After election wipeout, Democrats, experts ask what went wrong
In Ohio and nationally, Democrats’ hopes were high going into Tuesday’s election.
They’d pulled off a string of victories since Republican appointees to the U.S. Supreme Court eliminated protections for abortion rights. And they were running against a candidate in Donald Trump who had been convicted of dozens of felonies, tried to overturn the last election, and who used violent, misogynistic and racist rhetoric in the current race.
But as Tuesday night faded into Wednesday morning, it became apparent that Trump had grown his margins in Ohio and across the country, enabling him to become the first Republican to win the popular vote since 2004.
That left stunned Democrats and observers groping for answers. Among those offered on Wednesday were a truth-free information ecosystem, lack of a consistent economic message, and an unwillingness among millions of 2024 voters to consider facts that run counter to what they believe is true.
Columbus native Morgan Harper has run in Democratic primaries for the U.S. Senate and House. She now is director of policy and advocacy for the American Economic Liberties Project, a Washington, D.C.-based group that tries to reduce harm to consumers by concentrated economic interests.
She said the campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris didn’t do enough to address the issue most important to the working-class voters who broke so hard for Trump.
“There wasn’t a consistent economic message,” Harper said. “There was a plan released. There was talk of taking on price-gouging in the grocery market and middlemen in pharmacy. But it wasn’t something that was brought up every day. It wasn’t an overarching vision, and I do think that that’s something people are desperately wanting to hear from all political figures right now, but especially Democrats as we purport to represent the working class.”
She said that’s especially true in Ohio.
“I think there’s still a lot of frustration with the fact that we have two tracks to the economy — folks who are tied to the stock market and how that’s doing, and everybody else,” Harper said. “I hear from a lot of Ohio voters who feel like even though they work hard or even though they’ve got a good job, they’re just not getting ahead. If that’s how you’re feeling, that’s something you’re going to feel every day.”
As a Harris national co-chair, U.S. Rep. Veronica Escobar, D-Texas, knocked on a lot of doors across the swing states and in her hometown of El Paso. On Wednesday, she took to Facebook to say that she encountered a mountain of misinformation.
“Everywhere I canvassed, it was clear that the majority of voters get their ‘news’ from sources that promote outrageous lies,” Escobar wrote. “I saw people I’ve known and respected for many years here in our own community repeat completely factually inaccurate statements. It’s tough to win elections in a country where truth no longer exists.”
She added, “The information landscape in our country is poison.”
University of Cincinnati political scientist David Niven agreed that a lot of garbage information is swirling, but he pointed to an even deeper problem.
“It’s not just the (Democratic) losses in the states they lost, it’s the losses in the states they won,” Niven said. “That suggests a fundamental failure to get the plane off the ground.”
He said people have never wanted to hear information that doesn’t fit with their preconceived ideas, and with today’s limitless platforms they don’t have to. Niven conceded that the national media struggled to cover Trump’s outrageous statements and actions in a way that was proportional to its coverage of Harris.
“But more powerful is the capacity to choose your own reality with present-day media; to never confront a countervailing thought,” he said. “It never happened on Fox News, but the Biden administration is literally building bridges, but there’s a general assumption among the American public that nothing’s happened in the last four years.”
Marty Schladen has been a reporter for decades, working in Indiana, Texas and other places before returning to his native Ohio to work at The Columbus Dispatch in 2017. He's won state and national journalism awards for investigations into utility regulation, public corruption, the environment, prescription drug spending and other matters.
Ohio Capital Journal is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.
Publisher's note: A free press is critical to having well-informed voters and citizens. While some news organizations opt for paid websites or costly paywalls, The Highland County Press has maintained a free newspaper and website for the last 25 years for our community. If you would like to contribute to this service, it would be greatly appreciated. Donations may be made to: The Highland County Press, P.O. Box 849, Hillsboro, Ohio 45133. Please include "for website" on the memo line.