For most of Election Day 2024, the mood was upbeat inside the windowless Philadelphia hotel ballroom where Team Kamala Harris had set up its Pennsylvania command center. Early-morning turnout was exceeding expectations, especially in Luzerne and other parts of the state with large Puerto Rican populations — a sign many in the room were eager to attribute to the Donald Trump campaign’s decision to host a comedian who denigrated the U.S. territory at a high-profile rally days before the election.
Like a lot of Harris-Walz staffers, Erik Balsbaugh woke up that morning optimistic. He thought the polls were underestimating Harris’ support the same way they had underestimated Democrats’ chances in the midterm elections two years earlier. He suspected a similar dynamic — female voters’ fury over efforts to dismantle abortion access — would fuel a Harris victory. And the snatches of information he heard over the course of the day only confirmed his priors: The Puerto Rican side of Balsbaugh’s family, mostly Republicans, had all voted for Harris.
A senior official for Harris’ voter-protection team, Balsbaugh led a crew working to “cure” roughly 6,000 ballots, a process that involves tracking down Democratic voters whose ballots had been rejected over minor mistakes. Balsbaugh had played a similar role in Georgia in 2020, as part of a team that cured 15,000 ballots the year Joe Biden won the state by just 11,779 votes. Over the months leading up to the election, he imagined he and his colleagues would play a similarly critical role in Pennsylvania in 2024, but by election morning he began to think Harris might win by such a wide margin they wouldn’t even be needed.
By the time the first polls closed on the East Coast, Balsbaugh was on his eighth or ninth Celsius energy drink of the day, and that’s when the mood in the room started to shift. “It got silent when the first results from Florida started coming out,” he recalls. The early returns bore a strong resemblance to 2016, but somehow worse: Turnout was way up in rural areas and down in Democratic strongholds. Right after Florida came in, Democrats posted a weaker-than-expected performance in Virginia. “It went from feeling in the morning like we’re going to win by two or three points to ‘Oh, my God, the only way we’re gonna win is a cure margin in these states.’ ”
A little before 9 p.m., he sent his team home to get some rest — they were going to need it, he told them, thinking the race would almost certainly come down to Pennsylvania, where they were responsible for ensuring every last vote cast for Harris was accounted for.
But within the hour, Balsbaugh went from believing he’d play a critical role in securing the White House for Harris to realizing their efforts would make no difference at all: Trump was on pace to win the race outright that night. By then, the ballroom had emptied out. It was just Balsbaugh, alone and panic-stricken, watching MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki, asking himself over and over “How did we miss this again?” even as, in his gut, he already knew.
‘Carefully Curating Our Message’
A month after the election, in a fifth-floor conference room at Harvard University, emissaries from both Donald Trump’s and Kamala Harris’ 2024 presidential campaigns met to settle on a narrative of how exactly — with the stakes so high, with some $2 billion at their disposal, with seemingly all of the entertainment industry, the music industry, the mainstream media on their side — Democrats misjudged the American public so badly. Again.
A half dozen Trump officials, including senior adviser Chris LaCivita, political director James Blair, and pollster Tony Fabrizio, arrived at Harvard’s Campaign Managers Conference, a quadrennial tradition dating back to 1972, for an extended victory lap, ready to outline proudly and in detail how they aggressively targeted and turned out the politically averse, disengaged voters who delivered Trump’s victory across all seven battleground states.
The campaign, they explained at Harvard, actively targeted Black men, Latinos, and disaffected young men, many of whom still live with their parents, with economic messages — groceries and gas are too expensive, rent is too high, homeownership feels out of reach — and they sought those voters out in places their rival campaign didn’t touch.
The Trump campaign made MAGA “cool and edgy” with a “specific set of men between the ages of 18 and 22.”
While Harris’ campaign agonized about whether to make time to appear on Joe Rogan — the biggest podcast in the world — Trump was working his way through an entire ecosystem of mini Rogans, sitting down with people whom Democratic campaign consultants would have never allowed in the same room as their candidate. (One Harris source defended that thinking, saying, “The reason why we don’t just throw them on the phone with someone in between campaign events is because we want to make sure that we are carefully curating our message.”)
Trump, meanwhile, showed up alongside streamer Adin Ross and on podcasts hosted by figures like Real World/Road Rules Challenge alum Theo Von; Mark Calaway (known as the Undertaker back in his WWE days); Canadian American YouTube pranksters (turned right-wing influencers) the Nelk Boys; AI researcher Lex Fridman; Flagrant (a spinoff of MTV2’s Guy Code); and Logan Paul. Together, those seven appearances accounted for nearly the same number of views that Rogan’s Trump interview brought in.
That Rogan appearance racked up 37 million views on YouTube alone in the first three days it was live. Harris’ biggest podcast appearance — on Call Her Daddy — meanwhile still hasn’t cracked 1 million views on YouTube. (A Harris source admits the campaign could have made her more available for podcasts if they had more time, saying, “If we had had a six-month runway instead of 107 days … does she do Martha Stewart’s podcast? Does she do something with Ina Garten?… There’s so much, so many things that you can do, but we just didn’t have time.”)
When Trump himself wasn’t appearing in the channels these tuned-out voters were plugged into, his ads were: Make America Great Again, a pro-Trump Super PAC, assembled a list of 6.3 million so-called streaming persuadables — undecided voters who could be reached via services like Roku and Max — then targeted that particular segment over and over again, The New York Times reported, a strategy Team Trump viewed as key to neutralizing the Harris campaign’s immense cash advantage. (The Harris campaign, by contrast, targeted its TV streaming ads by geography, casting a much wider net.)
A Team Trump source tells Rolling Stone the specifics of how it targeted those 6.3 million potential voters: People with cable or satellite TV got fewer streaming ads, and a third group — persuadable voters who subscribed to neither cable nor streaming services — were papered with text messages or mailers. In the final weeks of the election, that source says, Team Trump expanded its focus to include roughly 7.5 million more potential Trump voters — about 4 million low-propensity voters, as well as 3.5 million inactive voters — a good portion of whom they believe turned out for the 47th president.
Publicly, the Harris campaign has maintained it staged a “pretty flawless” campaign that simply faced insurmountable headwinds: She became the candidate far too late, Team Harris says, in an era of high inflation that toppled virtually every governing party up for reelection across the globe last year. But privately, both at Harvard and in more than a dozen interviews since, campaign insiders admit to missteps on Harris’ part — and smart tactical decisions by Trump. A Harris campaign official, for example, concedes that Trump and his allies “certainly were sophisticated in how they chose to target voters” and were “reaching out beyond what you would consider to be a traditional swing voter.”
As far back as spring 2023, a separate Biden source says, his campaign recognized that these voters — infrequent and politically disengaged voters, the kind who “don’t trust mainstream media and are fundamentally not interested in politics” — would decide this election. The campaign just didn’t know how to reach them, the source admits. “We are in a media environment that these voters are definitionally hard for us to reach.… They don’t want to talk about politics, they don’t want to engage with politics.”
A separate Harris campaign source also acknowledges that “there were some things we missed, from a cultural standpoint,” going on to credit “the brilliance of Elon [Musk] and — I hate to even say it — Steve Bannon,” people who have worked to cultivate influence in online spaces popular among the politically disengaged. “It’s been this burgeoning underground world that’s not so underground anymore.”
As much as Harris campaign officials would like to brush off the significance of media appearances to the election outcome, one Democratic consultant who worked for the campaign says they did matter. They made “the MAGA brand cool and edgy” with “a very specific set of men between the ages of 18 and 22 — and then you layer that on top of Democrats losing more and more working-class voters,” historically, the party’s base — and it becomes an existential threat. “We have failed to connect time and time again about the real core issues that matter to them. That, to me, is an issue that we’ve got to figure out going forward as Democrats or we’re just gonna have more and more problems.”
It will be months before a complete voter file is available to offer a full and detailed picture of what went wrong, but what is clear from exit polls and county-level data is that, in 2024, Democrats lost ground everywhere. Their support eroded even in the party’s typical strongholds — urban centers, college towns, and majority-Black counties — an indication that the party fundamentally failed to understand its own base’s chief concerns, to say nothing of the broader electorate. The party failed to offer solutions or communicate the solutions it was offering; relied on data to guide advertising choices, muddling the narrative; and aligned itself with unpersuasive surrogates. Democrats forgot, essentially, how to talk to American voters — while failing, comically at times, to reach potentially persuadable voters who were actively tuned out from politics.
Democrats forgot how to talk to American voters — while failing, comically, to reach persuadable voters.
Take Nevada, for example, a state that automatically registers to vote every person who applies for a driver’s license or state ID — a target-rich environment for a campaign seeking to get inactive, low-propensity voters off the sidelines and into the voting booth. By late October, the internal polls run by key Democratic groups were all blaring the same warning: Trump had a better-than-decent shot at flipping Nevada, a battleground state that hadn’t swung toward a GOP presidential nominee in two decades. In the final sprint leading up to election night 2024, the Harris-Walz campaign took a gamble and bought space on the Sphere — an imposing, orb-shaped entertainment venue covered in LED lights that sits just east of the Las Vegas Strip. The building, open to the public for a little more than a year, had never displayed a political ad on its football field-size surface.
The Harris camp saw the Sphere as an opportunity “to culturally reach people — not just politically reach people,” campaign chair Jennifer O’Malley Dillon has said, by way of justifying the price tag: almost a million dollars a week on the 90-second ad displaying the Harris-Walz logo, her face, and an exhortation to “vote.” It contained no real message or new information, in stark contrast to the multiple Trump billboards lining a highway near the Vegas strip, repeating his popular vow that a second Trump presidency would mean “no tax on tips” for servers and other hospitality-industry workers.
That was a deliberate choice: Months prior to the Harris campaign’s decision, a Trump Super PAC was approached with an offer to have its ad be the first-ever political advertisement on the Sphere. Senior staff discussed it over the summer but quickly dismissed the idea as a waste of money, largely because the Sphere’s absurdly bright displays are projected at hotel rooms full of non-residents presumably ineligible to vote in Nevada.
Another Harris play for cultural cachet — her surprise appearance alongside Maya Rudolph on NBC’s Saturday Night Live days before the election — may have ended up paying off for Trump as much as Harris. According to Trump insiders, SNL did not extend an invitation to Trump to appear on the show. “They should have,” says a senior Trump official, “because we would have said no, and that would have been that.”
But because the campaign was passed over, Federal Communications Commission member Brendan Carr — whom Trump now wants to lead the agency — seized an opening to publicly (and erroneously) complain that SNL and NBC were breaking regulatory rules by having Harris on air that weekend. NBC went on to cut a deal to mollify the Trump campaign: The day after the SNL episode aired, he would get free airtime, during NASCAR and an NFL game.
A hastily filmed clip of Trump backstage at a Sunday-morning rally, speaking off the cuff and direct to camera, was soon beamed into households the party was already spending truckloads of cash trying to reach, says the senior Trump official. The Trump campaign believes the free airtime was worth about $1 million.
An advertisement for Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, is displayed on the 580,000-square-foot Exosphere at Sphere on Oct. 30, 2024 in Las Vegas, Nevada.
‘Obsessive Reliance’ on Data
In the end, Fabrizio, Trump’s pollster, declares the election outcome isn’t that mysterious: “We knew what our message was.” Democrats, he challenges, didn’t. As evidence, he points out that in the final week of the campaign, Team Trump ran 50 unique ads across all platforms while the Harris campaign ran more than three times as many — 162 — with the same amount of money. Messaging from the Harris campaign, a separate Trump official adds, “was different, almost day to day, but definitely week to week. And that’s just no way to build a brand, especially over a short period of time — or tell a story.”
Consultants who worked for the Harris campaign and for the Super PAC Future Forward (the central hub for pro-Harris outside money, which spent $500 million boosting the Democratic ticket in 2024) agree with that assessment — and they attribute the messiness to the party’s “obsessive reliance” on data to drive decision-making. The way they tell it, the campaign would test every ad, then throw whatever scored the highest up on TV and the internet — even when those ads didn’t add up to a single, coherent narrative about the candidate. “You can’t get to a storyline if you’re optimizing for each individual product,” says a Democratic strategist.
The process left the Harris ads feeling overstuffed and unfocused — jumping from topic to topic, snippet to snippet, quicker than casual viewers might process. The difference was obvious to the Democratic strategist, whose team watched TV in hotel rooms in battleground states: The Trump ads “packed a punch and were memorable,” while ads from the Harris campaign and Future Forward “blended into each other.”
“You’re telling people what they care about — at no point are you asking them what they care about.”
There was another significant difference between the Harris and Trump ads: Many of Trump’s ads — including the infamous commercial that asserted “Kamala Harris is for they/them, Donald Trump is for you” — involved hammering clips of Harris herself speaking, sometimes at length, sometimes on repeat. It’s an obvious choice to use soundbites and video clips as much as possible, the Team Trump source says: “Voters are very cynical, skeptical, and doubtful of claims without evidence, so any time you can use a candidate’s own words, you should do it.”
By contrast, the Democratic strategist says, Future Forward determined that ads featuring clips of Trump speaking performed less effectively than ads with a narration. This person says this is part of the problem with Democrats’ “ad-by-ad testing” and “hyper-data-driven approach” to messaging: “It is anathema to overarching storytelling.” (Future Forward points out that it did, in fact, use Trump clips in its ads. Founder Chauncey McLean says some of the PAC’s “best-testing” ads “used Trump’s quotes prominently to show voters how he would be harmful.”)
One Harris campaign official admits that the campaign found it difficult to counter Trump’s anti-trans ad specifically because it was based on video of her speaking (“You can’t say ‘That wasn’t me,’ or whatever”), but this person downplayed the ad’s overall significance: The ad was “damaging, but not the most damaging that we saw.”
The most damaging ads for the Harris campaign were, by far, those that focused on an economic message and pegged Harris as more of the same. Fabrizio agrees: The most effective Trump ads, by his measure, revolved around video clips of the vice president touting Biden’s economic record in 2023 and her assertion that “Bidenomics is working.”
A source familiar with the Harris campaign explained that as inflation began to decline in 2023, the Biden White House expected people’s views of the economy would shift, too — and they might as well take credit for his accomplishments. Economic sentiment didn’t improve, though, and many Americans’ finances didn’t either. The strategy did, however, yield a tone-deaf clip the Trump campaign could use in a series of ads.
Michael Podhorzer, the former longtime political director for the AFL-CIO, says that “many voters have long felt condescended to by Democrats who trumpet their macroeconomic prowess even as [Americans’] day-to-day lives become more precarious.”
The overreliance on testing, the confusion about where to reach voters and how to talk to them about the issues that they care about — it all represents the reality that Democrats have simply forgotten to actually talk to voters, rather than at them.
“We’ve managed to excise talking to voters from our campaigns, because we’ve done everything based around a data-analytics model [where] every single person is modeled for what they care about, and then we advertise to them about the things that we decide they care about,” says Balsbaugh. “You’re telling people what they care about, you’re telling people to go vote — at no point are you asking them what they care about.”
Playing for Game Day
Sitting in that empty hotel ballroom in Philadelphia on election night, Balsbaugh asked himself how Democrats failed so badly, even as he knew the answer. In his day job, he’s a consultant who has focused on staking out a presence in the spaces online that Democrats have steadily forfeited to the right over the past decade — basically since Gamergate.
Balsbaugh first started noticing a shift in 2015. He worked for Hillary Clinton’s campaign that year, before landing a job with the casino lobby. He remembers spending election night 2016 in Las Vegas, inside a glitzy suite overlooking the Strip, surrounded by titans of the casino industry, most of whom privately wanted Trump to win even as they expected he’d lose. When it was clear Trump would be declared the victor, he recalls one of those donors turning to him and asking, “What the fuck did we hire you for?”
“Kids were getting red-pilled. It felt like the YouTube algorithm was all right wing.”
That job made for a stressful few months, and to blow off steam, Balsbaugh gamed online in multiplayer RPGs. There was something he noticed in these spaces starting right around that time: The strangers he interacted with, mostly young men, a community he’s always considered pretty progressive, were growing more reactionary.
“It felt like the kids were getting red-pilled,” he says. Balsbaugh watched as the dynamic accelerated during the pandemic: The people he played against were suddenly more resistant to vaccines, more prone to using “snowflake” as a slur, and he was harassed for the screen name he adopted when he got his first PlayStation back in 2003. (“MassLiberal” — a tongue-in-cheek nod to his old boss, John Kerry.) It wasn’t just in the games where he took note of this dynamic. “You’d watch Call of Duty videos to get good and not get owned by a bunch of 13-year-olds, and the next thing you know, your YouTube algorithm is all right-wing talking points,” Balsbaugh recalls.
Two years ago, Balsbaugh started a program called Progressive Victory to counter growing right-wing influence on streaming platforms. Streamers, he says, “are all curious about politics, and they talk about politics all the time,” but Democrats hadn’t engaged them. There is no one reason why, but Balsbaugh has a couple of theories about the party’s reluctance.
For one thing, streaming is live, and therefore unpredictable — a problem for campaigns consumed with control. Balsbaugh saw this firsthand when he organized a big event in Ohio last year, featuring prominent streamers. Just before it was set to begin, Balsbaugh says, the Democratic Party sent out an email telling elected officials not to participate; one of the marquee influencers was deemed too controversial.
That experience, for Balsbaugh, summed up one of the biggest problems facing the party as it works to reconstitute itself: Democrats’ influencer strategy has focused on safe, family-friendly faces, while excluding anyone deemed too edgy. “If your influencers ‘pass vet,’ they are probably the wrong influencers,” Balsbaugh wrote in a memo after the election. In these communities, “authenticity is king.”
Without a concerted streaming strategy, is it any wonder that on Election Day, as Balsbaugh notes in his memo, nine out of the top 10 streamers covering the results were conservative — and not a single one was supportive of Harris-Walz?
Republicans, Balsbaugh says, “spent a lot more money on streaming. We spent a lot more money on controlled message bites that we put out. Theirs was authentic, and ours was super message-tested.” Put another way, while Democrats were workshopping “Keep calmala and carry onala” in the SNL writers room, Republicans were filming Trump backstage at a rally and sending it straight to the NASCAR broadcast.
“They weren’t asking, like, ‘How many people were moved by this message?’ ” Balsbaugh says. “They just funded [streaming influencers] and let them grow. Whereas we need to have a program. We’re going to need to have the key performance indicators.” But it should be obvious by now, he says: “The knowledge base of a million people on the internet is going to produce things faster and more true to what people want than the smartest Democrat in the world running a program.”
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