Politics is a popularity contest and Democrats are losing

Voters don't care about their own conditions, beliefs, or wealth. They care what everyone else thinks.

I’ve been trying for weeks to write some kind of post, or article, or summary of what I think happened in 2024 and I’ve been failing miserably. The problem is that while I feel like I’ve got some important pieces of the picture in my head, there’s something more fundamental underneath all of them that still remains unclear. There’s a sense that many basic premises, on which all our political discussions have long been built, no longer hold. Or better put, they were never true to begin with, and that fact can no longer be avoided.

The thing that I think can no longer be denied is that there is a social layer to politics in America. What I mean by that is that voters are not interacting with their environment, their material circumstances, their core ideological leanings, their personal beliefs or policy views. Instead, they’re largely interacting with the social system as they perceive it.

Much of how voters perceive the social system comes to them from and through media, both traditional and online, and that places media at the center of politics. But for many, I think the actual process of deciding how to vote is ultimately an exercise of voters deciding how to position themselves in society. That means it is a response to how they perceive others, and — very importantly — what they perceive other people as believing, including people they respect and people they dislike and do not respect.

We encounter this dynamic early in life and I suspect we never truly leave the habit. Think about high school. A high school is small enough that each student can have some sense of the entire social environment, which is partially self-contained. Student’s identities are largely constructed in relationship to that environment, attempting to position oneself within it, align oneself with the groups, ideas, styles, and manners of expression that are perceived as having consensus popularity, at least among the people that each student respects. Likewise, a student becomes broadly popular and well-liked largely through the consensus of his or her peers that he is popular or well-liked among other popular students, not through the qualities of the individual. This environment is notoriously fickle and faddish. Individual students do, however, typically have strong and accurate sense of the society around them.

I think what is more clear after 2024 is that this is not dissimilar from how politics works on a far larger scale. Certain groups are in, and other groups are out, largely because enough people have deemed that to be the case, and the people saying this themselves have sufficient social cachet. Democrats are regarded as uncool because none of the cool kids like them, and none of the cool kids like them because you can’t be cool and like Democrats. In the last several years, you could feel Donald Trump’s social standing building — transformed among the youth by TikTok into a goofball uncle, a comedy figure; transformed among older people into an unlikable brute who all right-thinking people must admit nonetheless “got things done,” creating the utopia of 2019. The voices of people who strongly opposed him faded into irrelevance, having changed the subject, or lost access to the most visible platforms.

When there’s a conflict in a high school, students side with the person who they think everyone else is siding with. This is the mechanism that makes being unpopular and disliked such a miserable experience in those environments: your nature is determined by your social position and not your actual actions or behaviors. Disliked people are defined not by themselves but by their peers, who tell each other that the disliked person has terrible qualities. People do not react to the unpopular person’s character, they react to a hologram of that person’s character built by consensus of their peers. There is no quick fix, and if that consensus changes, it’s because the most important and well-liked peers start to construct a different public image of the person.

I think something similar happens in national politics. Voters want to pick a winner and to figure that out, they don’t look at the candidates, or their positions — they look at what everyone else is saying. They don’t look at Kamala Harris, they look at what everyone else is saying about Kamala Harris — or what they perceive everyone else to be saying about her. If they perceive “everyone else” as saying Kamala Harris supports far-left social causes, that’s the image they will construct, and the reality of her campaign and rhetoric becomes irrelevant.

Of course at that moment it becomes very important to have respected voices singing your praises, and attacking your opponent, across the vast array of media that Americans use to observe their own society. Democrats mostly ignored that media, and over time have had fewer and fewer voices in their choir of supporters. Many of those voices were paid. An observer might come to the conclusion that this is simply the wrong side to back, that the weight of consensus stood with Trump. And many voters evidently did think that way, especially among lower-information groups. These are, incidentally, precisely the groups you’d most expect to turn to social vibes instead of detailed personal knowledge of the candidates and their positions.

If you’re voting based on who everyone around you likes, well — it’s astonishingly hard to find anyone who will confess to being pleased about voting for Democrats.

There is much more to the 2024 election than this, of course. In particular I think structural changes to media have underlaid a lot of the shifts in politics we’ve seen, in the US and globally. They distort our sense of our social structure, to the benefit of far-right candidates. I’ve been trying to find a way to describe those changes that makes sense, and will probably write something about it at a later date. But none of that matters if you don’t accept that politics is, ultimately, a popularity contest, and that people select what is popular by watching each other rather than thinking about themselves.