There is a widely repeated line in policy debates among Democrats that our big problem is that we (well-educated liberal policy types) just aren’t talking to the people we need to reach. We’re focusing on the New York Times and CNN, while young people are all getting their information from some whacked-out 20-year-old on TikTok.

The idea is that the elite media did their job, after all the overwhelming majority of New York Times readers voted for Harris. The problem is that the elite media just doesn’t have the influence it used to have.

I saw this line laid out very explicitly in Ezra Klein’s interview with pollster David Shor in the New York Times (worth reading). Klein at one point poses a question:

What I always think about though, is that if your lever is New York Times headlines, you’re not affecting the voters you are losing. The question Democrats face, when you look at how badly they lost less politically engaged voters, is: How do you change the views of voters you don’t really have a good way to reach?

Shor picks up from Klein and never questions whether the New York Times headlines could influence people who don’t read the New York Times, and quite possibly don’t even know what the New York Times is. While I appreciate the humility of a New York Times columnist, it doesn’t correspond to reality.

What the New York Times and other major media outlets assert about the world stretches well beyond their immediate readership. A good example that makes this point is that everyone knows the withdrawal from Afghanistan was a disaster.

As a practical matter, almost no one in the United States has any direct knowledge of the conditions surrounding the withdrawal in Afghanistan. There were about 650 US soldiers in Afghanistan at the time when the large-scale withdrawal of Afghan allies began. If each of them had explained the conditions of the withdrawal to 100 family members and friends that would mean 65,000 people had some direct knowledge of the withdrawal from people who were actually there.

That comes to 0.02 percent of the population. Yet somehow everyone knew that the withdrawal was a disaster. Sure, maybe their knowledge came from a whacked out 20-year-old TikTok influencer, but that whacked out TikTok influencer might have directly or indirectly gotten their information from the New York Times, CNN or other major media outlets which could not refer to the withdrawal from Afghanistan without calling it “disastrous.”

We can’t very well test the counter-factual, but I would speculate that if the media had spoken of the withdrawal in more neutral terms, everyone would not have “known” the withdrawal was disastrous. I would argue further, if the media had highlighted the huge number of Afghan allies the US military was able to withdraw under extraordinarily bad circumstances, with relatively few casualties, people might have actually viewed the withdrawal favorably.

But turning back to the election, and how elite views percolate down to TikTok viewers, it is clear that most people thought the economy was pretty bad last fall and those people overwhelmingly voted for Trump. As Klein put it:

You’re dealing with people who aren’t paying a lot of attention to politics. They do pay attention and feel prices and the state of the country. You had a massive inflationary period, and they’re [expletive]. Being [expletive] about inflation moved them against the incumbent party, which, as in other countries, they held responsible for inflation.

Okay, so Ezra Klein clearly feels the economy was shit. But how does he know everyone else sees their situation that way? We all know the inflation data, but unlike in almost every other rich country, wages outpaced inflation. This was especially true for lower paid workers, the ones who were most likely to vote for Trump.

Here’s the picture for production and non-supervisory workers in the hotel and restaurant industry, the lowest paying industry in the economy.

As can be seen, these workers’ pay far outpaced inflation in the years since the pandemic. We all know the story about workers see their pay raises as what they earned and inflation as what the government did, but how far can we take this? Real wages were more than 8.0 percent higher by Election Day than they had been before the pandemic, were all these workers as convinced as Klein that the economy was shit?

I’ll add in two other points to provide some additional context. First, there have been many years in the prior four decades where real wages for lower paid workers did not keep pace with inflation, so this rising real wages is not something that they had any reason to take for granted.

The second point is that these workers mostly have jobs. The unemployment rate was under 4.0 percent for most of the Biden administration. This was the best record on unemployment in more than half a century. I know it is fashionable in policy circles to say that working people don’t care about having jobs, but I’m afraid I don’t believe it.

Also, with a low unemployment rate, people can leave jobs they don’t like and get better ones. There was a massive wave of job switching in 2021-2023. This led to record levels of self-reported worker job satisfaction.

I’ll also mention that there was also good news for those who didn’t see themselves as workers but rather as potential business owners. We had record rates of new business formation in the Biden-Harris years.

In short, I don’t believe young people saw the economy as shit based on their own experience. As I’ve noted many times, they weren’t spending like the economy was shit, spending on non-necessities was way up from pre-pandemic levels. This is true even for things like dining at fast-food restaurants, which presumably was not driven by billionaires eating up their stock gains.

I think that the Ezra Kleins of the world told them the economy was shit and this view filtered down to the TikTok influencers who informed the people who went out and voted for Trump on Election Day. If the New York Times and other elite media had highlighted the many positives about the Biden-Harris economy, or at least not gone out of their way to highlight or even invent negatives, I suspect people going to the polls last November would have had a more favorable view of the economy, and we might not have Donald Trump sitting in the White House today.