MISS INFORMATION – Democrats Are Totally Unprepared for the MAGA Disinformation Machine
By Judy Gordon, DPSC Secretary
Democratic losses in 2024 were fueled by a tsunami of right-wing propaganda. Disinformation on wedge issues like guns, LBTQ+ people, immigration, and abortion, along with lies about the economy and inflation, was force fed to voters like foie gras geese being fattened for Christmas.
The likes of Fox News, Breitbart, the Daily Wire, conservative talk radio, Christian radio, conservative websites, conservative podcasts, and social media amplified Trump’s lies and made their massive audiences believe Democrats are the root cause of all our country’s ills, both real and imagined.
Take social media. Those between the ages of 18 and 35 regularly get their news from TikTok, which has 170 million users in the United States. Here, right-wing conspiracy theories and lies run rampant. In the year before the election, TikTok had twice as many pro-Trump posts as pro-Democratic posts.
YouTube steers its audience to right-wing content and right-wing Christian content. Users are largely between the ages of 18 and 44, many of them young men.
X (Twitter) appears to have algorithmically boosted the posts of Elon Musk and other right-wingers during the campaign.
Facebook, Instagram, and Threads attempt to suppress political content. Somehow, right-wing content manages to evade suppression, while progressive content is stifled.
Voters who consume mainstream media were better informed and more likely to cast their vote for Kamala Harris. However, mainstream media is no longer a significant source of information for a vast number of voters, and its “sanewashing” of Trump left its diminishing readership unprepared to cast a fully informed vote.
An October Reuters/Ipsos poll shows the damaging consequences of disinformation. People who had accurate information on immigration, crime, and the economy overwhelmingly supported Harris. Those who embraced right-wing media disinformation overwhelmingly supported Trump.
In the current asymmetric information ecosystem, with a worldwide anti-incumbency wave, a cult leader at the top of the MAGA ticket, and pervasive racism and sexism, it’s impressive that Harris and other Democrats performed as well as they did.
Progressive policies are popular. Surveys show the majority of voters do want to raise the minimum wage, have the wealthy and large corporations pay their fair share, and lower the price of prescription drugs, among other things. Recent state ballot referendums show that voters do not reject progressive policies out of hand. Seven states voted for reproductive rights. Alaska and Missouri, two unambiguously red states, voted for a minimum wage and sick leave. Voters in Kentucky defeated a constitutional amendment that would allow public funds to pay for private school.
Moreover, voters simply do not like key Republican policies, including banning abortion, opposing gun control, cutting Medicare and Social Security, and regressive taxation. However, Republicans and right-wing media have hidden or distorted these objectives using culture wars, distraction, and disinformation.
This crisis has been long in the making. Ultra-wealthy Republicans and their minions have succeeded in their decades-long project to gain power, capturing and corrupting the courts, state legislatures, and the media. They’ve now captured both chambers of Congress. Starting with Reagan, they built a world of Gilded Age inequality that has caused a justifiably angry electorate to cast their votes for faux populism.
Our fathers and grandfathers fought fascism abroad in World War II; now, with the help of right-wing media, their children and grandchildren voted to pave the road to fascism in our own country. Many have no idea what they voted for.
We lost this election to a party with dangerous and widely unpopular ideas, but the results also tell us that the working class feels abandoned by the Democratic Party and alienated from democratic institutions.
Change is urgent. The 2026 midterms will see 33 Senate seats and all 435 House seats up for election.
No matter what changes are made to our policies and messaging, Democrats must be able to compete with the right-wing media machine. Otherwise, voters, once again, will not know who we are, what we stand for, and what we seek to accomplish.