It's the information environment, stupid. Mainly. I think...

I really do think there is not enough thought put into this basic explanation of modern American politics.  That Will Stancil guy on Twitter keeps saying it, and I agree.  Two articles:

 An Overlooked — and Increasingly Important — Clue to How People Vote

Most election post-mortems neglect a key determinant of how people vote — where they get their news.

Some extracts:

The nature of these platforms has changed too — as more of their users come to rely on them for news. In 2020, 28 percent of regular Instagram users got their news there; in 2024, 40 percent did, according to Pew Research Center. In 2020, 22 percent of TikTok users got news there; in 2024, 52 percent did.

The other big factor that changed was one of the biggest platforms, X, formerly Twitter, having its owner (with 200 million followers) go all-in for one candidate.

These studies reveal an interesting fault line. While most women get their news from TikTok, most young men get their news from YouTube, Twitter and Reddit, Pew found. This confirms that men and women often act on different sources of information. Yet while we spill many words analyzing whether New York Times headlines normalize bad behavior, we know very little about what news and information rises to the top on Reddit and YouTube.

Trump supporters will argue that this re-sorting of media consumption was a positive development, allowing people to get information unfiltered by the (biased) elite media. Indeed, Elon Musk declared that with this election, “Legacy media is dead. Long live citizen journalism!”

But there is much evidence that information on social media is more likely to include misinformation and provide news that reinforces preexisting beliefs than traditional mainstream media. And in 2020, studies showed that people who relied on social media for news were less knowledgeable. We’ll see if that remains true in 2024. At a minimum, we need to better understand the dynamics.

One meta-cause of the change is obvious: the rise of social media. The other is more indirect but still significant: the collapse of local news. We’ve lost one-third of our local newspapers; the number of reporters has dropped 60 percent in two decades. Studies have shown that the contraction of local news has created a vacuum — which has been filled by partisan news sources and social media (both polarizing and more likely to spread misinformation).

I’m certainly not arguing that issues like inflation or immigration were not important factors, or that if people just had different information they might have voted differently. But if we want to grasp the meaning of this election, we can’t ignore one of the biggest forces that shaped the electorate — or how the collapse of local news has changed the political equation.

And at New Republic, a broader look at the whole Right wing media networks (which obviously feed a lot of misinformation into the social media world):

Why Does No One Understand the Real Reason Trump Won?

It wasn’t the economy. It wasn’t inflation, or anything else. It was how people perceive those things, which points to one overpowering answer.

Extracts (with my bold):

The answer is the right-wing media. Today, the right-wing media—Fox News (and the entire News Corp.), Newsmax, One America News Network, the Sinclair network of radio and TV stations and newspapers, iHeart Media (formerly Clear Channel), the Bott Radio Network (Christian radio), Elon Musk’s X, the huge podcasts like Joe Rogan’s, and much more—sets the news agenda in this country. And they fed their audiences a diet of slanted and distorted information that made it possible for Trump to win.

Let me say that again, in case it got lost: Today, the right-wing media sets the news agenda in this country. Not The New York Times. Not The Washington Post (which bent over backwards to exert no influence when Jeff Bezos pulled the paper’s Harris endorsement). Not CBS, NBC, and ABC. The agenda is set by all the outlets I listed in the above paragraph. Even the mighty New York Times follows in its wake, aping the tone they set disturbingly often.

If you read me regularly, you know that I’ve written this before, but I’m going to keep writing it until people—specifically, rich liberals, who are the only people in the world who have the power to do something about this state of affairs—take some action.

I’ve been in the media for three decades, and I’ve watched this happen from the front row. Fox News came on the air in 1996. Then, it was an annoyance, a little bug the mainstream media could brush off its shoulder. There was also Rush Limbaugh; still, no comparison between the two medias. Rush was talented, after a fashion anyway, but couldn’t survive in a mainstream lane (recall how quickly the experiment of having him be an ESPN color commentator went off the rails.) But in the late 1990s, and after the Internet exploded and George W. Bush took office, the right-wing media grew and grew. At first, the liberal media grew as well along with the Internet, in the form of a robust blogosphere that eventually spawned influential, agenda-setting web sites like HuffPost. But billionaires on the right have invested far more heavily in media in the last two decades than their counterparts on the left—whose ad-supported, VC-funded operations started to fizzle out once social media and Google starting eating up the revenue pie.

And the result is what we see today. The readily visual analogy I use is: Once upon a time, the mainstream media was a beachball, and the right-wing media was a golf ball. Today, the mainstream media (what with layoffs and closures and the near death of serious local news reporting) is the size of a volleyball, and the right-wing media is the size of a basketball, which, in case you’re wondering, is bigger.

This is the year in which it became obvious that the right-wing media has more power than the mainstream media. It’s not just that it’s bigger. It’s that it speaks with one voice, and that voice says Democrats and liberals are treasonous elitists who hate you, and Republicans and conservatives love God and country and are your last line of defense against your son coming home from school your daughter.

And that is why Donald Trump won. Indeed, the right-wing media is why he exists in our political lives in the first place. Don’t believe me? Try this thought experiment. Imagine Trump coming down that escalator in 2015 with no right-wing media; no Fox News; an agenda still set, and mores still established, by staid old CBS News, the House of Murrow, and The New York Times. 

That atmosphere would have denied an outrageous figure like Trump the oxygen he needed to survive and flourish. He just would not have been taken seriously at all. In that world, ruled by a traditional mainstream media, Trump would have been seen by Republicans as a liability, and they would have done what they failed to do in real life—banded together to marginalize him.

But the existence of Fox changed everything. Fox hosted the early debates, which Trump won not with intelligence, but outrageousness. He tapped into the grievance culture Fox had nursed among conservatives for years. He had (most of the time) Rupert Murdoch’s personal blessing. In 2015-16, Fox made Trump possible.

And this year, Fox and the rest of the right-wing media elected him.

The only confounding thing about this fundamental theory for this election, which a lot of Democrat supporting people have been noting on Twitter with puzzlement,  is the apparent significant number of people who split their vote.  Voted Democrat for Senators or state positions, yet swapped to Trump for President.

That really is hard to fathom.   (Some on Twitter arguing it's evidence of fraud in the system - even going as far as to say it was due to some election tallies been sent via Starlink, where Musk had the figures changed!)  I don't believe the conspiracies, but there is much further analysis to be done on understanding what was going on in the minds of voters who did that....