Four Myths About Kamala Harris’s Loss

By Branko Marcetic, Jacobin

In the aftermath of any election, as people try to figure out what just happened and why, we are being forced to wade through a bog of misleading and flat-out untrue talking points.

Confusion and missing information often prevails in the wake of elections. But some of this confusion is due to the spin and self-interest of powerful and influential people. The 2024 election is no different, with an army of pundits, operatives, and officials wasting no time in trying to ensure all the wrong lessons are learned from the Democratic defeat.

Here are four of the most common talking points about the election and why they are wrong.

1. The Country Turned Right

Most people vote for a candidate or party because after weighing it up, they decide that one, on balance, is the better option. Very few consider their vote an across-the-board endorsement of every part of a politician’s platform, rhetoric, or behavior. This is why Democratic voters voted overwhelmingly for Democratic candidates this election, despite being vehemently against their party’s support for the Gaza genocide.

But this is not how political pundits think, which is why we’ve heard a variety of commentators saying that voters “rejected progressive ideas,” that “America, after its long journey through the 2010s and ’20s, is becoming more conservative again,” and that “the U. S. has revealed itself to be distinctly more conservative than many had thought.” Trump gave voters “an opportunity to reject the perceived leftward shift of progressivism and to stake a claim for conservative culture,” charged one MSNBC analyst. But this claim is hard to square with the data.