Trump lost; voter suppression (and propaganda) won

On Social Media and Politics

At the end of April 2025, I left social media, potentially for good. There was a big blowup, I'll be honest, and perhaps I didn't handle myself perfectly. But it comes down to my take, which I'm confident enough to share here, about the 2024 election: Biden voters staying home for Harris didn't cost Harris the election. Trump lost; voter suppression won. While I reached this conclusion alone having read a lot on the topic, I'm not remotely an expert. Greg Palast is an expert though and he lays it out better than I ever could:

Here are key numbers:

4,776,706 voters were wrongly purged from voter rolls according to US Elections Assistance Commission data.

By August of 2024, for the first time since 1946, self-proclaimed “vigilante” voter-fraud hunters challenged the rights of 317,886 voters. The NAACP of Georgia estimates that by Election Day, the challenges exceeded 200,000 in Georgia alone.

No less than 2,121,000 mail-in ballots were disqualified for minor clerical errors (e.g. postage due).

At least 585,000 ballots cast in-precinct were also disqualified.

1,216,000 “provisional” ballots were rejected, not counted.

3.24 million new registrations were rejected or not entered on the rolls in time to vote.

If the purges, challenges and ballot rejections were random, it wouldn’t matter. It’s anything but random. For example, an audit by the State of Washington found that a Black voter was 400% more likely than a white voter to have their mail-in ballot rejected. Rejection of Black in-person votes, according to a US Civil Rights Commission study in Florida, ran 14.3% or one in seven ballots cast.

Florida, as has largely been the case since the Civil War ended, is ground zero for voter suppression, which is partly how a state that twice voted for Barack Obama moved to out of play in statewide elections for Democrats. Florida was nowhere near alone in this, however, as the Brennan Center for Justice noted in September, "This fall, voters in more than half of the states will face obstacles to voting that they have never encountered in a presidential election before."

Of course, there's an entire book on this that goes back to the 2016 election that features everyone's favorite historian, Heather Cox Richardson. Heather Cox Richardson posted on March 7, 2025:

A 2024 study by the Brennan Center of nearly a billion vote records over 14 years showed that the racial voting gap is growing almost twice as fast in places that used to be covered by the preclearance requirement. Another recent study showed that in Alabama, the gap between white and Black voter turnout in the 2024 election was the highest since at least 2008. If nonwhite voters in Alabama had voted at the same rate as white voters, more than 200,000 additional ballots would have been cast.

My argument goes further than that though. I'm convinced the massive propaganda and discord sewing efforts in the United States, led by Elon Musk's X and Mark Zuckerberg's Meta platforms, including Instagram and Facebook, played a huge role in the 2024 election outcome. These efforts were aided and often led by foreign adversaries such as Russia, as The Brookings Institute, a genuinely non-partisan think tank, confirms that Russian propaganda, or "lies that kill," influenced the last several US elections, including 2024. An example of how pervasive these propaganda and discord serving efforts could be was detailed in The New York Times in 2022 in a piece entitled "How Russian trolls helped keep the Women's March out of lock step."

On March 5, noted historian Heather Cox Richardson went into the propaganda and other techniques used by the former Soviet Union to manipulate elections and how this was brought to the United States by Putin allies, including Donald Trump. It's worth quoting at length:

Russian “political technologists” used modern media to pervert democracy. They blackmailed opponents, abused state power to help favored candidates, sponsored “double” candidates with names similar to those of opponents in order to split their voters and thus open the way for their own candidates, created false parties to create opposition, and created false narratives around elections or other events that enabled them to control public debate.

This system enabled leaders to avoid the censorship from which voters would recoil by instead creating a firehose of news until people became overwhelmed by the task of trying to figure out what was real and simply tuned out. Essentially, this system replaced the concept of voters choosing their leaders with the concept of voters rubber-stamping the leaders they had been manipulated into backing.

...

Russian operatives told [Trump 2016 Campaign Chair Paul] Manafort that in exchange for a promise to turn U.S. policy toward Russia, they would work to get Trump elected.

...

According to a 2020 report from the Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee, “the Russian government engaged in an aggressive, multifaceted effort to influence, or attempt to influence, the outcome of the 2016 presidential election…by harming Hillary Clinton’s chances of success and supporting Donald Trump at the direction of the Kremlin.”

That effort was “part of a broader, sophisticated, and ongoing information warfare campaign designed to sow discord in American politics and society…a vastly more complex and strategic assault on the United States than was initially understood…the latest installment in an increasingly brazen interference by the Kremlin on the citizens and democratic institutions of the United States.” It was “a sustained campaign of information warfare against the United States aimed at influencing how this nation’s citizens think about themselves, their government, and their fellow Americans.”

In other words, they used “political technology,” manipulating media to undermine democracy by creating a false narrative that enabled them to control public debate.

Richardson does not mention that some political historians believe that personal technologies encouraged in the United States and kept from the masses in the Soviet Bloc, such as computers and the Internet, as much as anything else, ended the Soviet Union in the late 1980s (for example see Odd Arne Westad's The New International History of the Cold War: Three (Possible) Paradigms). Though the Internet was not known to most Americans, it was relied upon by two major institutions, the Trump Administration is trying to dismantle: researchers at public universities and the United States Military. It is my opinion that Putin is using the Internet to attack democracy as a sort of revenge dish served cold. After all, it was Putin who was in the business of the largely failed Soviet KGB efforts to use propaganda and what I tactfully call "mind fucking" other countries to maintain power in Europe, especially since he was stationed in East Germany. He likely saw first hand, or at least second hand through his plants in West Berlin and West Germany who were largely professors and military folks, how the Internet and personal technologies such as personal computers, helped accelerate the Soviet Union's demise.

Still, the reality is that social media platforms' reach has limits, at least in other countries (this is an excellent piece by one of my favorite political scientists, Thomas Zimmer). Musk's unsuccessful efforts to influence the recent German elections should give us hope that our fight against propaganda isn't impossible.

Adjacent to my argument that pro-Trump propaganda pushed by Musk, Zuckerberg, Russia and other adversaries helped the GOP win, is that the media failed us, as crack reporter Parker Molloy laid out on February 28, 2025. Molloy looks at the Washington Post story about a woman who voted for Trump so she'd get his promised free IVF treatments.

Ryleigh Cooper, a 24-year-old Forest Service employee who voted for Donald Trump in part because he promised to make IVF treatments free — a campaign pledge he made last August. Now, she's been fired due to the administration's federal workforce purge (part of that Project 2025 plan Trump claimed wasn't his), and her dream of starting a family through IVF seems further away than ever.

Parker provides ample evidence that the reason Cooper believed Trump's IVF promises is that media headlines gave her no reason not to trust Trump. In examples all across the political map, Parker shows that the headlines took Trump at his word, even if the articles themselves rightly questioned Trump's intentions and/or the feasibility of such a program. Only about 40% of Americans read past the headline, and 60% post articles on social media without reading the article first. Molloy concludes her piece:

This isn't about liberal vs. conservative or pro-Trump vs. anti-Trump. It's about whether journalism's primary responsibility is to the truth or to neutrally repeating what powerful people say, regardless of its veracity.

For Cooper, who's now out of a job, health insurance, and possibly her chance at parenthood through IVF, the stakes of this media failure couldn't be more personal or devastating.

The media needs to stop treating Trump's outlandish promises as straightforward policy announcements. Lives are literally being shaped by these decisions. Just ask Ryleigh Cooper.

Ultimately, what led to my brouhaha on social media was my argument that voter suppression and propaganda--lies that kill--elected Trump, and that we need to focus on those on going anti-democracy efforts, rather than what I call "Tommy down the street" who didn't vote because of "Genocide Joe."* The only evidence I've seen that Tommy-down-the-street played a defining role in the election always fail to mention that 2020 was the highest turn-out election in history and the easiest in history to vote in, that from 2022 on Republicans passed at least 70 voter suppression laws with the full intent of removing Biden/Harris/Walz voters and 2024 was still the second highest turnout in American history,** or provide any reason whatsoever that motivated Tommy-down-the-street other than Tommy simply choosing to stay home. The voices attacking me for this hot take were supposedly from the Left.

But almost all of these voices were anonymous accounts—at least the ones I could see (Bluesky and Mastodon can have some visibility issues). Tommy-down-the-street is as much a tool of the Right as the myth of the Welfare Queen; it is designed to get the Left to tear itself apart. While the Welfare Queen myth has devastating real life consequences, particularly for Black women, the Tommy-down-the-street myth also uses racial animus to drive the wedge within the resistance. The argument goes, Tommy didn't vote for Vice President Kamala Harris, not because of Palestine (or "both parties are the same"), as Tommy claims, but because he's too racist and sexist to vote for a Black woman.

There are absolutely millions of people too racist and sexist to vote for a Black woman even if she was the most qualified candidate in history; some of them are registered Democrats and/or call themselves liberals. There's no doubt about this. Some of these people stayed home. Some of them voted for Trump. I'm angry at them too. They're real people. But no evidence compels me to think they played a role that moved the needle in the election. There's proof that voter suppression did, yet liberals on social media in my experience are too busy talking about Tommy to talk about voter suppression.

When you look at the role of propaganda and crappy reporting you may notice that Dearborn, Michigan flipped 30 points from historically very Democrat to pro-Trump in just one election. Dearborn, which is home to the largest percentage of Muslims in the United States, flipped to Trump because they believed Trump would bring peace to the Middle East. They immediately regretted their decision.

Or take Miami-Dade County (this blog is about South Florida, after all), which twice voted for Obama, hasn't voted for any Republican President since George H.W. Bush, and voted for Biden by seven points in 2020, but went "blood red for Trump" in 2024. Trump won by 11 points here in November, an 18 point swing. According to one FIU professor, Mario Loyola, "Trump won voters who are worried about the threat to democracy because people know who the real threat to democracy is." Now the families of many of those voters are being forced back to Venezuela's dictatorship and feel betrayed. With today's news that the White House is pulling the plug on pro-democracy and protections for opposition efforts in Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua, all with massive diaspora and refugee populations in Miami-Dade County, it is likely the sense of betrayal will only grow. As the blood red article points out, there are other theories about why this county flipped--and as a historian I abide by the historian's favorite phrase, "well, it's complicated." Still, the role of propaganda in the 2024 election is undeniable, even if we'll never fully understand the specific numbers of votes it changed.

Assuming there are free and fair elections in 2026 and 2028, we must be aware of the role of propaganda and voter suppression in our elections and let Tommy-down-the-street worry about himself.

One final note before I return to the regularly scheduled programming here. The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968. The Senate voted on the Fair Housing Act of 1968 that same day. President Johnson used the assassination to pressure Congress to pass the bill, and they did. White people, as a group, have never voted for a Democratic nominee for President since then. So, while we talk about Tommy-down-the-street staying home the reality is that Tommy is probably a white male and no group is more in the bag for Republicans than white males. I know there's a lot of noise and "news" about more people of color, particularly Latinos, voting for Trump. However, the reality is that a majority of Latinos still voted for Harris and Trump won the Latino vote in only one state. Yeah, it's Florida. In short, if you must have someone to blame for Trump winning, point to the only racial demographic that voted, as a group, for him: white people.

For my part, I prefer to direct my unmitigated, unquenchable rage at the billionaires who financed this mess and benefit from it.

This post is updated periodically as I find new sources and new information.

*This post is not commenting on who is to blame for the violence in the Middle East. That's for a different post. Suffice to say, no matter who the innocent bystander is, this author is against murder.

**I'm only counting since the 1964 Voting Rights Act, as before then, most Americans over 21 could not vote. So, while some elections had turnouts of nearly 80% in the 19th century, this was of eligible white male voters and in an era when election fraud was much more common.