Why presidential election beliefs as a topic? The US presidential election happened and Democrats are looking at analysing the fallout.
While it is easy to blame the qualities of the candidates, I wanted to take a look at the presidential election beliefs that underpinned the campaign. The reason why I am publishing a while after the fact is that I wanted the clarity of slower thinking rather than being wrapped up in the maelstrom of analysis, this then naturally took me to analyse presidential election beliefs rather than other aspects of the campaign such as the qualities of the candidates.
I think that their campaign was built on presidential election beliefs that would seem foolish in retrospect.
- Gen-Z would vote Democrat
- Substance matters
- Taking the moral high ground
- Trust in the mainstream media
- Vibes over policy
Gen-Z would vote Democrat
I won’t get into the debate over how representative and helpful generations are as a descriptor and assume on good faith that this is just short hand for young adults. Evidence would suggest that this belief was untrue in election performance and underlying research available prior to the election.
Group cohesion scores
BBH London looked at TGI’s Jan-Dec 2019 UK dataset, measuring the size of the average majority viewpoint across 419 lifestyle statements.
As an entire populace, the UK’s Group Cohesion Score is 48.7%. In other words, the average majority opinion is held by 48.7% of the population. …On average, the generations have a Group Cohesion Score of +1.3, making them only marginally more like-minded than the nation as a whole. For Gen Z, this score falls to +0.2. People born between 1997 and 2013 have no stronger connection to each other than to the rest of the country.
This viewpoint was supported by a piece of research conducted by Stanford University researchers back in 1998 and presented to the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association. The researchers found that the beliefs attributed to young adults at the time in terms of cynicism, bleakness about the future and personal unhappiness were actually increasing across all ages – an empirical demonstration of group cohesion similar to the TGI data cited.
Criteria affecting progressive political themes
Oxford Analytica published a paper looking at the criteria affecting progressive political themes on a global basis, which had some lessons at a national level as well:
- Manipulation of religious divisions will prevent an improvement in religious tolerance.
- Wealthier economies correlate with better support for proactive measures to support women’s rights.
A comment by Alexander Stubb at the Norwegian Business School struck me about this concept of wealthier economies. President Stubb was talking about struggling to understand Brexit, he recalled a politician commenting on how the UK benefited in terms of GDP, to be interrupted by and event attendee commented ‘Yeah mate, perhaps your GDP, but not mine’.
What a wealthier economy is, is as much contextual as nation level quantitative data.
This would probably explain why less well off women didn’t universally rally behind the Harris over Roe versus Wade when they may have been pre-occupied by the impact of inflation on their households.
It also may partly explain the progressive / conservative political split between the genders highlighted in the FT. A new global gender divide is emerging – documented the split.
Richard Reeves in his book Of Boys and Men highlighted some of the factors driving it that affect the context of a wealthier economy by gender from the gender split in education attainment to better quality social support networks.
Economically independent women can now flourish whether they are wives or not. Wifeless men, by contrast, are often a mess. Compared to married men, their health is worse, their employment rates are lower, and their social networks are weaker.
Substance matters
I was divided over whether I should include this in the next section as substance and taking the moral high ground seem to be closely paired. I think that this is based on a number of factors:
- In most careers there is a fallacy where we think others think our work matters more than it actually does in the minds of the general public, the same goes for policy wonks.
- From the Roman satirist Juvenal discussing ‘bread and circuses‘ to Orwell’s description of the ‘proles’ in 1984 it is obvious that their vision of a general public that want to be entertained rather than informed. The higher role for media exemplified by the likes of John Reith at the BBC is at odds with this reality. This goes hand-in-hand with the power that Elon Musk’s voter registration sweepstakes and Joe Rogan’s podcasts seemed to have; despite them being the antithesis of John Reith’s vision.
Taking the moral high ground
The Republican campaign threw out a number of ‘dead cat’ tactics that distracted media, outraged their political opponents and entertained their supporters:
- Donald Trump’s admiration for Arnold Palmer’s sizeable penis. Words I never thought I would be writing here.
- Unfounded accusations of Haitian immigrants eating pets.
- JD Vance’s childless cat lady comments.
- Donald Trump’s ‘millions of people pouring into our country from prisons and jails, from mental institutions and insane asylums‘
The average member of the public probably doesn’t care about the high ground. We can see this in marketing history. Going back to Christmas 2016, Poundland’s social campaign around its ‘naughty’ elf on a shelf that outraged the ad industry and regulators at the ASA, received positive responses from the general public online. We see this mirrored in the interests and pleasures of the ‘proles’ in George Orwell’s 1984. Elections aren’t a debate class, but entertainment.
Trust in the mainstream media
One of the great differences between the campaign run by the Democrats and their Republican counterparts was the role played by the mainstream media. The Harris campaign relied on institutions like Saturday Night Live and interviews with serious journalists.
By comparison, Donald Trump gave his interviews primarily with podcasters (though some of those podcasters were faces in the mainstream media before becoming podcasters like Sean Hannity) including:
- Sean Hannity
- Let’s Go! with Bill Belichick, Maxx Crosby, Peter King & Jim Gray
- Brian Kilmeade (Fox Radio podcast show)
- The Joe Rogan Experience
- Six Feet Under with Mark Calaway
- The Dan Bongino Show
- The Glenn Beck Program
- Bussin’ With The Boys
- Andrew Schulz’s Flagrant with Akaash Singh
- The Ben Shapiro Show
- The Ramsey Show also syndicated in their clips podcast The Ramsey Highlights
- The Howie Carr Radio Network
- Lex Fridman Podcast
- The Dr. Phil Podcast
- Shawn Ryan Show
- This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von
- The Adam Carolla Show
- Impaulsive with Logan Paul
Altogether Trump appeared on 22 podcasts in 2024 alone. Many of them on multiple occasions. If you discount mainstream media programmes republished in a podcast format, Harris appeared less times in less podcasts than her rival. In terms of absolute reach the Joe Rogan Experience is bigger for US audiences than equivalent shows on Fox News. Progressive-leaning TV networks MSNBC and CNN combined are about only half of Rogan’s reach.
The problem is that trust in mainstream media has declined, at a faster rate than their newer online media rivals according to research conducted by IPSOS. So the Democrats spent time focusing on ineffective media interactions in comparison to their Republican rivals based on presidential election beliefs about the primacy of mainstream media publishers with regards to politics.
