After the Election
With the closure of the polls a week ago, the country turned its attention to a new political reality. I have published two pieces to herald that change. I spent Tuesday with a notebook at Howard University, in Washington, D.C., where the Harris campaign was holding its official Election Night gathering. I filed a report on that evening and its changing moods—what happened, how those watching felt about it—which ran the next morning alongside some wonderful photographs by Peter Fisher. Then I cleared my head with an hour in the National Gallery.
In the days that followed, pundits offered many accounts of what the Harris campaign and the Democrats had done wrong. Most were familiar—more or less the same explanations trotted out every loss cycle. Some alleged oversights that, I knew from reporting a long Harris cover profile and interview, the campaign had been at deliberate pains to avoid. Others seemed plausible but insufficient to explain particular voting patterns on Tuesday—especially patterns of change.
Today, for The New Yorker, I put forward a new idea of what won and lost the election. I call it the “ambience of information”: notions that, as the communications researcher Pablo Boczkowski has put it, people “rub against” in their daily lives, and thus that form the basic premises and the fundamental beliefs they have about what candidates and their programs are (and aren’t). The Trump campaign, I show, was able to seed this ether of premises by a particular approach to the national informational landscape. The Harris campaign, whose messaging took a more conventional course through micro-targeting and local community networks, didn’t end up with nearly as much control.
“At Howard University, a Bittersweet End to a Historic Presidential Campaign,” Vogue, November, 2024: https://www.vogue.com/article/kamala-harris-campaign-howard-university
“Republican Victory and the Ambience of Information,” The New Yorker, November, 2024: https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-lede/republican-victory-and-the-ambience-of-information
Onward,
