Dem
47
GOP
53
Starting in 1961, the left dominated the country all the time culturally and half the time politically (with Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, Clinton, Obama, and Biden). Right now, the right controls all three branches of government, but is also ascendant culturally. Thomas Edsall has an interesting column about how this came about.
For one thing, the left was slow to grasp the importance of new media and also had some bad luck. When Elon Musk bought Twitter and turned it into a right-wing cesspool, the left didn't have any alternative until Bluesky really got going in 2024. Meanwhile there were multiple other right-wing microblogging sites, including Truth Social, Parler, and Gab, waiting in the wings.
Podcasting is another new medium where conservatives dominated. Joe Rogan has the most popular podcast, but a majority of the top 10 are also pro-MAGA. Then there is Tucker Carlson. The left has no answer to him.
Another victory for the right has been the capitulation of the new tech barons to Donald Trump. Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook, Elon Musk, Sundar Pichai and Mark Zuckerberg were all front and center at his inauguration. None of them are known as devoted lefties and they have to worry about their quarterly profits for the next 16 quarters, so bowing down to Trump seems to them like a good thing to do.
What about the traditional media? They are scared of Trump. The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times refused to endorse Kamala Harris, even though their editors wanted to. ABC decided to settle a bogus lawsuit that it could easily have won because it didn't want to anger Trump. Trump has sued CBS for $10 billion over its interview with Kamala Harris, a case he could never win on the merits, but it is likely CBS will settle because it wants Trump to approve a merger between CBS' owner, Paramount, and Skydance. Since the election, Fox's ratings have gone up while those of MSNBC and CNN have nosedived. Talk radio has been a Republican stronghold ever since the late Rush Limbaugh went on the air.
Part of this is that Trump is a bully and Democrats don't do that. Suppose that Joe Biden had told Fox to turn down the volume or he would order the FCC to rescind its broadcast license. Unthinkable, right?
What about universities? After Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) pistol-whipped a bunch of university presidents, universities panicked about losing their federal funding and all the protests about Gaza stopped. They are rolling back their DEI efforts (as are businesses). Efforts to block conservative speakers on campus and mandatory diversity statements give elite universities a bad name with the general public. That was absolutely not the case in the 1960s and 1970s. The universities' perceived wokeness has cost them a lot of prestige with the general public, which sees them as indoctrinating students, not educating them.
One thing that Republicans are good at, and Democrats are bad at, is messaging. Republicans have only a couple of themes, like immigrants and crime, but they hammer on them, day and night, night and day. Some immigrant commits a heinous crime, Republicans go nuts, and Congress passes a bill, like the Laken Riley Act that it passed yesterday. When was the last time you heard that the guy who pulled off the Oklahoma city bombing that killed 168 people, including 19 children, with hundreds injured, was a native-born white Christian man, Timothy McVeigh? Then there was South Carolina-born white Christian man Dylann Roof, who shot up a Bible class in a church in Charleston and killed nine people in 2015. How about the incident in Las Vegas in 2017 when Stephen Paddock, a white Christian man born in Iowa, gunned down 60 people and injured hundreds of others? Or that Adam Lanza, a native-born white Christian man, killed 20 children and 6 teachers at Sandy Hook. Do you see a pattern here? And there are dozens more. But one immigrant kills one student nurse in Georgia and it is a Very Big Deal.
Democrats have a vast number of issues, including abortion, bathrooms, climate change, corporate greed, education, equality, gay rights, green energy, gun control, health care, housing, racial justice, sexism, voting rights, and many more. Voters can't remember all this stuff. Maybe the Democrats need to whittle it down to a couple of themes, like Republicans try to steal elections and billionaires control the country for their own benefit. The Republicans' message is fundamentally positive: Americans are a good people and if it weren't for these criminal immigrants, all would be well. The Democrats' message is fundamentally negative: The country is beset by dozens of major, major problems, like the ones listed above. Turns out, people like the positive message better. Surprise. (V)