"Opt-Out" voters outsmarted Biden and Harris

Dem’s big problem is message, not medium

By now, it’s a genre: the Democratic postmortem essay that half-admit 2024 mistakes while still dodging the uncomfortable reality of an out-of-touch party.

Rob Flaherty’s New York Times piece is one of the better-written entries, but still misses the real lessons. The former Harris deputy campaign manager and digital strategist in the Biden White House pins Democratic struggles on “opt-out voters,” social media drift, and infrastructure gaps. His argument is basically that Democrats need to build their own “Joe Rogan Cinematic Universe” to win.

The reality is simpler, and harsher: Democrats didn’t lose because voters opted out of politics, but because they opted out of the party.

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The Biden Administration and Harris campaign weren’t undone by a new social media landscape, decentralized attention spans, or cultural drift. They were undone because they failed to meet voters where they actually are on their two biggest concerns: inflation and immigration.

The Biden-Harris campaigns bet the farm on democracy, Trump’s character, and abortion rights. These are important issues, yes. But mid-2024 polling already showed that the median voter was obsessed with the price of groceries and the chaos at the border — and skeptical that Biden and Harris even understood the scope of either.

You can build all the micro-targeted media strategies you want. If your candidate is out of touch on the cost of living and border security, you’re losing. This is Campaigns 101, not Advanced Cultural Sociology.

Let’s be clear: the medium didn’t kill the message. The message killed the message. And the messengers made it worse.

Instead of reckoning with this, some Democrats are reaching for an easier story: that “opt-out” voters — the ones who aren’t glued to MSNBC or Twitter — drifted away because they weren’t seeing enough Democratic content.

But that’s a cope, and a confusing one.

If these voters are so disengaged and lost in algorithmic fog, how did they manage to split their tickets in such disciplined fashion?

If the problem was mass disengagement, how do you explain Democrats who won over large blocks of Trump voters, like Ruben Gallego, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, Adam Gray, and Jared Golden? Or Republicans like Brian Fitzpatrick and Don Bacon, who won enough Biden voters to hold blue districts.

These candidates ran well ahead of the national ticket by breaking with their national party. Democratic over-performers branded themselves as distinct, skeptical of progressive orthodoxy, and serious about the daily problems voters face.

Voters weren’t checked out. They were tuned in — just not in the way elite Democrats prefer. They were highly alert to which Democrats seemed willing to break with party orthodoxy on inflation, immigration, policing, and cultural elitism. And they rewarded them accordingly.

In other words, “opt-out” voters are real. They’re just not passive victims of social media drift. They’re active participants who smell phoniness from a mile away. They sized up Biden and Harris, found them wanting, and went shopping for Democrats who didn’t seem welded to national party talking points.

You can’t blame the voters for exercising discernment. You have to blame a campaign that made itself an easy “opt-out.”