The Low-Trust Election
I don’t think there was anything that the Harris campaign could have done that would have changed the outcome of this election, I really don’t. Policy, GOTV, fundraising, none of it actually moved the needle given what we know now about the outcome. Instead, I think the major dynamic of 2024 was an issue of trust — trust in institutions, trust in information, trust in others. We’ve just lived through the Low-Trust Election and the change in dynamics it represents is going to make our heads spin for decades.
The day-to-day experience of living in America is no longer just one of being bombarded with advertising, it’s morphed into wall to wall scams — the mobile ads claiming you can win cash playing solitaire, the sports ads filled with gambling to try to get you addicted, the health ads filled with supplements that don’t do anything. We all know they’re scams, but they’re so omnipresent that it’s easy to make yourself wonder if they aren’t. The media monoculture is dead, and it’s been replaced by a million talking heads that appear on your phone and tell you not to trust things. Not to trust your doctors, not to trust your teachers, not to trust the government. They appear on your phone no matter what you do because an algorithm has decided they’re the most likely thing to keep you watching so you can keep getting the ads. This constant buffeting of the psyche of each and every American by the winds of these forces has eroded them, and it’s taught us to no longer trust institutions, or each other. American minds are increasingly their own individual bedroom communities, paranoid and twisted, looking skeptically at the outside world.
The Republican Party has been the party of the Low-Trust voter for a very long time. It’s the party that wants to get rid of institutions, of any of the bonds that connect us all together. The Democratic Party is the party of institutions, the party of Good Governance. It’s the party of trusting other Americans to make good choices for you. There is very little that the Democrats can do to appeal to the Low-Trust voter, and you saw what that means for the future of our politics last night. I would go so far as to say that we’re seeing the effects of a realignment of what partisanship is. The GOP is the party of the perpetual outsider and the Low-Trust voter, the people calling for things to be torn down. The Democrats are the insiders, the institutionalists. That’s why you saw realignment of people like Liz Cheney and Vermont Governor Phil Scott, people who still think the government matters even if they disagree on how it should be doing things.
I don’t know what you can do to win back the Low-Trust voters. There’s action that could have been taken long ago to counteract them like going after sports betting and some of the other engines that are eroding trust, but I don’t know how you build back trust in the government. Things like FEMA in disasters are supposed to be able to do that, but the post-hurricane situation in North Carolina, where outside agitators went in to try to destroy that trust, and people on the Internet went out of their way to spread lies about how the Federal government had abandoned Asheville, are just examples of how everything can be used to pop out more Low-Trust voters.
One of my structural worries (and I have very personal worries as well) is that we just saw the death of the idea of Good Governance in America. There’s no longer any kind of electoral incentive to try to be the party that tries to make the government work, and if you look at last night’s results through the lens of an economy that is doing better than the rest of the world there might be a significant disincentive to doing so. The future is going to be painful, and it’s going to be filled with more hardship than anyone thinks it will, and for much longer than we think it will be. The terrifying thought I keep returning to is that if the government’s decisions keep making people’s lives worse, as we know that Trump’s policies are going to do, won’t that just keep creating more Low-Trust voters? If we want to try to rebuild after what’s coming, we’re going to have to figure out a way to break that cycle. I don’t know how right now.
