CEO Update: Misinformation, disinformation, and what actually happened in 2024

It’s been a minute since you’ve heard from me.  Or about 7 months, if we're being precise.  This isn't because I haven't had anything to say.  It's because I have been heads down, thinking, trying to make sense of what happened in 2024.  I'm not press, and I'm not a pundit, so I'm under no pressure to get out there with a incorrect but spicy take. I'd rather share facts than whatever passes for news right now.  Anyway.

You’ve seen the headlines: The country shifted right. Democrats lost ground. Big warning signs ahead.  The sky is falling, yadda yadda.  These headlines are great for clicks, but they're not accurate.  The country didn’t swing right. It sat down.

2020 Democratic voters didn't vote for Trump.  They just didn't vote at all.  As my colleague Alex likes to say, "the couch was the big winner in 2024."  Or to put a finer point on this: more people didn't vote than voted for either candidate. 

Over a third of eligible voters didn’t cast a ballot. That’s a pretty big problem when you have democratically elected leaders.  It leads to thinks like a malignant narcissist with the support of barely one-third of the country trampling on our constitution, alienating our allies, embracing our enemies, leading us into WWIII, and embarrassing us on a national scale.

In any case, Biden voters absolutely did not swing towards Trump. According to recent analysis conducted by the Pew Research Center, here's what happened to Biden's 2020 voters.  You'll notice that they did not swing to Trump in any conventional sense.

• 79% voted for Harris
• 15% didn’t vote
• 5% voted for Trump
• 1% voted for a third-party candidate

And 2020 Trump voters?  85% voted for him again, 11% didn't vote at all, 3% voted for Harris, and 1% voted for third parties.  

There is are some really obvious answer for why Democrats didn't vote in 2024, and why Republicans did:

1. Both sides of the aisle spent almost all of their money on outreach to Republican voters. Democratic voters, especially the reliable base, were treated as an afterthought.   
   

2. Democrats poured billions of dollars, literally, into broadcast TV.  Broadcast TV is a medium with shrinking reach, skyrocketing costs, and an audience that skews older, more conservative, and more likely to vote than the average America.  This is the least persuadable group of voters in the country.  

The first point is more or less keeping me up at night. I watched with increasing dismay as the various Biden/Harris Super PACs funneled staggering sums of money into non-college-educated white men (13% of the population), while failing to make an greater -- or even equal -- investment in women of color (20% of the population).  

Does anyone in her right mind think that high-school-educated white men were the key to electing a Black female president? If so, please show them the chart below. It shows how the election would have worked out if only white men without college degrees voted.  

If I sound frustrated, it’s because I am. I don’t like losing. I really don’t like wasting money. I really don’t like misguided decision-making by DC consultants who appear to have never met a person outside of the Beltway, never mind a high-school-educated white man.

The coming years are going to require something different from all of us. For those of you who have been around for a while, you’ve heard me say that VoteAmerica is “goal-oriented and tactic agnostic.” And our goal has always been to live in a functioning democracy. That hasn't changed, but our tactics have.  

The VoteAmerica of the future is going to look more than a bit different than the VoteAmerica of the past.  We're sunsetting some of our programs, handing off some others, and we're taking a longer-term view of our work.  We've also added a few more tax-statues to our arsenal. We now have a 501C3, a 501C4, an LLC, and a Super PAC.  We like to joke that we have the full EGOT of mobilization tax statuses. But what we really have is the freedom to run smarter programs, with fewer restrictions, tax write-offs be damned.

As always, thank you for being part of this work. More to come.