Rest. Reflect. Respond. -Part 2.

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.