Embrace Complexity in Resistance
The 2024 Election and Beyond
In a country as large and complex as the United States, looking for simple answers has done us wrong.
The idea that there’s a silver bullet issue such as abortion or “it’s just the economy stupid” cannot fully explain or create strategies to win over such a fragmented electorate. Multiple stories need to be told because different voters have different motivations.
I won’t be the one making the decisions of how the party or people move ahead, but what I’d implore the Democrats is to accept this complexity and that we can take it on. We’ve had successful Blue Waves in the past and we can again.
What I’d also implore as well, is we need to spend more time in the immediate term protecting people and institutions as much as we can from the harm vs fighting with each other.
Who I Am
I’m a concerned citizen. I’ve also thought about and worked implementing strategies to convince people to make different decisions through most of my career working in data-driven advertising and can see how people can be convinced/manipulated to make decisions, how complex decision-making can be among different constituents, and how people can be convinced.
I also studied International Relations as an undergrad at UC Davis, have a Master of Communication Management from the Annenberg School at USC where I researched how AI can detect sentiment and automatically generate appealing messaging, and have an EMBA from a joint program from UCLA-National University of Singapore.
I was also raised by parents who grew up in an authoritarian dictatorship to pay attention to politics, history, cherish my rights and freedoms, and to speak out.
This Wasn’t a Blowout Nor Does Trump Have a Mandate
I generally agree with these thesis:
- GOP and Dems are Each Drawing Erroneous Conclusions from 2024 | by Matthew Dowd.
- No, Trump Did Not Win in a Landslide — nor Did He Secure a Mandate | The Nation
Kamala Harris secured about ~75 million votes to Trump’s ~77 million. It’s worth noting that Barack Obama won with ~69 million votes and Clinton lost with ~65 million.
But still, a loss is a loss, with a huge gap from the ~81 million votes Biden got.
What I’d like us to think about for the future are the layers of differences that added up to a sum of factors.
Why We Lost
Larger picture of incumbent parties driven out by inflation
This is part of a worldwide trend of backlash against incumbent parties. We must not look at the US in isolation. The loss of the LDP in Japan was an early indicator.
- “Look around the world. Everywhere, incumbent governments of every hue have taken a beating from angry voters. For the first time in almost 120 years of records, every government in 10 major countries being tracked by a research project with elections this year suffered an unprecedented reversal.”
- “In every presidential election, “the economy, stupid” matters most, as James Carville famously said, and Harris never developed a compelling response to concerns about inflation’s lingering effects.”
107 Days
By far to me, the biggest factor here is the Democrat Party not holding Biden accountable to being a transitional figure as he claimed, hiding his decline, and not holding primaries after 2022. Figuring out messaging and the right reach takes more than 107 Days.
Why Kamala Harris lost the election — POLITICO
- “Another Harris aide said it was clear Biden should have made a graceful exit much sooner, allowing Democrats to hold a primary they believed Harris would have won.”
Dems rage against Biden’s ‘arrogance’ after Harris loss
- “The decision froze several would-be successors in place, linking the party to a candidate who his advisers insisted would gain momentum as the race progressed. And despite mounting worries among Democrats about Biden’s effectiveness, it took until June’s catastrophic debate for those concerns to go public. Even then, Biden spent nearly a month trying to salvage his run before dropping out — leaving little time for Democrats to audition new candidates.”
Making it About Trump and Not the Voters
I don’t buy the whole idea Harris did not have explicit and specific economic plans. She went on multiple interviews, said in her speeches, and literally had an economic policy book about $25k payment support for first time homeowners, capping prescription drug costs, and fighting against price gouging.. These are actual numbers, not concepts of a plan, with Nobel Prize economists endorsing her economic plan.
That being said, I do think making those her central thesis vs warning about the danger of facism under Trump, which a lot of voters just don’t understand or believe. The inital pic up above is from my friend Brooklyne Gipson, whom I studied with, who is now a Professor of Journalism and Media Studies.
Why Kamala Harris lost to Donald Trump
- In the final stretch, however, Harris made a tactical decision to again highlight the dangers of a second Trump presidency, calling the president a “fascist” and campaigning with disaffected Republicans fed up with his rhetoric.”
Where did Democratic voters go?
- “Not nearly enough people turned out to vote for what the Democratic Party was selling nationally,” said MSNBC’s Jen Psaki, who previously served as President Joe Biden’s press secretary. The party’s messaging in the campaign’s final days — that Trump represented a fascist turn away from democracy — was “geared too much” toward college-educated white voters. “Clearly that message just didn’t connect with enough people”
Lack of Political Engagement
A huge part of the American public just is not politically engaged. A silver lining here is their political affiliations are up for grabs.
What Political News Engagement Tells Us About Donald Trump’s Victory
- “The pattern is clear: Harris won with voters who pay serious attention to political news. Among those who don’t, her support collapsed, giving Trump a clear advantage.”
‘Did Joe Biden drop out?’ Google searches spiked in key states on Election Day | FOX 5 Atlanta
- “On Election Day, many Americans appeared to be surprised by President Joe Biden’s absence from the 2024 ballot, despite his withdrawal from the race months earlier.”
Lack of Media Literacy
The fragmentation of the information ecosystem, which I’ll highlight below, requires media literacy to navigate. One of the most startling things about the United States are these literacy statistics. People need to be communicated to in a way they understand without condescension. While people like me in the educated class find Trump repugnant, should we be surprised that his speaking style resonates with a huge portion of the population in this context?
Literacy Statistics 2024- 2025 (Where we are now).
- On average, 79% of U.S. adults nationwide are literate in 2024
- 21% of adults in the US are illiterate in 2024.
- 54% of adults have a literacy below a 6th-grade level (20% are below 5th-grade level).
An Information Ecosystem of Lies and No Accountability
Right Wing Media has simply been more effective, their lies have not been held accountable for — including microtargeting contradictory messages to different voter groups, people believing them (re: lack of literacy and therefore media literacy above), and they march in lockstep.
Why Does No One Understand the Real Reason Trump Won? | The New Republic
- “Let me say that again, in case it got lost: Today, the right-wing media sets the news agenda in this country. Not The New York Times. Not The Washington Post (which bent over backwards to exert no influence when Jeff Bezos pulled the paper’s Harris endorsement). Not CBS, NBC, and ABC. The agenda is set by all the outlets I listed in the above paragraph. Even the mighty New York Times follows in its wake, aping the tone they set disturbingly often.”
Inside the Republican false-flag effort to turn off Kamala Harris voters — The Washington Post
- “Muslims in Michigan began seeing pro-Israel ads this fall praising Vice President Kamala Harris for marrying a Jewish man and backing the Jewish state. Jews in Pennsylvania, meanwhile, saw ads from the same group with the opposite message: Harris wanted to stop U.S. arms shipments to Israel.”
Normalization of Trump by Media and Failure of the Fourth Estate
Since 2016, the media has not held Trump accountable and normalized him as a candidate. Reporting was rife with double standards. Journalism schools will look back and teach this moment as a huge failure of the press.
How to Think About Covering Trump 2.0 — Columbia Journalism Review
- “When Trump launched his first presidential run, the media was dubious about his chances — but handed him a bunch of free airtime — in ways that I believe were consequential, or at least played into his hands; now everyone knows exactly who Trump is, not least since he freely advertises the fact every chance he gets. To the extent that I’ve agreed with the criticisms of journalistic sanewashing and the like, my impulse has been a desire for the media to tell the truest and clearest story about Trump that it can — because a media that can’t consistently name and shine a light on authoritarianism clearly isn’t equipped to cover a country tilting in an authoritarian direction.”
- “Meanwhile, what of Trump’s obvious cognitive decline, his endless lies, his shocking plans to imprison his political enemies and to deport millions of people he calls “animals”, his relationship with the late accused sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein?”
Sexism and Racism — Namely Misogynoir
This played a huge part. It’s maybe easy to understand why huge segments of the White population would not vote for her, but I can easily see how non-White men who prefer a racist White strongman vs someone whose identities should represent someone beneath them. I grew up and lived in immigrant communities until I had the means not to. Few people would be more resentful from these groups of a Black and South Asian woman taking power.
- “Since Bay Area native and Vice President Kamala Harris announced her intent to replace President Biden as the Democratic presidential nominee, a barrage of attacks has surfaced. These attacks range from political criticisms to personal digs, reflecting a troubling blend of misogyny and racism, often referred to as “misogynoir.”
Opinion | We Spoke With 13 Young Undecided Americans for Months. Here’s How They Voted.
- “I voted Trump. I made the decision after he appeared on “Joe Rogan.” He just seemed more normal than the other side.”
Mismatched Strategy and Ideology
A lot of the ideas of the last few years from left-wing progressivism have proven deeply unpopular. There’s a lot of propaganda reporting against the state of blue cities that is exaggerated and agenda seeking, but as someone who shuttles for work between LA, SF, and NY, you can’t deny the failures of governance here. That has to be addressed.
Opinion | When Will Democrats Learn to Say No? — The New York Times
- “Democrats cannot do this as long as they remain crippled by a fetish for putting coalition management over a real desire for power. Whereas Mr. Trump has crafted an image as a different kind of Republican by routinely making claims that break with the party line on issues ranging from protecting Social Security and Medicare to mandating insurance coverage of in vitro fertilization, Democrats remain stuck trying to please all of their interest groups while watching voters of all races desert them over the very stances that these groups impose on the party.”
The left’s comforting myth about why Harris lost
- “For now, my point is simply that there is little basis for confidence that Harris lost due to excessive moderation, or that Democrats would benefit electorally from becoming broadly more left-wing. The fact that many on the left nevertheless evince such certainty is therefore disconcerting.”
The blue cities must be fixed — by Noah Smith — Noahpinion
- “But fixing blue cities is going to require more than just waves of voter anger or a laundry list of good policies. It’s going to require a mindset change — a shift in people’s understanding of what a city should be and how it should be run. The most important thing blue cities need to understand and internalize is that anarchy is not a form of welfare”
Gaza
We will look back at the below as one of the tragedies of the early 21th century.
- “Texts, mailers, social media ads and billboards targeting heavily Arab American areas in metro Detroit paint Harris as a staunch ally of Israel who will continue supplying arms to the country. Meanwhile, residents in metro Detroit or areas of Pennsylvania with higher Jewish populations have been receiving messaging that underscores her alleged support for the Palestinian cause.”
Trump’s pro-Israel cabinet picks upset Muslims who voted for him | Reuters
- “Muslim support for Trump helped him win Michigan and may have factored into other swing state wins, strategists believe.”
People Just Don’t Care About Decency
I find this particularly damning about this whole thing, is that people know who Trump is and lived through COVID, but didn’t care. That being said, I’m not a fan of this, I’m from California, not America. Or Don’t Call Me an American, I’m a New Yorker stuff. If we’re the ones living out the ideals of the Constitution, why are we willing to accept not being the Real Americans?
Our mistake was to think we lived in a better country than we do | Rebecca Solnit | The Guardian
- “They appear to be deeply damaged people and they have come to damage everything else, including the climate; human rights, especially women’s rights, trans rights and immigrants’ rights; and the US economy. The rest of us and the rest of the world will be the cleanup crew because men like this never clean up after themselves.”
Opinion | Enough — The New York Times
- “Mr. Trump’s election demonstrates how American tolerance for the unacceptable is nearly infinite.”
Hopes, Dreams, and Preservation
The above is all shattering and painful. I’m a Californian who lived in SF when Kamala Harris served as a beloved Attorney General. I lived in New York for nearly a decade, and am now an American expat. One of the defining experiences as an American expat is realizing how much I value liberalism and the belief in the dignity of the individuals and fairness. I saw in Kamala Harris and Tim Walz as an affirmation of those values, of the best of us, competence, and being able to set a vision and example of our future.
Instead, it’s horrible to have the worst people in the world continue to get rewarded for bad actions. A convicted sex offender and scammer winning against former prosecutor who became one due to the sexual abuse of her best friend is a national humiliation. And now he’s nominating an entire cabinet of sex predators and incompetents.
I think we have to grieve and process this to be ready for the fight. Some wisdom I’ve seen below:
- How to get through this
- Timothy Snyder: ‘You have to be in the moment in order to get through the moment’
What I’ll Do Next
I wrote this as an angry young woman in 2016 What I’m Doing to Fight. In the intervening years into middle age, I’m less angry more about building. I wrote this over a weekend as I grieved.
Take Care of Myself, Find Community, and Support Organizations
Shock doctrine is meant to overwhelm us. I refuse to let it eat at my mental health and lean into community. I will focus on issues I care about and uplift those directly on the fight as much as I can as an American expat.
Monthly Committed Donations
- NRDC
- Planned Parenthood
- ACLU
- Indivisible
- EFF
Learning
I’ve been reading Timothy Snyder’s Lessons on Tyranny and On Freedom. There are the points I’m focused on:
- “4. Take responsibility for the face of the world. The symbols of today enable the reality of tomorrow. Notice the swastikas and the other signs of hate. Do not look away, and do not get used to them. Remove them yourself and set an example for others to do so.”
- “5. Remember professional ethics. When political leaders set a negative example, professional commitments to just practice become more important. It is hard to subvert a rule-of-law state without lawyers, or to hold show trials without judges. Authoritarians need obedient civil servants, and concentration camp directors seek businessmen interested in cheap labor.”
- “8. Stand out. Someone has to. It is easy to follow along. It can feel strange to do or say something different. But without that unease, there is no freedom. Remember Rosa Parks. The moment you set an example, the spell of the status quo is broken, and others will follow.”
- “15. Contribute to good causes. Be active in organizations, political or not, that express your own view of life. Pick a charity or two and set up autopay. Then you will have made a free choice that supports civil society and helps others to do good.”
- “19. Be a patriot. Set a good example of what America means for the generations to come. They will need it.”
I’ll continue to learn about historical examples where people resisted authoritarianism and misinformation. I live in Taiwan where disinformation is piled on day-by-day. Other countries suffer the same, but have overcome it. I’ll learn from the successful examples of others as well.
Decide on Institutions/Causes to Focus On Protecting
- Education+ Libraries
- Voting Rights
- Women’s Rights
