For this week, my dear colleagues at Epicenter asked me a rather provocative question: what does it take to win an election? This is, obviously, a very expansive question, not least because “an election“ looks very different if you’re talking about, say, a U.S. House race in Montana versus a City Council election in New York. In sum, though, I have a somewhat unsatisfying answer: nobody really knows anymore. Or, rather, we know roughly what wins elections, but we do not know how to reliably generate that, which is attention and narrative.
Allow me to explain. Not all that long ago, the information inputs that a typical voter might receive were relatively predictable. There were a few local outlets spread across newspapers, radio, and television, in addition to communications like physical newsletters – which is probably how this newsletter would once have been distributed – and then candidate-generated content like advertisements and mailers. There was (and is) a whole cottage industry dedicated to helping candidates use these existing platforms to shape narratives about themselves and generate their own content in ways that will bolster that narrative.
The problem now is that everyone’s kind of shooting in the dark because there are infinitely more information sources. Not to say that there has always been a complete agreement on reality in America– and there certainly have always been lies and conspiracies in the political realm– but we now inhabit often entirely hermetically sealed and separated information silos. You can be walking down the street next to someone who gets their news exclusively from a series of Facebook pages that you don’t know exist and have no insight into, who are convinced that the candidates have essentially opposite positions to what they actually have, did things that they did not do, support people they did not support, and so on.
We’ve all heard James Carville‘s famous refrain “it’s the economy, stupid,“ and while I think that Carville was a bit of a one trick pony that has long outlived his usefulness in contemporary political discourse, that quip is true insofar as material conditions have long been arguably the main driver of political outcomes. It’s a pretty popular and I think substantively correct assessment that Biden‘s 2024 loss was at least in part due to runaway inflation, a global issue that he had limited hand in creating, but still was blamed by voters for as they stared in shock at their grocery store receipts.
Where this goes off the rails strategically is that voters care a lot about their material conditions, but, given the splintering of the information landscape, seem wholly unable to actually assess how any given candidate would affect these conditions. Not to harp on it too much, but at the time of his defeat, Biden was presiding over an economy that had its significant issues, but was widely considered to have undergone the best post-pandemic recovery in the world. The infrastructure bill, the Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS Act, these collectively formed the most significant public investment into domestic manufacturing and job creation in generations.
By the time of the actual election, inflation had begun to cool off and real wages were growing across the board. Not only did Biden lose, but he lost to Trump, a candidate who (not in so many words) centered his campaign on the message of “I will create a massive recession.” All of the economic turmoil and market uncertainty that we’re seeing now is not really a surprise, nor is it incidental to Trump‘s long-term policy agenda. His only real fleshed-out policy prescription during the campaign – apart, of course, from his openly racist obsession with heavy-handed immigration enforcement – was exactly this type of unrestrained tariff structure, which is the driving force behind the economy teetering on the edge.
All of this is to say, we are in this bizarro world now where a candidate can frequently and explicitly craft a political platform around the exact opposite of what voters claim to want, and still capture those voters on the strength of the narratives that are being woven in our new information silos. The upshot of all this is that, while I personally believe that candidates should still put out voluminous policy books outlining their positions and agendas, this seems to matter less and less for actual electoral victory. This goes hand-in-hand with the decimation of the news industry as a whole, which would at one time have been that intermediary between a candidate’s policies and the narrative that surrounds them.
As we increasingly compete with torrents of misinformation and a lot of local coverage disappears altogether, the specifics of any given candidate’s policy objectives wane in importance, because voters quite simply don’t often have either the time or the will to actually parse these things on their own.
This is part of the reason why, in last week’s newsletter, I wrote about the potential outsize impact of endorsements in the NYC mayoral race. The information onslaught, paired with New York City’s embarrassingly low turnout rates, mean that vouching by what few trusted actors remain is pretty important. As is the case for social media influencers — which prominent politicians basically have to try to be now as well — what voters seem to value most of all as a kind of authenticity, the sense that the candidate can channel them in some way and act as a stand-in not only for their interests but their broader socio-cultural worldview.
I think a lot of the voters who are currently backing Andrew Cuomo like the former governor not necessarily because he’s promising to do X or Y, but because he’s long burnished his image as a tough guy who gets things done, duking it out with the left and the right in favor of the common sense Democrat. I would assume that most of Zohran Mamdani’s base of largely young progressive supporters can’t point to particular public safety and economic policies that he’s adopted, but at the end of the day it’s more about his ability to seem like one of them.
In a crowded Democratic primary where a lot of the candidates will have all-but-identical positions, it’s the power of narrative and self-identification that will carry the day. What that’s going to look like in this particular election I think will mean standing up to Trump on behalf of the city; appearing to care about and want to tackle the amorphous sense that there is a public safety crisis (which, as I’ve written about before, does not seem to be well borne out by the facts); and taking steps to burnish an economic social safety net as recession fears rise. Yes, these are substantively policies in their own right, but I’m not sure candidates these days really need specifics. They need emotional response, and that’s something without a clear-cut formula.
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