What really went wrong
There’s a ton of talk right now about who needs to be blamed for the Democratic Party’s loss in the 2024 presidential election. The proverbial knives are coming out, as campaign members and strategists begin scapegoating each other for what went wrong. Not only is this unproductive, it completely misses the point.
Did Kamala Harris and her campaign get everything right? I doubt it. No campaign ever gets everything right. But they were given just a hundred days to ramp up from nowhere on strategy and messaging. Despite those constraints, they came within one point of winning. The margin in the national popular vote was about one point, and the margin in each of the deciding swing states was about one point. Kamala came very close to winning, under seemingly impossible circumstances. From a strategy standpoint, the question shouldn’t be what went wrong. The question should be how so many things managed to go right.
If you want to talk about what went wrong in 2024, there’s one culprit. The entire mainstream media colluded to dishonestly force an incumbent President out of the race with just a hundred days left. And the replacement candidate wasn’t able to run a full campaign. It’s as simple as that. The media is the evil villain here.
Don’t try to blame Biden for not having stepped aside earlier. Presidential incumbency is the strongest force in U.S. politics, and you never sacrifice it willingly. Biden was right to run again. It gave us our best chance. He simply didn’t foresee that with just a hundred days left, the entire media would suddenly decide to destroy him by dishonestly overplaying his mild cognitive struggles while ignoring his opponent’s severe cognitive struggles.
And don’t blame Kamala Harris. You try entering the race at the last minute under those circumstances. And she almost won.
The bottom line is that the media – the entire media, even the outlets on our “side” – wanted Trump back. They wanted him back badly enough that they knocked Biden out of the race at the last possible moment. They wanted Trump badly enough that they refused to acknowledge Trump was exhibiting symptoms consistent with severe dementia. They wanted Trump badly enough that they massively overhyped inflation even after Biden had fixed it. They wanted Trump badly enough that they refused to explain what a tariff was. The media wanted Trump, badly enough to destroy its own credibility, and we still came within one point of defeating the evil Trump-media cabal.
So let’s not look internally when assigning blame or figuring out what needs to change. The media simply decided to sabotage this election from start to finish. It was pretty close to a criminal conspiracy, given that they were conspiring with a convicted felon who was awaiting sentencing.
What has to change is the media. Forcibly. I’d say we have to put them out of business, but Trump will probably do that himself. These major media outlets wanted the ratings of another Trump regime so badly, they didn’t care that Trump will try to abuse the power of his office to dismantle them. That might not happen until year three, they figured, and by then different executives will be in place to bear the brunt of it anyway.
So what do we do? For now, we’re doing the smart thing by choking off the ratings of every major media outlet. Ratings are in the toilet for MSNBC and CNN. MSNBC is being spun off. The network did it to itself. How many times did MSNBC use the word “dementia” to describe Trump during the election? By my count zero. Exactly what good was MSNBC doing for us? Let them fail.
We need to build new media powerhouses on the left and center to replace the ones that have so willfully and evilly failed us. That means turning Palmer Report into the kind of juggernaut that can bypass the old guard and directly take the fight to Trump and organize liberal activists and influence the voters in the middle. So far we’ve raised more than $21,400 in that effort. Let’s keep it going and truly fight back. Contribute here.
