Americans Hate it When They Can't Afford to be American Anymore
A brief analysis of what went wrong in the 2024 election for progressives
If you’re already tired of our political discourse even though it’s been—believe it or not—just two weeks since Trump got re-elected, I don’t blame you. I keep going back and forth between evasion and news headline jumping myself. Between studying for my California Life/Health Insurance Exam, which has been a real slog, let me tell you, binging season 2 of あいの里 (Love Village) on Netflix with LB, which is basically a Japanese reality TV dating show for middle-aged people, & playing Minecraft, which feels metaphorically appropriate right now as the creepers and zombies and spiders and arrow-shooting skeletons encircle the compound with the taste of democracy in their throats, I admit I’m still kinda depressed about Kamala Harris losing because I let my guard down again and let myself think America was ready for an intelligent mixed-race Black female centrist president. I go back and forth between stubborn resistance and emotional hopelessness. These are the normal stages of Trumpian grief for progressives.
But the scholar and the public intellectual and the social democrat (aka the European liberal) in me wants to understand this political disaster because it’s going to hurt so many different marginalized communities. And if the best defense we have against Trump’s clown car cabinet of TV characters and his promise to deport millions of both naturalized and undocumented workers is that Trump doesn’t really mean what he says because he’s a pathological liar (i.e., “he won’t do what he said,”), then we are—as they say—totally fucked because we’re treating Trump’s incessant lying as a saving grace, which is absolutely bizarre. Either way, liberals have to learn every valuable lesson we can about this debacle in order to evolve as a culture, a movement, a political philosophy, & its connection to the DNC, which isn’t nearly as progressive as conservatives claim it is nor as nimble or adaptive or fresh with ideas as it should be for a party looking ahead. I’m going to delve into the 2024 election and try to make sense of it because it will help me move on, I think, or at least help me let go of a world I very much wanted to believe in. Sometimes that’s as good as it gets. Here are my thoughts:
Americans aren’t special when it comes to global economics, but we think we are because we expect to be the exception in every situation which is the idealistic underbelly of rugged individualism. We might grumble about rule breakers but when the time comes we are happy to break the rules when it suits us. We expect, as Americans, to create our own rules and invent our own happy endings even in the face of a global pandemic and global inflation. IOW, in terms of our political economy, we want what we think we deserve, not what the economy thinks we deserve, and the market is an asshole to everyone except politicians, doctors, tech bros, & rich people if we’re being honest. At the same time, if you look at economic indicators of the American economy in 2024, they’re objectively good:
Economic Data
-Unemployment Rate: 4.1%
-Current Inflation Rate: 2.6%
-CPI (Current Price Index): 0.2%
-Wages and salaries increased 6.4% for union workers and 3.6% for non-union workers (In the 12 months ending in September 2024)
Sources: Bureau of Labor Statistics, BLS, BLS
-Average GDP in Past 4 Years: 2.2% (Trump’s average GDP was 2.3%, according to Investopedia)
-Average Annual Growth Rate of S&P 500 for the Past 4 years: 14.1% (tying Trump’s best year of 14.1% according to CNN) though other analysts like Rick Newman, senior analyst at Yahoo Finance, claim that Biden’s number was closer to 40% back in April 2024
Compared to the rest of the world, the American economy, according to The Economist, is literally the “envy of the world” because our numbers are so much better than every other country in the G7 and the developed world, most of it due to consumers using credit to maintain their consumption habits, a disciplined Federal Reserve not reducing interest rates until it witnessed inflation in the 2% ballpark, & a softening labor market, which can be a leading economic indicator of recession. Let’s not forget robust government spending from the CHIPS Act and Inflation Reduction Act that would have made Keynesian theorists blush. Let’s also not forget the two rounds of stimulus checks, one passed by Congress during Trump’s first term and another by Biden during the current presidency in addition to state stimulus checks, all of which helped this country avoid stagflation and minimize mass unemployment but also revved up the engine of American capitalism in a way that made inflation unruly. And to be fair, those semi-inflationary bills that Congress passed, the Fed reducing interest rates to 0, & inflationary macroeconomic policies like stimulus checks were the correct response to a global pandemic. So it shouldn’t be shocking that global inflation was incredibly high because every developed country passed some form of inflationary policy to stimulate the economy during a global recession. That’s standard fare.
But inflation—no pun intended—isn’t free. It’s like taking a loan from the future and then having to pay interest in future prices. The problem is that people don’t know who to blame, so what they do is, they blame whoever is in office.
But there’s the objective economic data for our economy and then there’s the subjective economic experience of living in America with a minimum wage that hasn’t been adjusted to the rate of inflation since WWII and the cost of consumer staples and defensive goods that have been high since supply chains collapsed in 2020. But Americans being Americans, they don’t care what’s going on in the rest of the world, they only care about the prices of gas and rent and cereal in their own economy, which is why Trump voters kept mentioning them in interviews like a mantra: gas, rent, eggs.
I think many heartbroken progressives felt like this answer from first-time Trump voters, in particular, was a smokescreen for America’s racism and sexism, but they’re mostly wrong. For many Americans there’s money and then there’s everything else. Economics, or more correctly, the perceptual understanding of economics, takes center stage for Americans to a fault. If they can’t afford to live, they’re not going to care about anything else, not social issues, not gender issues, not moral issues, not environmental issues, not even constitutional issues, not even reproductive issues, no matter how important these things are.
The fact that an ex-con president with a documented history of lying and cheating on all his wives and insulting immigrants and people of color and people with disabilities and women and sexually assaulting women is the torchbearer for the GOP model of family values, even this gets pushed down in the subconscious mind for the people who voted for him because Americans hate it when they can’t afford to be American anymore. There’s no question that this was the largest and most important reason why a majority of Americans voted for Trump and not Harris. Of course, we all know the irony that:
• If you watched the Harris-Trump debate that Trump lost by all objective metrics, you know then that Trump didn’t have an economic plan at all, he had concepts of a plan. IOW, Trump had no solution to the problems Americans cited the most in this election whereas Harris did but Americans don’t do any research on the candidates, so the truth lost to gut feelings yet again. Trump’s only economic proposals are tax cuts and tariffs for foreign goods between 20% and 200%, which are both incredibly inflationary for different reasons. Empirically, tax cuts snowball the federal deficit by decreasing federal revenue and simultaneously increasing expendable income, which is intrinsically inflationary since low-income and middle-class Americans will spend the money they saved almost immediately, especially with interest rates coming down. Just like getting a stimulus check. And tariffs not only increase the price of exports (which is the literal definition of inflation), but they are a form of protectionism too, which, economists will tell you, lead to massive market inefficiencies, costlier overhead, more expensive inputs, higher cost of production, and higher costs that will absolutely be transferred to consumers. Trump’s concepts of a plan will not decrease the costs of goods, they will definitely increase them.
• A majority of Americans think the economy is doing terribly and that’s largely because prices have been raised since the pandemic from OPEC to McDonald’s and partially because Republicans, conservative media, & right-leaning podcasters have been telling them that the economy is doing terribly for four years, just like they’ve been telling them that crime rates are up and border crossings are out of control (both are way down by the way, according to the FBI and Pew Research Center). Much of this is just partisan politics in general where the oppositional party treats everything their opponent does as ineffective, wasteful, or dangerous for this country and everything their own party does as efficient, restorative, & safe. What’s unique, however, is that Republican disinformation is directly related to 2024 Republican policy: if the border is bad and crime is up and the economy is fucked, then this country needs a strongman (aka, a populist businessman) to come and rescue us, which has been the GOP playbook since Trump lost in 2020.
• 23 Nobel-prize winning economists that analyzed the Trump and Harris economic proposals said that Harris’ proposal was better for the American economy, better for American consumers, better for the American middle class, better for the rule of law, better for American entrepreneurialism, investment, sustainability, & competition. These are the things that traditional Republicans have espoused for years as free-market cheerleaders, just not for their own candidate right now.
• It doesn’t matter if the empirical economic data says that the American economy made a soft landing in the middle of a thunder storm. It doesn’t matter if economists disagree with Trump’s economic report of the country. The lie that things are terrible just has to be repeated over and over again until a majority of Americans start to believe it and then it becomes true. This is true of marketing and it’s true of propaganda.
Leaving economics aside for a second, if Americans read impartial news sources or took a modern world history class or cared at all about global politics over the past decade, they would know that right-wing populism has defeated centrists and left-of-center governments in almost every developed country in the world from UK to Hungary from Argentina to Germany from Poland to Brazil, from Italy to France because post-Covid inflation has been disastrous. So much worse than American inflation has been. Worse than being poor, is feeling poor. And the DNC really underestimated the role that the economy played in this election and the role that right-wing populism has played in global politics.
Ben Rhodes, the deputy national security advisor under the Obama administration, published a cogent essay in the New York Times two weeks ago where he argued, among other things, that despite Trump’s pathological lying, racist/xenophobic/misogynistic behavior, lack of civility and diplomacy, the president-elect was able to frame himself as the political outsider and Americans believed him from the jump. Part of that is because Trump is too narcissistic, intellectually lazy, & bigoted to learn how to act like a member of the political institution. But another part is that billionaires have proven that when you’re rich enough, you can defy the legal system, you can play the political system, & you can milk the financial system just like Trump and Elon Musk did. At worst, you can derail the system knowing that your own estate will be fine even if Main Street suffers. And many Americans would love to have that kind of economic agency after feeling broke and powerless for years. Rhodes goes on to say that one of the salient mistakes that Harris made was defending the very economic system that Americans loathed while not separating herself enough from the status quo enough. Harris defended an economic system that Americans are disenchanted with even if they still refused to disavow it. And while Trump had no useful economic solutions to American inflation, which normally would be the end of a political campaign, he had the defiance and the billionaire energy that many Americans want. Because Harris’s campaign strategy was much more focused on reproductive rights than economic policy until closer to the election, this gave Trump a free ride as the economy candidate for months. In retrospect, Kamala Harris should have pointed out every flawed Trump economic policy since 2016 and offered a detailed, refutation of Trump’s tariff policy and then repeated it over and over again since Americans don’t understand what tariffs are. She should have talked in bullet points about her own economic proposals from day 1 of her campaign, explaining how they would help Americans with all the things they felt disenchanted about financially while also disconnecting her presidency from Biden’s. A tricky balancing act for sure since Biden defeated Trump in 2020 and Trump is the poster child of unfettered capitalism, but absolutely necessary, I think, to separate herself for her political CV and to demonstrate to voters that Trump was the reason your paycheck will never get larger. Harris should have said: Trump is trying to be the solution to the problem he is the cause of. Whether it’s not paying contractors for their work, raising rent and banning Black tenants as a slumlord in NYC, living in gold penthouses that Middle America can’t even afford, bankrupting casinos and companies he mismanaged over and over again, or overvaluing his assets in order to get larger loans from banks, which is why he’s a felon, by the way, the point is Trump is the nightmare we need to wake up from, not the solution to our problems. If you vote for him, your paycheck is going to get smaller and our economic problems will get worse. But don’t believe me. Believe his record.
The opposition party always wins in American elections now and it’s been that way for a very long time. After eight years of the Clinton administration, George W Bush served two terms (the Supreme Court intervention in the Florida recounts notwithstanding). After eights years of “W,” Obama was elected and served two terms. After that, Trump defeated HRC, even though she was one of the most qualified candidates to run for the American presidency, was leading in the polls, & was the presumptive favorite. But it wasn’t just Comey’s FBI press conference that derailed her political ambitions. None of the establishment candidates in either party won in 2016. George Bush’s brother, Jeb Bush, who was a popular, Spanish-speaking governor from Florida, didn’t even get the GOP nomination (and dude was much smarter than his brother) whereas HRC got the nomination in 2016 but lost. But the point is that after two terms under the Obama presidency, HRC was the status quo candidate and Trump was the oppositional candidate without any political dynasty. That’s probably the biggest reason why Trump won. And after just one term of Trumpian chaos, the democrats won in the midterm, special, and general elections because they were the oppositional party from 2018-2020. When Biden won, he was the oppositional candidate. After four years, Americans picked the oppositional candidate again with Trump Redux. This is not a coincidence. This is correlative.
As much as I hate to write this, the DNC needs to employ a strategy where men are co-partners again in the party because frankly, it can’t win future elections without their votes anymore than Black women can win without the votes of white progressives. While the Me-Too movement has been fundamental in holding men accountable for their toxic behavior, calling attention to passive and active forms of misogyny and sexual violence and power inequality and centering women in the cultural space in a number of important ways, all of which I’ve always supported, I also think it’s naive to think that progressive and independent men will accept their roles as simply allies in this country’s political struggles. Men need to be part of the solution, part of the struggle, & part of the fight as co-partners so that progressive political victories are theirs to identify with too, not simply theirs to help out with. We cannot simply ask men to shut up and help women succeed, we must also ask people to support other people based on both equity and meritocracy, knowing full well that women (of color) are often the most qualified candidates in the room but not always. But culturally, we have work to do as well: we can’t talk about femininity only in positive terms and masculinity only in negative terms, even if we’re doing that partially to counter the misogynistic programming that has told us the opposite forever. We can’t treat men like they’re always the problem and women like they’re always the solution because we all know people. It’s because of this operative assumption about trusting women but not men that our culture was forced to create the corrective term “Karen” to point out the very obvious fact that some women are problematic and some men are trustworthy. That might be obvious but some people don’t believe it anymore because nuance is dead in America and some of the most progressive circles have become—ah, the irony—the most intellectually binary of all. The future can and should be female but it can and also should be male sometimes too as long as it’s the right kind of candidate fighting for progressive issues that helps women, immigrants, BIPOC Americans, & members of the queer community stay safe, maintain complete autonomy over their bodies, & live their best lives. The proof of how bad the DNC is failing right now in appealing to young male voters is in the exit polls: according to NBC News, first-time voters, which are often the youngest voters in an election, voted for Trump 56% to 43% over Harris and voters in the 18-44 bracket only gave Harris a 5% advantage over Trump! 5%! PBS News revealed in its AP votecast that 59% of white men voted for Trump, 24% of Black men voted for Trump, & 47% of Latino men voted for Trump. We know now from the data that Gen-Z men are more likely than Millenials to be conservative, which is absolutely counter-cultural in ways we shouldn’t downplay. And part of the reason is right-of-center bro-casters (male podcasters) who fill a void in the cultural discourse. People like Joe Rogan whose podcasts can last 3 hours long and don’t advertise themselves as overtly political even though they have an unmistakable right-of-center political slant. This is where young men are getting their cultural information, where they go to feel centered, acknowledged, & important again. And while it’s incredibly easy to say, “Well, men can fuck off then!” something I’ve thought and said out loud many times, this problem will only get worse unless progressives do something about it because conservative media spaces are more masculine and they’re telling young men that they’re important and fundamental and valuable (in defending things that conservatives adore like traditional families or male breadwinners) and young men want that affirmation and need that affirmation more than any other age bracket.
And let’s be honest, that’s not strange. All people want to feel valued, appreciated, understood, centered, & acknowledged. That’s a very basic human need and the long history of patriarchy in the world doesn’t change that.
Just as important, Americans don’t want to be best-supporting actors. Ever. This is true of almost everyone save introverts in America. Americans want the lead role even when they don’t deserve it because we all have protagonist syndrome of one type of another. We are obsessed with lead actors and bad bitch bosses whether we want to be one or because one is ruining our life. So we, as a country, have to change this situation both politically and culturally because women can’t do the work alone and more men are needed to fight the good fight. It’s always been that way. But if our only response is, “men can fuck off,” we should remember that that’s partially how we got into this mess—heartbroken and disillusioned. If ignoring men, boycotting men, & telling men to go away are the way we deal with the 2024 election, then we should prepare for more heartache in the future in politics. We should prepare for an even larger exodus of male voters in the future where our elections no longer reflect our intentional communities.
The DNC needs to not take the Latino, Black, & Asian vote for granted and motivate voters to vote again and to see each election as a form of economic self-interest, cultural self-protection, & harm reduction for marginalized groups. Voting for the DNC must be treated as the only way for us to protect ourselves, not boycotting the election, not voting third party, not voting for an aspiring fascist because he mumbled some things into the mic once about solving all wars in the Middle East before he started his second term. Voting blue must be treated as the only legit form of self-preservation and non-voting must be treated as community endangerment. Voting blue must be treated as political resistance. IOW, the stakes need to be high and stay high for every election going forward. In Wayne County, for example, only 47% of eligible voters voted this time even though the Michigan DNC knows that Detroit needs at least a 50% voter turnout to have large enough blue margins to make up for red counties in Michigan according to the New York Times. Millions of democrats voters sat this election out, which is astounding when you consider that voting was better in Michigan for Democrats during a global pandemic where millions of people died than now.
As I argued a year ago in an earlier newsletter, the DNC needs to openly and unapologetically support a two-state solution, demand justice for all crimes against humanity in the world, whether it’s perpetrated by Israel or Hamas, support the UN International Court of Justice, stick up for Palestinians in policy and rhetoric, & modernize its views of Israeli-American relations, Israeli aid, and all geopolitical issues in the Middle East because supporting Palestinian rights isn’t an albatross anymore and Israel can’t defy the world if America doesn’t play along. When hardliners accuse the DNC of being antisemitic or supporting terrorists, which is always the first line of attack no matter how nuanced Democrats try to be with their Mid-east policy, the DNC can simply reiterate that it supports Israelis and Palestinians in finding a two-state solution where all peoples can live together, protect their sovereignty, & enjoy support of a multilateral coalition to develop and protect the region from violence, political extremism, & destabilization from any and all sources.
As I alluded to earlier, progressives must make a much better case for themselves and be part of the dominant political discourse on YouTube, social media apps, and podcasts because this is where Americans are getting their “information.” Liberals might get their news from NPR and the New York Times, but most voters don’t and most Americans don’t read, which is why they don’t know shit about candidates or policy except for the the things they hear. And because Americans believe in themselves even when they have absolutely no right to, they will still believe they’re capable of casting a ballot for a candidate with absolutely no real knowledge of either candidate. This means that progressive podcasts and YouTube shows need to one of the voices that everyday Americans listen to every day. Said another way, progressives needs to meet voters where they are, not where they think they should be.
We underestimate this country’s talent for emotional compartmentalization. When a construction worker in Scranton, Pennsylvania literally says that Trump is Hitler but at least he’ll help with the cost of living, we have the perfect anecdotal evidence for American Compartmentalization. Couple our talent for psychological compartmentalization with the way we place money issues at the top of our hierarchy of needs and you can understand—if only for a second—how and why Americans were able to ignore Trump’s most egregious qualities so easily like his stated admiration for Nazi generals or his promise to be a dictator for just one day or the way he called the White House trash or the time he asked on Truth Social for the US Constitution to be overturned because he lost an election to Biden.
Many Trump voters know he has authoritarian, anti-democratic instincts. They know he might aspire to be a lower-case fascist, but they believe—falsely—that American institutions are strong enough to check his worst impulses because they did last time (just barely). Americans also hope that warnings of institutional collapse by Democrats are just alarmism. But at the end of the day, Trump supporters know that even if they’re wrong and even if Trump is an aspiring fascist, they also know that they’re not his enemy and many Trump supporters will defend his aspirational fascism as long as he targets other people. Hitler indeed.
Americans vote appositionally because they don’t know how to reconcile their contradictory views of American capitalism: they love the idea of market capitalism but they hate the way capitalism hurts their pocketbooks, makes their jobs precarious, compresses their salaries, destroys neighborhoods and ecosystems, exploits workers, and raises the prices of goods and services. Americans love the idea of cowboy capitalism but they hate it when elitist capitalism works against them, from their first summer job to their dwindling retirement account. Americans know the system is rigged and they know it’s unfair but they also know that if they had more power, money, & influence like Trump, Musk, Bezos, et al., they could reap the system to their benefit like a cowboy winning a gun fight in a saloon.
That’s why Americans have such an intense and contradictory love/hate relationship with billionaires. They hate them but they respect them. They resent them but they also revere them. They criticize them but they also find them wildly inspiring because the American billionaire is the finance cowboy of the American imagination because he gets to ride off into that sunset with a pile of dead working class brown bodies behind him.
Americans have been programmed to hate every other economic system but their own because it could always be worse and frankly, the deplorable human rights and economic records of fully developed socialist countries doesn’t help matters, let’s be honest. But because Americans can’t hate capitalism without being labeled socialists, they choose to hate the government in office during every economic failure as if the problem isn’t our market economy, but its administrative execution. Americans choose to hate the issues that stem from capitalism as if they’re outliers of our economic system. To them, wage compression, gargantuan CEO salaries, structural unemployment, inflation and price gauging, cultural and political collapse, collusion and corruption, & shock capitalism, are all outliers. In reality, these are all typical issues that pop up again and again in every capitalist country, but progressives can argue, fairly I think, that as a country, we have the power to decide which version of capitalism America follows and how we define capitalism in this country. We have the power to define how American capitalism functions in our lives and in the world without asking for an armed proletarian revolution or children working in coal mines. IOW, economic systems are a lot like identities: instead of being binary, they are part of a spectrum with full capitalism on one end and full socialism on the other and we can move our own economic system up and down that spectrum to the place where it needs to be in order to improve the lives of everyday Americans without selling out to Bernie Bros in Che t-shirts. But again, this can’t happen until we, as a country, are willing to have much more nuanced and complex conversations about our culture and our political and economic systems. And America doesn’t do nuance.
The DNC needs to appeal to working class Americans again, but that can’t happen if it doesn’t center economic issues every day in its party platform from here on out or if it’s too compromised by lobbyists or if it’s seen as the smug, white-collar, college-educated crowd that thinks that college women are going to save the day while millions of young men and women don’t vote or vote against their interests simply because we didn’t incentivize their participation or see their value or acknowledge their importance or modernize our own party platform to represent a pluralistic multi-class America. Furthermore, the DNC needs to stop trying to be Moderate Republicans. It didn’t work. It never does. Exit polls show that Harris only received 4% of the GOP vote and Trump received 5% of the Democratic vote in this election. That’s a wash at best and a losing ratio at worst. I’d argue that a small percentage of educated Republicans will vote for sound economics based on sound, controlled fiscal policy anyway, regardless of the candidate’s party but it’s non-college-educated voters that the DNC is losing badly. If voters believe that the DNC has its economic interests at heart, most of them will forgive a number of so-called radical policy proposals that the RNC will accuse them of having because Americans are selfish (like most voters) and they’re gifted at compartmentalization. And even though I’ve long been a huge supporter of Affirmative Action because of the long history of systemic racism in this country, it would be such an easy and smooth transition for the DNC to move to a platform of economic equity for all people that would now include working class people and poor white people. Obama knew this. Why doesn’t the DNC? It would be such an easy and intuitive thing to fight for class-based solutions and adopt a party platform of economic equity that would help the vast majority of the country while also appealing to and supporting marginalized communities in obvious but also invisible ways too using race-neutral terminology that Republicans can’t create campaigns about. Rich people won’t like this idea, of course, but some of them were never going to vote Democrat anyway because they care about their taxes and the other half are educated and are going to vote blue simply because it’s the more educated party. But the DNC needs to be smart and pragmatic, not idealistic and morally justified.
The DNC and progressives at large need to stop taking the high road for everything. I’m fucking sick of it and so are a lot of defectors. For one thing, no one is going to give Democrats credit for doing the right thing and for another, being morally superior only reinforces the democratic stereotype of elitism that it shed under Clinton and Obama and Harris. Furthermore, politics is dirty, sleazy, agressive, emotionally violent, relentless, cruel, Machiavellian, & hypocritical—a zero-sum game between overlapping political parties. I don’t like that one bit but that’s how it is. This is why so many of us absolutely detest politics because it’s a manifestation of our worst qualities as human beings. But as we learned from watching pro-Palestinian voters boycott a fucked up political system that has never protected or supported Palestinian rights in the history of this country, not voting, voting third party, or voting for the party that passed two Muslim bans and uses the word Palestinian as an insult doesn’t make the system or your world better, it only benefits Trump’s xenophobic immigration policies and Trump will damage the lives of all marginalized communities in this country, which will absolutely include Arab Americans and Muslims. And if change is what you want, then avoiding the dirt and filth of politics by not voting will never keep your hands clean or give you what you want since you still must go through the political system to get everything you believe in from Palestinian statehood to Israeli war crimes accountability. That’s why Clinton, despite his idiotic hubris in the Oval Office, knew how to win. He knew how to punch Republicans in the mouth and call them out on their religious and moral hypocrisy and they absolutely hated him for it, but Americans didn’t care about his scandals as long as the economy was humming along. And hum it did. We need that energy for the midterms and the 2028 General Election. We need a progressive fighter even if it’s a fight for ideas, philosophies, visions of the future, & moral principles where I think the GOP is incredibly vulnerable after defending an armed insurrection, a cabinet of rapists and unqualified schmucks, another xenophobic election and a fascist deportation policy, full-throttled Russian appeasement, & an abandonment of character as a political issue.
The DNC must simplify its economic messaging, hire advertising managers, stop using target groups, & create message coherency so every member and surrogate of the party is saying the same thing. Republicans are much much better at this than Democrats are when it comes to party discipline and party messaging. The DNC also needs to employ repetition for all political messages, advertise in the all the media markets where centrists populate in English and Spanish, especially the podcast and YouTube spaces, and remind Americans of all the catastrophic damage that happened during Mango Mussolini’s first and second terms while tying MAGA Republicans to every single fiasco to provoke a strong emotional reaction in voters and remind them that boring quiet efficiency, expertise in government, + economic equity is always superior to loud white nationalist chaos, dipshits in government, + grievance identity politics.
The DNC must embrace cryptocurrency in its party platform whether it likes digital currency or not because this shit is not going away and the first party to fully embrace it (and not simply sell ridiculous NFT cards for personal enrichment) is going to appeal to millions of young investors who think Bitcoin is the only currency of the future that matters.
That’s my take. Now, the only question is, will the DNC and American progressives learn from their mistakes or will they double down on their losing formula in 2026 and 2028 and pick the worst candidate again? Your guess is as good as mine.