Warning - this entry will be about the 2024 election. It's something I need to get out of my system in order to move on from the events of the last few months. I've put off writing about my immediate reactions for a while, but now it's time to finally confront a few things.
So, I spent pretty much the entirety of the Kamala Harris campaign for President of the United States in the left wing media bubble. I knew I was in a bubble from fairly early on, and that Harris had a fifty-fifty shot at winning pretty much the whole way through the campaign, no matter what the news was telling me from day to day. I was surprised at the outcome of the election on November 5th - not because of who ultimately won, but because it happened so quickly. After 2016 and 2020, I expected that we wouldn't know who would be President for a few days at least.
I don't want to write about what I think the Democrats did wrong, because the odds were stacked against them pretty high from the start, and my position is that there's not much that really could have been done with the cards they were dealt. The anti-incumbency mood of the country (and the globe really), coupled with the failures of the US Justice system, and the Republicans failing to primary any decent alternative to Trump all pointed to a Trump win months before Joe Biden dropped out of the race. As someone who has studied the US political system and consistently has a hard time ignoring politics, I was already in a bad mental state since late 2023. Just thinking about getting through another election year at the start of 2024 felt like an ordeal.
And then Kamala Harris was the nominee, and Brat Summer began, and suddenly there was this big wave of optimism that hit us full force. For this first time there was some hope about the Democratic candidate. Suddenly there looked like a real path to victory, and so many high profile endorsements were coming in. Conversely, Donald Trump was now a constant figure of derision, and nobody was too worried about voicing their disdain for him openly anymore. For a little over a hundred days, a good portion of the media was suddenly reflecting the world as I thought it should be - people were seeing through Trump's lies, and everyone was getting behind an intelligent, progressive candidate who had all the right answers. Of course it turns out that it wasn't true, and the support was illusory, but I don't blame anyone who bought into this narrative. After years of bad news, it was a comfort to think that a return to sanity could be possible. As the weeks went by, my anxieties lessened and my mood improved. I was still apprehensive about November, but I wasn't avoiding news about US politics anymore.
Now, as someone who is very familiar with narratives and the way they work, the one being pushed toward Democrats in the last month or so of the Harris campaign was hard to ignore. If you were on any kind of social media and expressed any kind of preference for progressive politics, you were getting a lot of stories about crowd sizes at rallies, women planning to vote in secret, and record numbers of newly registered voters. It was increasingly clear that I was being sold a certain view of the election by the various social media algorithms. For instance, Youtube started pushing a lot of Bulwark videos at me with very hyperbolic titles, usually about Trump doing something embarrassing. Meanwhile, Pod Save America recommendations disappeared for a while. When I checked on their channel, they were still releasing their videos at the same rate as usual, but their tone was far more cautious than what we were seeing in the bubble, and their coverage of Harris more even-handed, so the algorithm made them less visible.
In the end, it was the "less visible" ones who decided the election. I mostly stayed out of the right-wing media spheres, but even if I hadn't I wouldn't have had a more accurate picture of how the election was actually going to turn out. Fox News and their ilk are so divorced from reality as to be completely useless, and often operate based on some of the same faulty assumptions as the left-wing media anyway. The one good thing I can say about the left wing media is that the bubbles collapse faster. It's been weeks now, and there's still a lot of emotional self-examination going on from those who were convinced that a Harris landslide was coming. There are a few who are convinced that the pro-Harris momentum was real and the other side cheated, but not many. The Democrats are better at accepting bad news.
I admit that I got swept up in the hype in the last few days, partly due to the Selzer poll, and partly due to the huge turnout numbers. However, this was not my first rodeo and the shock wasn't nearly as bad as it had been after 2016. I had one sleepless night, but my anxiety ebbed very quickly. The worst had happened, but it was a possibility that I'd been facing down long before the Harris campaign began. The snap back to reality was abrupt, but not unexpected. The 2024 election was over, and that in itself was a relief. I expect I'll get through the 2028 election better too.
Looking back, I'm weirdly grateful for the bubble. I had peace of mind for three months. I was reminded that there are a lot of people who see the world the same way I do, and care about each other. I have many reasons to hope for better in the years ahead. I expect I'll end up in more media bubbles, and I'm still in a few - the Ukraine War is a big one - but it's getting easier to see them coming. And despite the damage they cause, I have to admit that they do have their uses.
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