging element of this topic in this election is that we know that Trump’s tariffs will only hurt workers more.

It is one of many reasons that this election is so painful. Sure, history shows that Trump meets the very definition of a fascist. Definitely, we will watch as people die in the Ukraine at the hands of a despot with a far too cozy relationship to Trump and his growing cadre of oligarchs. You can be sure that, while the Biden approach to finding peace in Israel and Palestine was spineless, so much more suffering and injustice will occur under Trump (if not a regional war). His right wing coalition in America will empower the right wing actors in Israel that have slowly assumed power over the last forty years, with horrendous goals in mind.

There are so many other examples that we all know: the prison industrial complex, “patriotic correctness” which hampers real discussion of military corruption at the cost of our volunteers in uniform and, a greedy health care industry that bleeds people dry of their money, even though we know better models have been working around the world for a century.

What is the unifying theme here?

Education.

We know that much of what has oozed forth from the business-backed right wing is not real education. It is not set in reality. It is propaganda of the most insidious kind. It tells people that we don’t have a shared, common interest in healthy people, educated youth, campaign finance reform, workers’ rights and many other topics that even many in the Trump-supporting working class fundamentally want –though they will find out soon enough that they are not in the cards for them.

Democracies die without accurate information. Just like the other side has built hundreds of think tanks to push faulty information, we need to support more and avenues of education, in addition to truly good journalism. Journalism needs to go nonprofit, become relevant to people’s lives, stop talking down to people, stop confusing infotainment with real journalism, and build trust by being up front when it makes mistakes.

What I advocate here is that we build our plans going forward on long-term, slow, deliberate and one-on-one education, backed by more trusted news sources. It is something I’ve been bringing up in every campaign I’ve worked on since 2004, but big funders can never seem to find their way to do anything other than dump lots of money in ads, GOTV, ground game and pleas for participation in the last nine months of a campaign.

“Deep canvassing” works, but never gets enough funding early enough.

Without going in to tactics or revealing things about recent campaigns that I’ve been involved with, I can tell you that deep canvassing works. Done correctly, it humanizes the conversation. It builds trust around information and it has a more lasting effect on people’s beliefs.

I started this multi-series think piece saying that, if you think you know the answer of what to do, you are wrong. Don’t mistake this advocacy of deep canvassing for a prescription of how the left can rebound. Deep canvassing models are the tactic by which we implement whatever larger coalition plan we get behind.

Thus, in the next installment, I’m laying out some topic areas that I hope we all will build a process of discovery around.

Back to previous article in the series here. On to the next one here.

It feels like there are a lot of people rushing to be the first with prescriptions of what we need to do to dig our way out of this giant festering hole in our democracy.

How many of them are trying to figure out what they personally got wrong?

That’s my goal here. Well, that and maybe if I don’t get these ideas out of my head I’m going to melt like that guy in Raiders of the Lost Arch who opened the Arch of the Covenant.

So, do you wanna join me as I try to figure it all out?

Agree. Disagree. But let’s do this together.

I wouldn’t pretend to have the answers. God knows I’ve gotten so many things wrong in my often miscalculated political career. I’ve been in politics and public policy for over a quarter century now. I have some strong opinions on some things, but if there ever was a time to reflect, this is it.

I do know this: we need to take this time to rest in our communities, reflect on what we saw and respond with the largest, most unified coalition that we can imagine.

And, we don’t have long. We need to stop this madness by the next mid-term election and we can’t rely on the other side fumbling the ball.

Our respectful exchange can help us focus on creating a structure in 2025 that will lead us down the best path together, rather than a thousand different influencers giving their individual and contradictory analysis. Eschew internal division, finger pointing and recrimination.

So, what you will see here are some suggestions but also a whole lot of questions that I hope will guide a process, so we are not all over the place. I’m also gonna talk a bit about how I’ve gotten things wrong.

The first sections of the following blog posts are level-setting, at least from my years in politics. The second set of sections is where we get in to the nitty gritty of how we might move forward.

If you are looking for 240 characters and pithy memes, Twitter is still there for you. We’ve done so well with that model of information sharing, after all. For my part, I think our organizing needs to take on a longer format, and I’ve been guilty of letting the social media bubble hold me tightly like a warm blanket on a cold night.

So, grab a glass of wine or tea and settle in.

As I wind down my real estate business, I’m repurposing this website and newsletter for political commentary, historical perspective and catalyzing action. Please sign up for the newsletter here. If I get a positive response, then I may move over to Medium, or some other platform that my deer friends keep pushing me to do.

If so inspired, please share this.

Now, on with the show.

The Tortoise and the Hare

This isn’t the first time that I totally miscalculated the strength of the Republicans. And it is in no way shocking that it was a similar appeal to populist and short-sighted instincts of the public.

In 1994 I was sitting in a dark room at the Democratic National Committee building in Washington DC, with the east coast November gloom outside. I was with my then-boss, Kitty. She was an impressive person who could remember any phone number you told her, had met everybody you could think of in DC, saw Muhammad Ali levitate three inches above the ground, and was balancing eight precariously stacked piles of documents on her desk at any given time.

We didn’t work for the DNC, but they called her in to help that night and she said I could tag along. Together we squinted at an AP wire computer, with ghostly green lettering scrolling on a infinitely black background. I was not sure what I was looking at. But in just one moment she went quiet and said, “Ken, the Republicans just took over Congress.” We were some of the first people in the country to witness the 54-seat swing in the House of Representatives, brought to us by Newt Gingrich’s “Contract for America.”

We thought what we called the “contract on America” was brutish then. It is a soft white cheese by comparison to the Project 2025 agenda today.

Kitty and I sat in silence, weighted down with the immensity of it all. The feeling of dread pulled on us like a wet wool trench coat. This political shift in congress upset a political reality that had been in place since FDR, and from which the Democrats have never been able to recover.

Three years earlier, when I was an intern for Arizona Senator Dennis DeConcini, somebody organized a tour of a unassuming little mock TV studio, just across the courtyard from Union Station. There they trained Republican members of Congress how to appear more approachable on the three major networks and the relatively new Cable News Network (CNN). At the time, they had a real problem connecting with audiences because they had not yet learned to use dog whistles as well as they do now. They would say the quiet part out loud and that alienated voters. But they learned.

Of course, now Republicans can say the quiet part out loud because Fox News has conditioned its viewers since 1996 to fear 1,000 different boogymen, as a brilliant way to capture their eyeballs and sell them more products. I’ll never forgive Fox for turning my previously center-right, pro-choice, gun regulation agreeing parents in to talking point-repeating binge watchers.

Fox News founding editor Roger Ailes had pledged during the Nixon impeachments that he would create a “news” source that would prevent any future accountability for any Republican president. As we know now, he succeeded beyond than his wildest dreams.

Democrats were behind the game. Very behind. In the early years Fox built its talk shows in the image of the good versus evil story telling of the then-World Wrestling Federation. They brought liberals and Democrats on to their programs and rigged the game so they could use them as punching bags, to make them look stupid. It was always about showing them as evil. We know this. We’ve seen it ourselves and people over the years who left Fox told us about that secret sauce.

Little did I know, that these early years were really the only opportunity I had to build some suspicion about the Fox machine with my family. To be fair, I didn’t know as much about how government worked in the 1990s as after I started working in it. But I did not have the skills to open a values-based conversation, and avoid it breaking down to an argument.

When MSNBC moved to capture a left-leaning audience during the GW Bush years, they just couldn’t keep up with the growth over at Fox. Two decades of right-wing AM radio prior to Fox’s launch had primed the pump perfectly. Fox had done such a thorough job of blurring the line between straight reporting and right wing commentary “infotainment”. Old school reporters who fought to keep that distinction on MSNBC were eventually drowned out.

And, frankly, did it matter much? Liberals would seek comfort in the “reporting” of Rachel Maddown, Chris Hayes and more recently Jen Psaki. Though I largely agree with them politically, they are just MSNBC’s answer to the Fox infotainment model: tell the audience what they already believe and then sell them whatever the advertisers want.

They are not journalists. We should stop watching them as if they are. Though they may be skilled and experienced people, they are commentators dressed up by their network as journalists. You cannot have served in a political party or an administration and they convince anybody that you are a balanced conveyor of the news. They may have the trust of their tribe, but we’ve all lose through tribalism. I feel we should have fought harder to expect more from our news sources than a copy of the Fox model.

Still, even though they are owned by a huge corporation with its own agenda, MSNBC made liberals feel that they at least had some response to the barrage of half-truths, lies and misdirections (notably on the climate crisis) coming from Fox and AM radio. Liberals sought refuge primarily in MSNBC or the Daily Show, among a few others in the liberal chat-o-sphere.

But the right was already another step ahead. Over the last 10 years, they put money behind a whole list of influencers who, jointly, had tens of millions of loyal followers. These were people who presented the trappings of journalism without the Journalism Code of Ethics and Standards, without editorial oversight, fact checking or retractions. I mean, at least Fox news had editorial oversight, even though it was lax, and the other three items were never taken seriously.

Like Joe Rogan, they didn’t like answering to advertising bosses or editors, and they convinced their audiences that they were more fair than traditional news sources–even though the information they were sharing was often demonstrably false. They were “just asking questions.”

There are easily over 30 right wing influencers on social media, with followings starting at 1 million, and as high as 15 million –each reaching a different niche market that left-leaning cable news or John Stewart, John Oliver or Stephen Colbert can’t reach. Those niche markets include sports-plus-Trump, hunting-plus-Trump, Christians-plus-Trump and probably even vision boarding-plus-Trump.

It was one of the reasons for the rise of the “manosphere”, detailed brilliantly in this Code Switch podcast, which also details the rise of the “black manosphere.” This is an amazing insight in to why so many black men may have voted for Trump. Apply the same formula to Latino men, Asian men, and so on.

Days before the election Joe Rogan unquestioningly listened on as Trump spurted the same set of debunked lies to his 15 million listeners about everything from climate change to telling people that Kamala Harris wanted to turn all illegal immigrants in to immediately-voting Democrats.

People believed it because, despite over 1 billion dollars from the Harris campaign dedicated to ground game, there was not a sufficient way to respond to each of these niche markets.

This leads us to where we are now, and in the next post in the series, I want to talk about the landscape we are fighting in now, and what we liberals contributed to it.

Click here for that.