In a perfect world, Democrats would have a leader who lives and leads by the principle that “the buck stops here.” Unfortunately for the Democrats, no such leader currently exists for them.

The Democratic Party’s leaders have decamped back to their respective quarters to process their defeat by Donald Trump and his MAGA Republicans. As widely reported, many remain in denial about what happened on Election Day.

Kamala Harris and the Democrats lost because they were fighting the last war. By comparison, Trump and his MAGA movement won because they were (and are) fighting a war for the future. This error is encapsulated by the Democrats’ failed branding and media strategy and their inability to dominate the information space and “news” environment in an evolving era of social media, podcasts, “influencers" and algorithms. During the campaign, such nontraditional outlets served as a type of force multiplier for Trumpism during a time when elites and their institutions were viewed by large portions of the public as illegitimate.

As Paul Krugman laments in his farewell New York Times column, “[P]eople were feeling pretty good about the future when I began writing for this paper. Why did this optimism curdle? As I see it, we’ve had a collapse of trust in elites: The public no longer has faith that the people running things know what they’re doing, or that we can assume that they’re being honest."

In this postmortem-analysis of the 2024 election, the New York Times noted that each podcaster courted by Trump "was cited by name during the televised Trump victory celebrations":

Eight years later, the media ecosystem has become increasingly fractionalized. Mr. Trump took advantage of that. He declined to participate in a second debate with Ms. Harris, and then pulled out of a planned interview with “60 Minutes,” the country’s most popular news program, which has hosted the two major-party candidates since the late 1960s. Mr. Trump’s team complained that CBS wanted to fact-check his interview, the kind of basic accountability that is often absent from podcasts that are focused on entertainment.

Mr. Trump’s recent approach to media tracks the shifting ways that Americans consume news. A recent Pew Research Center study found that more than half of adults sometimes get news from social media. Facebook and YouTube outpace other social media platforms as news sources and Instagram and TikTok have seen gains over the last four years, the study said.

And, last month, trust in traditional mass media reached a new low, Gallup reported.

In service to its divide-and-conquer strategy while simultaneously building a multiethnic MAGA coalition of rage and resentment, the Trump campaign and its surrogates very skillfully used disinformation and propaganda to confuse and demobilize potential Harris voters. The Washington Post details how:

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.

Another group promoted “Kamala’s bold progressive agenda” to conservative-leaning Donald Trump voters, while a third filled the phones of young liberals with videos about how Harris had abandoned the progressive dream. Black voters in North Carolina were told Democrats wanted to take away their menthol cigarettes, while working-class White men in the Midwest were warned that Harris would support quotas for minorities and deny them Zyn nicotine pouches….

The project, funded with anonymous donations, micro-targeted messages across the battleground states, often with ads that appeared to be something they were not — a tactic the organizers sometimes referred to internally as “false positives.”

With digital spots, direct mail, text messages, influencer marketing and mobile billboards, the overall project was a high-tech experiment in misdirection — an old political tactic that has been sharpened in recent decades with increasingly precise targeting techniques.

Ads tested better if Muslims felt they were seeing a message meant for Zionists, “Bernie bros” felt they were hearing from the far left, and “Zyn bros” felt they were hearing from activists who wanted “a world without gas-powered vehicles,” a ban on fracking and affordable housing for undocumented Americans — policies Harris did not actually support during her campaign.

Trump’s campaign was expert in how it took advantage of what Nathan Heller describes in his excellent New Yorker essay as the “ambient information” environment. As detailed below, Trump and his propagandists were able to connect with the MAGA and other voters by validating their experiences and subjective realities (what social theorists describe as “life worlds”) in ways that the Harris campaign and the Democrats failed to match. Here, truth and empirical reality are secondary to emotions, perceptions and lived experience:

Of all the data visualizations that were churned out in the hours following the election, the one that struck me most was a map of the United States, showing whether individual areas had voted to the left or to the right of their positions in the Presidential race in 2020. It looks like a wind map. And it challenges the idea that Trump’s victory in this cycle was broadly issues- or community-based. The red wind extends across farmland and cities, young areas to old, rich areas to poor. It is not the map of communities having their local concerns addressed or not. It’s the map of an entire nation swept by the same ambient premises.

In a country where more than half of adults have literacy below a sixth-grade level, ambient information, however thin and wrong, is more powerful than actual facts. It has been the Democrats’ long-held premise that access to the truth will set the public free. They have corrected misinformation and sought to drop data to individual doors. This year’s contest shows that this premise is wrong. A majority of the American public doesn’t believe information that goes against what it thinks it knows — and a lot of what it thinks it knows originates in the brain of Donald Trump. He has polluted the well of received wisdom and what passes for common sense in America. And, until Democrats, too, figure out how to message ambiently, they’ll find themselves fighting not just a candidate but what the public holds to be self-evident truths. 

Heller offers this intervention and warning about the country’s overall media environment and a culture that is immature, anti-intellectual, hostile to expertise and earned knowledge, has a very short attention span and where, to borrow from media theorist Neil Postman, too many Americans are amusing themselves to death.

The Democrats didn’t look past national-scale audiences — Harris sat with both Fox News and Oprah. But she approached that landscape differently. The campaign, it was often noted, shied away from legacy-media interviews. It instead used a national platform to tune the affect, or vibes, of her rise: momentum, freedom, joy, the middle class, and “BRAT” chartreuse. When she spoke to wide audiences, her language was careful and catholic; one often had the sense that she was trying to say as little as possible beyond her talking points. The meat and specificity of her campaign — the access, the detail, and the identity coalitions — were instead concentrated on coalition-group Zooms, and on local and community audiences. Harris micro-targeted to the end.

Donald Trump did the inverse. He spoke off the cuff on national platforms all the time. He said things meant to resonate with specific affinity or identity subgroups, even if they struck the rest of listening America as offensive or absurd. …

Trump’s speeches at rallies, many people noticed, had a curious background-music quality: they went on forever, aimlessly, and people would come and go at will. The actual speeches didn’t seem to matter; they existed simply to set a vibe and keep certain broad suggestions (immigration big problem! Biden Administration so corrupt!) drifting into the ether. Trump seemed to think that much of the voting public couldn’t be bothered with details — couldn’t be bothered to fact-check, or deal with fact checkers. (“Who the hell wants to hear questions?” he asked at a town hall in October before deciding to dance and sway to music for more than half an hour.) Detail, even when it’s available, doesn’t travel widely after all. Big, sloppy notions do.

Planting ideas this way isn’t argument, and it’s not emotional persuasion. It’s about seeding the ambience of information, throwing facts and fake facts alike into an environment of low attention, with the confidence that, like minnows released individually into a pond, they will eventually school and spawn.

How should the Democrats – and those Americans more broadly who believe in a multiracial pluralistic democracy – plan for the next political battle(s) and war?

Of course, there are big changes such as improving access to high-quality public education, reinvigorating unions, the labor movement and other civil society organizations. Progressives would be wise to build a parallel news media ecosystem that fully integrates legacy news media and new digital media and culture(s) to meet voters and the mass public where they are, countering right-wing disinformation and misinformation, finding new ways to fund local news organizations that speak to the day-to-day experiences of their communities and advance a progressive political and social agenda. Leveraging how political power is often downstream from cultural power, Democrats must take the initiative by shaping the public’s mood and beliefs instead of passively responding to them. The party's branding and message discipline, as well as how it spends campaign dollars, needs a major overhaul. Perhaps most importantly, Democrats need to create a strategic plan for victory that looks beyond the next two, four or six years of the election cycle and instead focuses on a decades-long vision for protecting and expanding the country’s social democracy.

In a series of essays at The Washington Post, Jennifer Rubin has offered the following action plan for Democrats:

Simply put, only a certain stratum of Americans prioritize learning about politics. That poses a problem for Democrats who love to flash their policy credentials and often rely on substantive arguments (e.g., tariffs are effectively the same as a sales tax). Democrats are missing a large and increasingly critical segment of voters….

Still, Democrats can do a much better job of reaching less politically engaged voters. For starters, they need to reduce and simplify the values that define the party (e.g., protecting the little guy, letting you choose your own life) and pound away at them for years, using every medium available (podcasts, nonpolitical TV shows, social media, etc.).

Second, Democrats would be wise to frame Trump and Republicans in direct, clear terms, which they can emphasize daily (e.g., the culture of corruption, the party of fat cats, reckless with your health and security). Each time Trump and his Republican acolytes do something that fits into one of these categories, Democrats must highlight their behavior and amplify it (requiring more facility with online influencing and new media).

And finally, Democrats must be scrupulous in tying Republicans to the consequences of their policies. Controlling the White House and both houses means Republicans will not have the luxury of blaming others (although they will try). If voters do not understand how bad policy choices are impacting their lives, they will have no reason to hold Republicans accountable.

In the end, the best practical advice for the Democrats about what they should do going forward as they rethink their approach to political warfare may be from Lucian Truscott, a contributing writer here at Salon and a West Point graduate. In a recent essay, Truscott advised:

Trump has gone to war against the America we have known. We don’t need to ask ourselves what this country has done to deserve the war Trump has planned against us. Biden needs to deploy his pardon power as a weapon in that war, and the Democratic Party needs to start recruiting not only followers but fighters. This is going to be an ugly four years, and it is way past time to prepare ourselves.

The Democratic Party’s leaders (and their news media and other surrogates) must decide whether to continue fighting the last war and losing or if they will instead listen to the advice of voices like Lucian Truscott and improvise, adapt and overcome as they plan for the next political battle and war against Trumpism and the larger antidemocracy movement. Trump and his MAGA movement are not going to allow the Democrats the luxury of time as they ponder and regroup. Trump’s shock and awe campaign is moving very quickly. He has the momentum and the forces to assert his will with little resistance from the Democrats (or the small group of insurgent Republicans).

This reporting from The New York Times about Trump’s growing coalition of forces should be a huge kick in the butt for the Democratic Party and its complacency:

The working-class voters Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign needed were not moved by talk of joy. They were too angry about feeling broke.

For decades, Democrats had been the party of labor and of the working class, the choice for voters who looked to government to increase the minimum wage or provide a safety net for the poor, the old and the sick. But this year’s election results show how thoroughly that idea has collapsed even among Latino, Black and Asian American voters who had stuck by the party through Donald J. Trump’s first term….

The Trump campaign reached nonwhite working-class voters in both unconventional and familiar ways.

It worked with rap artists, podcasters popular on YouTube, Ultimate Fighting Championship stars and evangelical pastors. And in the campaign’s final days, Mr. Trump held rallies in heavily Hispanic cities.

At one in Allentown a week before Election Day, a heavily Latino crowd signaled the strength of Mr. Trump’s gains, but there were glimpses, too, of an even broader coalition potentially in the making: a red-white-and-blue kaffiyeh worn in solidarity with Palestinians. Korean and Japanese flags held aloft.

And everyone chanting: “Trump, Trump, Trump.”

With their defeat in the 2024 election did the Democrats “just” lose a very important battle or did they actually lose the war and not realize it? The Democrats and the American people will find out the answer very soon — and in all probability to their great detriment.