Hey Democrats: It’s Not the Volume, It’s the Frequency

The reference might be a bit antiquated in our online age, but frequency means the radio station you’re dialed in to. Volume, of course, is how loudly the radio is turned up.

I’m sure there are some exceptions, but the overwhelming majority of explanations I’ve seen from Democrats following their crushing loss in what they constantly billed as The Most Consequential Election Of Our Lifetime(™ ) ignores the frequency of their messaging and focuses on volume, instead.

It doesn’t seem like anything was wrong with the volume of the Democrats’ campaign. Harris massively outspent Trump on advertising. Democrats have a vaunted ground game (door-to-door operations, as opposed to the air game, which is more about media, though again Democrats outspent Republicans on advertising). Harris was the first black or mixed-race woman to be the candidate of either wing of the duopoly, and this alone brought a lot of attention to her campaign, as did the palace coup and defenestration that preceded it.

And yet all the handwringing I’ve seen has been about Democratic volume, not frequency. Listing everything I’ve come across would turn this post into an encyclopedia entry, but here are just a few.

Let’s start with Jon Stewart:

“I don’t ever in my life want to hear about our vaunted ground game will put us over the top. It’s a 50/50 tossup race, we’re sure of it, but the vaunted ground game—turns out that people knocking on other people’s doors doesn’t get them to do what you want them to do as, I believe, vacuum and Bible salesmen have probably known for many, many centuries…fuck us, fuck me, I was wrong.”

There are some encouraging signs in Stewart’s take—“fuck us, fuck me” instead of “fuck them, fuck you” is the right way to begin a journey of accurate understanding, even though the destination is still a long way off. And toward the end of the video there’s some other thinking that leans toward frequency rather than volume.

But the notion that a ground game doesn’t matter because it’s hard to sell vacuums and bibles door-to-door is wrong. Vacuums and bibles are products. The product matters. If people are thirsty and you’re selling water, you’ll sell a lot of it. If they’re thirsty and you’re selling vacuums, the problem isn’t the salespeople, the problem is the product.

(Also sales is about yeses; the no’s don’t matter. You can get nine no’s for every one yes and still make a good living in sales. For a political ground game, a ratio like that is a catastrophe.)

Here’s CNN’s Van Jones:

“We got beat because Republicans built a different media system that has to do with online, has to do with podcasts, has to do with streaming platforms…we were laughing at them, and knocking on doors in Philadelphia and Detroit was like, ‘There’s no Trump people. They’re not dropping literature. They’re not knocking on doors…’ While we were knocking on doors, they were making these phones into 24-hour-a-day political weapons for themselves.”

Whatever you might make of the merits of Jones’s argument, its focus is entirely on volume. He seems unacquainted with even the notion of frequency. It’s all, “We weren’t saying it loudly enough!” And zero, “Was there anything off about what we were saying or about how we were saying it?”

(Also note how easily, naturally, and frequently this journalist uses “we” to refer to the Democratic party. There is zero independence of thought or action here—you might as well be listening to Harris herself or some other Democratic party bigwig. And yes, obviously this phenomenon exists for Fox News and Republicans, as well. The good news is, viewership of this kind of state media is declining.)

Here’s MSNBC’s Anand Giridharadas:

“The media ecosystem they’ve—it’s not a good one, it’s a negative one, it’s a radicalization funnel. But what they have done in their online media ecosystem is build a radicalization engine literally the way militant groups do around the world that takes people from relatively low-level annoyances with the world—‘Why are eggs so expensive, why is my kid learning this new thing in American history in school that I didn’t learn’—and then moves them through YouTube videos, to podcasts—moves them from that annoyance, all the way slowly, slowly, slowly to a full-blown fascist politics. It’s an elaborate, multibillion-dollar infrastructure, and there’s nothing like it on the pro-democracy side…When a man is just lost and lonely and not yet radicalized, we don’t have the equivalent of Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson to move that man in a feminist direction. By the way, we should educate men that it’s actually really great to live with a strong woman who makes money; it’s actually easier, life is easier.”

There are so many exemplary things wrong with Giridharadas’s approach to reality it’s hard to know where to start.

First, note the focus on volume—“the other side has more and better means of getting its message heard.” But his segue into frequency—the message—is also telling.

Because imagine how well-off you’d have to be to believe rising food prices are merely an “annoyance.” Imagine how thoughtless you’d have to be to believe the way history is taught is also merely an annoyance (for starters, you’d have to be unfamiliar with the novel 1984, or one of Ingsoc’s tenets that “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past”).

And if you think Joe Rogan’s politics are fascist, it can only mean (1) that you’ve never watched his show (among other things, Rogan endorsed Sanders in 2020, perhaps an unusual move for a fascist; he also invited Harris on during the election, but she declined); or (2) that the voices in your own head are so loud you can’t hear what other people are saying (I don’t follow Peterson, so I couldn’t say, but I’m guessing Giridharadas knows as little about the one as he does the other). Ditto for the notion that Rogan primarily appeals to men who are “lost and lonely,” rather than, say, people who are looking for opinions a bit more heterodox than what’s offered on MSNBC.

But maybe the most telling part is Giridharadas’s notion that men need to be “educated” by the Anand Giridharadas’s of the world, that they need Giridharadas and his enlightened cohort to teach them that strong women are good and that having more income is an advantage (who knew?!). This is the Democrats’ frequency—and Giridharadas and his nodding host Mika Brzezinski think the problem is with their volume! Which in a sense it is, because if smug, condescending, idiotic cultural messaging is what Democrats want to be known for, they’d be better off turning the volume all the way down, not up.

One reason it’s more attractive to focus on volume rather than on frequency is because “We didn’t do it loud enough” involves little personal responsibility. “We’re saying the wrong things, we might even believe the wrong things, tens of millions of people including the diverse people we told ourselves were our identitarian base seem to viscerally loathe us” is a much more uncomfortable concept to grapple with. But if Democrats stick to the more comfortable path of thinking their only problem is volume, that there’s nothing off about their frequency, and that ultimately the fault lies in the stars and not in themselves, they’re doomed as a meaningful political force. They can turn up the volume as loud as they want. It won’t matter. People will just change the station.

Some Post-Election Thoughts

Obviously there’s a lot to discuss about the 2024 election results. I’ll offer just the following.

None of this is about the merits of either candidate; it’s about the broad dynamics that shaped the outcome. You don’t have to like those dynamics any more than you like any other aspect of reality. But as the saying goes, denial has no survival value, so it’s best to try to be accurate and unsentimental in our understanding of events.

I think it was a terrible mistake for Harris to fuse her campaign with the Cheneys, other neocons, and various state security apparatchiks. But I also think the prevailing Democratic take on this fusion—some version of “Harris’s campaign is a big tent, the fusion demonstrates even Republican loathing of Trump, etc”—is missing a far more important dynamic that has to do with the dramatically diminished influence of establishment institutions.

Whatever you might think about Trump, he is fundamentally a people-powered candidate. He won two bruising Republican primaries and survived everything the former GOP establishment and the Democratic establishment could throw at him—Russiagate, two impeachments, numerous lawsuits, attempts at ballot removal, a never-ending media blitz, and more. He swings Republican primaries with endorsements, even with tweets. He fills stadiums with enthusiastic audiences. What Trump did in 2016 was functionally a hostile takeover of the GOP, and he has dominated the GOP ever since. We can quibble over these observations, but I think they are broadly accurate.

By contrast, I don’t think Harris can be fairly described as a people-powered candidate. She had to drop out of the 2020 primaries before the first contest—a contest the Democratic establishment engineered to produce a Biden victory (the closest comparison to Trump on the Democratic side was Sanders, who the Democratic establishment twice managed to thwart). That same Democratic establishment and its media allies gaslighted the country for four years about how Biden was “sharp as a tack” and how “age is a superpower” and all that—right up until Biden failed to uphold his end of the bargain and undeniably revealed his condition in the July 2024 presidential debate. At that point, the Democratic establishment swapped him out for Harris.

Again, we can quibble about the foregoing, but my main point is that relatively speaking, Trump’s position derives from bottom-up voter enthusiasm, while relatively speaking, Harris’s position derived from top-down party dictates.

To counter Trump’s relatively people-powered position, Harris relentlessly sought (and received) establishment backing (various Harris supporters also pleaded for a George Bush Jr. endorsement, but Bush endorsed no one). It was less that she needed Republican support; the real need was to bolster her base, which was the establishment (ironically her merger with elements of the Republican establishment seems to have translated into no additional support from Republican voters).

So if there’s a lesson to be learned from this election, it isn’t—or isn’t just—that Democrats don’t benefit from merging with Republicans. It’s more that seeking additional support from an increasingly infirm establishment—political, bureaucratic, media, celebrity, whatever—is a losing proposition.

The foregoing tracks with something I’ve long observed about the humans: they have more trouble changing the frequency than they do the volume. That is, when a tactic isn’t working, humans tend to do it harder rather than changing to a different tactic. To use just one example from the election context, when the media’s eight-year-and-running efforts to brand Trump a fascist proved a failure, did they try a different tactic? Or did they just screech “Fascist!” even louder?

(In fairness, the Harris campaign did briefly experiment with what I guess was a different messaging tactic—“Republicans are weird.” That was such a dud, and so inherently contradictory of the previous messaging, that they immediately reverted to the familiar and comfortable “Fascist!” theme. Please note that this isn’t an argument about whether or not Trump is a fascist. It’s an argument that for eight years, the messaging has proven fruitless, and yet Democrats stayed with it, but louder.)

Worse, when the music you’re playing is unappealing to your audience, playing it louder not only won’t solve the problem—it will irritate the people you’re trying to please. That Harris outspent Trump three-to-one would be an example of playing the music louder when the right move was to change the station.

Combine: (1) the human tendency to blame the volume rather than the frequency, with (2) the human tendency to avoid responsibility, and with (3) the human tendency to focus on power within an institution rather than the power of the institution (The Iron Law of Institutions), and even after 2016 and 2024, it’s difficult to see how the claws of the Clintons, the Obamas, the Pelosis, the Clooneys, the Schumers, and whoever else selected Biden and then swapped him out for Harris can be removed from the levers of influence.

One more lesson here: it seems bruising primaries produce strong general election candidates—Obama in 2008; Trump in 2016 and 2024. Managed affairs seem to produce weak candidates: Clinton in 2016; Harris in 2024 (I think Biden won in 2020 largely because of Covid, but unfortunately the panjandrums who installed him think he prevailed because of their wisdom, not despite).

Obviously there’s a ton more to be said on the topic of establishment decline, enough to fill a book: 

Luckily someone’s already done that, and I recommend Martin Gurri’s The Revolt of the Public for more insight into the causes and consequences of western establishment decrepitude, which in my opinion was foundational to the Democrats’ election-day catastrophe: a catastrophe in how Harris was chosen; in how and with whom she campaigned, and in the kind of messaging her media allies thought voters would find motivating, but that seems to have produced the opposite motivation of the one intended.