The New Yorker -- Republican Victory and the Ambience of Information

[ancianita]

For years, Democrats have sought to win elections by micro-targeting communities with detailed facts. What if the secret is big, sloppy notions seeded nationwide?
by Nathan Heller

https://archive.ph/3cbSE

...Why didn’t the speeches register? Why did people persist in thinking that Harris was short on policy; that Trump’s programs would boost the American economy, despite a widely broadcast consensus from sixteen Nobel Prize-winning economists to the contrary; or that he would lower taxes for working people, though the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy calculated that he would increase them? Even many of Trump’s critics think his first term marked a high point for border patrol, though more unauthorized migrants have been forced to leave under Biden. (Why was Biden’s Presidency widely dismissed as desultory, when, in fact, as my colleague Nicholas Lemann recently put it, “he has passed more new domestic programs than any Democratic President since Lyndon Johnson—maybe even since Franklin Roosevelt”?) How did so many perceptions disprovable with ten seconds of Googling become fixed in the voting public’s mind? And why, even as misapprehensions were corrected, did those beliefs prevail?

Democrats, during their hair-shirt rituals, gaze into their souls and find “bad messaging.” There is talk of a poor “ground game,” an élite failure to “connect.” But the Harris campaign set records or near-records for fund-raising, volunteer enrollment, and in some districts voter registration; it is hard to imagine what a better ground game or a closer connection might have looked like in three months. And the messaging, which hewed to the middle-class experiences of Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz, neither of whom is Ivy-educated or grew up rich, was hardly misguided in a race that ostensibly came down to the economic and exclusion anxieties of working people. Yet Democrats did make a crucial messaging error, one that probably (as the line goes) lost them the election. They misjudged today’s flow of knowledge—what one might call the ambience of information.

It is wrong to suggest that people now relate only through digital screens. (People still show up at cookouts, dinner parties, track meets, and other crossings.) But information travels differently across the population: ideas that used to come from local newspapers or TV and drift around a community now come along an unpredictable path that runs from Wichita to Vancouver, perhaps via Paris or Tbilisi. (Then they reach the cookout.) Studies confirm that people spend less and less time with their neighbors. Instead, many of us scroll through social networks, stream information into our eyes and ears, and struggle to recall where we picked up this or that data point, or how we assembled the broad conceptions that we hold. The science historian Michael Shermer, in his book “The Believing Brain,” used the term “patternicity” to describe the way that people search for patterns, many of them erroneous, on the basis of small information samplings. The patterns we perceive now rise less from information gathered in our close communities and more from what crosses our awareness along national paths.

The Democrats didn’t look past national-scale audiences—Harris sat with both Fox News and Oprah. But she approached that landscape differently. The campaign, it was often noted, shied away from legacy-media interviews. It instead used a national platform to tune the affect, or vibes, of her rise: momentum, freedom, joy, the middle class, and “brat” chartreuse. When she spoke to wide audiences, her language was careful and catholic; one often had the sense that she was trying to say as little as possible beyond her talking points. The meat and specificity of her campaign—the access, the detail, and the identity coalitions—were instead concentrated on coalition-group Zooms, and on local and community audiences. Harris micro-targeted to the end.

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Donald Trump did the inverse. He spoke off the cuff on national platforms all the time. He said things meant to resonate with specific affinity or identity subgroups, even if they struck the rest of listening America as offensive or absurd. (“In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs!”) As my colleague Antonia Hitchens reported, his campaign was boosted by a traditional get-out-the-vote ground effort late in the game—despite this apparently not being a priority for Trump—but the canvassing was less about delivering policy information than about tuning voters’ ears like satellites to the national signal. (Election fraud was a theme.) Trump’s speeches at rallies, many people noticed, had a curious background-music quality: they went on forever, aimlessly, and people would come and go at will. The actual speeches didn’t seem to matter; they existed simply to set a vibe and keep certain broad suggestions (immigration big problem! Biden Administration so corrupt!) drifting into the ether. Trump seemed to think that much of the voting public couldn’t be bothered with details—couldn’t be bothered to fact-check, or deal with fact checkers. (“Who the hell wants to hear questions?” he asked at a town hall in October before deciding to dance and sway to music for more than half an hour.) Detail, even when it’s available, doesn’t travel widely after all. Big, sloppy notions do.

Planting ideas this way isn’t argument, and it’s not emotional persuasion. It’s about seeding the ambience of information, throwing facts and fake facts alike into an environment of low attention, with the confidence that, like minnows released individually into a pond, they will eventually school and spawn. Notions must add up to a unified vision but also be able to travel on their own, because that’s how information moves in a viral age. And national media is key. Trump’s command of the ambience of information wouldn’t have been possible without his own platforms, such as Truth Social, as well as allies such as Fox News’ C.E.O., Suzanne Scott, who in 2020 excoriated her team after they fact-checked Trump, and Elon Musk, who, hoping for executive-branch power over his own sector, largely funded more than a hundred and seventy-five million dollars’ worth of pro-Trump outreach, was read into early voting data, and tweeted lies, conspiracy theories, and mistrust of media on his network, X, which boosts his posts. The communications researcher Pablo Boczkowski has noted that people increasingly take in news by incidental encounter—they are “rubbed by the news”—rather than by seeking it out. Trump has maximized his influence over networks that people rub against, and has filled them with information that, true or not, seems all of a coherent piece.

This is the opposite of micro-targeting. The goal is for voters to meet ideas coming and going so often that those notions seem like common sense. The pollster and political-marketing-language consultant Frank Luntz assembled a focus group of men who had previously voted for a Democratic nominee but were voting for Trump this year. Many of their rationales were based on untrue information settled deep in the ambience of information. “Nothing against people from California, but the policies in California are so bad I wouldn’t be surprised if the state goes bankrupt,” a participant in Indiana said. (California has the largest economy in the U.S.) “Kamala from California is too radical . . . she’s too far left.” (Biden’s policies tended to be to the left of Harris’s, when they didn’t align.) These are not convictions that someone acquires from a specific source, neighborhood, or community.

Of all the data visualizations that were churned out in the hours following the election, the one that struck me most was a map of the United States, showing whether individual areas had voted to the left or to the right of their positions in the Presidential race in 2020. It looks like a wind map. And it challenges the idea that Trump’s victory in this cycle was broadly issues- or community-based. The red wind extends across farmland and cities, young areas to old, rich areas to poor. It is not the map of communities having their local concerns addressed or not. It’s the map of an entire nation swept by the same ambient premises.

In a country where more than half of adults have literacy below a sixth-grade level, ambient information, however thin and wrong, is more powerful than actual facts. It has been the Democrats’ long-held premise that access to the truth will set the public free. They have corrected misinformation and sought to drop data to individual doors. This year’s contest shows that this premise is wrong. A majority of the American public doesn’t believe information that goes against what it thinks it knows—and a lot of what it thinks it knows originates in the brain of Donald Trump. He has polluted the well of received wisdom and what passes for common sense in America. And, until Democrats, too, figure out how to message ambiently, they’ll find themselves fighting not just a candidate but what the public holds to be self-evident truths. ♦

[NewHendoLib]

1. The last paragraph is the key, to me.

[tulipsandroses]

2. Bottom line, half of the people in this country are either bigots or fucking idiots

I don't know how you fix either.

[Intractable]

3. It's far easier to put out bumper-sticker slogans about destroying the system ...

than to describe how to improve the system using only a few words.