In Ohio and nationally, Democratic hopes were high ahead of Tuesday’s election.
They had reeled off a string of victories since Republican nominees to the US Supreme Court stripped protections for abortion rights. And they ran against a candidate in Donald Trump who had been convicted of dozens of felonies, tried to overturn the last election and used violent, misogynistic and racist rhetoric in the current race.
But as Tuesday night faded into Wednesday morning, it became clear that Trump had widened his margins in Ohio and across the country, enabling him to become the first Republican to win the popular vote since 2004.
That left stunned Democrats and observers scrambling for answers. Among those on offer Wednesday were a truth-free information ecosystem, a lack of a consistent economic message and an unwillingness among millions of 2024 voters to consider facts that contradict what they believe to be true.
Columbus native Morgan Harper has run in Democratic primaries for the U.S. Senate and House. She is now director of policy and advocacy for the American Economic Liberties Project, a Washington, DC-based group that seeks to reduce harm to consumers by concentrated economic interests.
She said Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign did not do enough to address the issue most important to the working-class voters who broke so hard for Trump.
“There wasn’t a consistent economic message,” Harper said. “There was a plan released. There was talk of tackling price metering in the grocery market and middlemen in pharmacies. But it wasn’t something that was brought up every day. It wasn’t an overarching vision, and I think that’s something that people desperately want to hear from all political figures right now, but especially Democrats, because we purport to represent the working class.”
She said that’s especially true in Ohio.
“I think there’s still a lot of frustration with the fact that we have two tracks to the economy — people who are tied to the stock market and how it’s doing, and everybody else,” Harper said. “I’m hearing from a lot of Ohio voters who feel that even if they work hard or even if they have a good job, they’re just not getting ahead. If that’s how you feel, it’s something you’re going to feel every day.”
As national co-chair of Harris, U.S. Rep. Veronica Escobar, D-Texas, knocked on many doors across the swing states and in her hometown of El Paso. On Wednesday, she took to Facebook to say she encountered a mountain of misinformation.
“Everywhere I looked, it was clear that the majority of voters get their ‘news’ from sources that promote outrageous lies,” Escobar wrote. “I saw people I have known and respected for many years here in our own community repeating completely false claims. It is tough to win elections in a country where the truth no longer exists.”
She added, “The information landscape in our country is poisoned.”
University of Cincinnati political scientist David Niven agreed that there is a lot of garbage information swirling around, but he pointed to an even deeper problem.
“It’s not just the (Democratic) losses in the states they lost, it’s the losses in the states they won,” Niven said. “It indicates a fundamental failure to get the plane off the ground.”
He said people have never wanted to hear information that doesn’t fit their preconceived notions, and with today’s limitless platforms, they don’t have to. Niven acknowledged that the national media struggled to cover Trump’s outrageous statements and actions in a manner commensurate with its coverage of Harris.
“But more powerful is the ability to choose one’s own reality with today’s media; to never confront an opposing thought,” he said. “It never happened on Fox News, but the Biden administration is literally building bridges, but there is a general assumption among the American public that nothing has happened in the last four years.”
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