Why Most Americans Didn’t Buy the Harris Campaign

“Hard as they tried to suck us through the black hole leading to their alternative-facts universe, inundating us in a steady stream of misinformation even as they, again ironically, accused us of peddling misinformation, we resisted.”

In the waning days of the 2024 Presidential election, The Atlantic, running an assortment of purely delusional articles engaged in wild factual distortions and rampant and incendiary name-calling and fearmongering, played host to one especially unhinged piece by David A. Graham titled, in an echo of comments made shortly beforehand by Michelle Obama, “How Is It This Close?” Well, we can now say that, in the end, it was not especially close, though I doubt this will be of much solace to Graham and his ilk.

For some time now, research has shown that, contrary to the common presupposition that education opens minds, our “educated” elites trapped in the corporate media bubble labor under a total inability to understand and empathize with “the other side.” From widely discussed books caricaturing and demonizing rural Americans to former President Barack Obama’s recent tone-deaf hectoring of “the brothers” for their purported misogyny in not sharing his enthusiasm for Vice President Kamala Harris to another recent Atlantic article in which Adam Serwer subdivided Trump supporters into three categories, all of which shared the characteristics of delusion and denial, the elites’ approach to this election has been a mix of misapprehension, disinformation, and condescension.

The media, academia, and the celebrity class, of course, had worked overtime on Vice President Harris’s behalf, doing its darndest to insulate the Vice President from criticism and scrutiny and trying to paint their transparently incompetent candidate as the second coming of President Obama even as she spent her limited time away from the teleprompter meandering in circles around predigested talking points. The Media Research Center found that coverage of this election was the most lopsided in history, with broadcast evening news coverage of Vice President Harris being 78% positive and of former President Donald Trump being 85% negative. And, with the media seemingly marching in lockstep with her campaign all the way to the finish line, those of us not hypnotized by the elite monoculture’s hall of mirrors definitely felt the substantial slant as they went from telling us she was the “joy” candidate in contrast to those “weird” Republicans, to their unambiguously biased “moderation” of the last two debates. They never bothered to hold her feet to the fire in probing her non-answers during the rare interviews she gave. There was 60 Minutes’ outright duplicitous editing to make her incoherent word jumbles seem slightly more coherent. There was then the implosion of the “joy” campaign in favor of a hatred-and-division-stoking fear campaign premised on calling now President-elect Trump a would-be authoritarian fascist who, if elected, would, among other things, crack down on free speech and weaponize law enforcement against his opponents (never mind the obvious ironies of such charges coming from the people whose administration had cracked down on free speech and weaponized law enforcement against the President-elect).