Tip of the hat to http://all-hat-no-cattle.blogspot.com

Like many I am still licking my wounds from the election. Kamala Harris ran a great race. Tim Walz ran a great race. Candidate Trump stunk it up and his running mate, Mr. Vance, barely registered as a blip on the meter. Yet somehow, after the votes were counted Trump and Vance got more votes and the anachronistic electoral college once more showed why it is long past time for it to be put to rest.

Once again the nearly totally right wing media is spouting loudly with their advice. “You know what the Democrats ought to do” they start out. Yep, I think. The first thing we should do is ignore a media that through ownership or fear of Trump is in the back pocket of America’s extremist right wing.  

The power balance in the media is almost completely tilted to the right. Where this really matters is that anytime an American turns on a TV, more especially a radio or goes to social media (such as Facebook or Xitter) the message that is most likely to be delivered to that person either overall or covertly will be a right wing message.

These are the criticisms of Kamala Harris, Tim Walz and the whole Democratic Party post election. It is being delivered on an almost uniform media all geared to make the Democrats look like mumbling, bumbling idiots. That is not what I saw. What I saw was a woman with fire and passion for her country and its people against a fumbling, bumbling caricature of an old man who lives in an unreal world of movie villains and fantasy reality. The old man won.

That is why I was so glad to stumble across this John Pavlovitz substack the other day.    Pavlovitz tells it like it is:

In the wake of the election results, one of the most common media postmortems has been the Democratic Party’s supposed failure to reach those Americans who they were unable to persuade over the course of the campaign; rural and working class voters, especially. The airways have been filled with politicians and talking heads offer their critiques and suggestions on how Democrats need to rethink how they are messaging.

I’m sorry, but that’s largely nonsense.

This election result isn’t about Dem messaging.

Their messaging during the campaign was pitch-perfect in any other iteration of America. It was about helping the middle class, lowering taxes for the average American, continuing with sound economic policies to cut rising grocery prices, preserving democracy, taxing the wealthy, affordable healthcare and education, the rights of women, strengthening the border, unity, opportunity. 

<<snip>>

There is no messaging strategy that can overcome deeply-held prejudice and rising ignorance, and those two factors are the only explanation for someone like Donald Trump even being the nominee, let alone getting 76 million votes.

Trump neither attempted to embrace working Americans nor offer them any substantive plans to help them, because he knew he didn’t need to. He simply peddled wild, racist fever-dreams and continually repeated grotesque fabricated nightmares about immigrants eating pets and sex-change operations on middle school students, knowing that terrified people without critical thinking skills are an easy mark.

So do not listen to the right wing media whose only interest is to keep power in the hands of incompetent politicians who will serve the wealthy. 

The Democratic Party desperately needs to create their own media infrastructure. That will take time and money. It is not that the Democrats have a bad message. We have a great message and it was delivered well by our candidates from top to bottom. But no one heard it because it was only delivered on a few outlets such as MSNBC and Free Speech TV. 

This is literally in real life the old saw about a tree falling in the forest. Does it make a sound if no one is there to hear it? We need to make sure that people can hear us. Even with the right wing monopolizing the media, Democrats still get 50% of the vote.