Kamala Harris did her best

On Tuesday night, Donald Trump defeated Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election. Republicans also won back a narrow majority in the U.S. Senate. U.S. House results are still coming in, and Republicans hold a small lead over the Democrats. Many people are in shock about the results, and are asking what went wrong for the Democrats, as well as how the party can do better going forward. There are so many possible answers, and it will take some time to sort through them and come up with new ideas. But we want to focus on one area that reflects the mission of Messaging Matters.

That area is communications and media. Specifically, we need to look at what the big corporate “mainstream media” did in this election, and how badly they served us. One obvious place to point to is the number of major newspapers, including ones that traditionally have a Democratic editorial viewpoint, that failed to endorse any candidate this time. Axios has a dramatic chart here, with an accompanying article, demonstrating how the number of such endorsements has plummeted by about 80 percent just since 2004.