While simple and ideologically appealing explanations for Harris’ loss are tempting, the truth is that the reasons are many and often complicated. While it is inarguably true that racism and sexism (two staples of American politics) were factors, the relationships between the two parties and the truth were also factors.

While politics often involves people in a dubious relation with the truth, Trump seems to have locked the Republican party into strategic deceit. The prime example is, of course, what was dubbed the “Big Lie” about Trump being robbed of his rightful victory in 2020. As would be expected, talk of issues with the election has ceased with Trump’s victory. While the Republican party has engaged in strategic lying broadly, I will focus on economic lies.

To be fair and balanced, both the Republicans and the Democrats are right when they claim that many Americans are suffering economically. Inflation, stagnating wages, the high cost of health care and the absurd price of housing have been hurting Americans. Even those who are relatively well off also seem to have felt that the economy was not working for them as it should. As such, both sides agreed on and were correct about the general claim that most Americans are facing economic woes. But they obviously differed in their explanations and proposed solutions. I will focus on the explanations.

While the Republican populist rhetoric did lay some of the blame on corporations, there was an emphasis on lying about the impact of migrants. In addition to the old lies that migrants are stealing jobs, spreading disease, committing crimes and sponging off the system, J.D. Vance also offered the false claim that migrants were responsible for the high cost of housing. While migrants do occupy housing, it is obviously not true that undocumented migrants are buying houses in the United States. In addition to the barrier of the high cost, there is also the fact that legally buying a house is a process that an undocumented person would not be able to complete. Trump and Vance ran hard on the migration issue, linking it to the economy and using racism and xenophobia to add rhetorical fuel to their false claims. The economic link is a smart rhetorical play for two reasons. First, it provides cover for people who are motivated by racism and xenophobia but who do not want to be seen for what they are. Second, it onboards people who are not racist or xenophobic but who are rightfully worried about their economic woes. In terms of how this can work, I need to present an analogy to tech support.

While I am a philosopher, I am also the guy that family, friends, and co-workers turn to when they have tech issues. While I do not work in IT, I was the editor of a Mac ezine in the 1990s, wrote shareware programs, and still build my own PCs. I also have those philosophical critical thinking skills that translate well into fixing tech problems.

When I first started helping people, I made some mistakes that were soon corrected by experience. These were not technical mistakes but psychological. The first was that I would try to explain the nature and the cause of the problem accurately and in some detail. I learned that no one cared much about a detailed explanation, even if they could understand it. The second was that when I tried to show them how to fix the problem as I fixed it, they did not want to know the details, nor did they care much about what I was doing as long as I solved their problem. As one friend put it, they didn’t need to know how to fix problems since they had me. Since learning that people only want their problems solved without caring much about the complicated why or how, since then I have fixed problems quietly. While I was initially annoyed by this and wondered how they could not love knowing about technology as I did, I realized that this was a biased view on my part. While I am interested in technology and solving problems and willing to expend my resources on this knowledge and skill, other people are not interested and prefer to expend their mental resources on other things. This is rational since a person has only so many resources to spend and it makes sense to rely on other people who have the needed knowledge and skill. This holds even when the problem is important and affecting a person.

While I am also interested in politics and economics, it makes sense that (just as with technology) most people are not. They do recognize when they feel things are not going as they would like, and they want someone else to offer them a simple explanation and be told that the problem will be fixed for them.

While we talk about “the economy”, it is obviously an incredibly complicated network of people, resources, made-up laws, made-up traditions, practices, relationships, and so on. As such, there are usually no simple explanations or fixes for economic problems (and one person’s problem is another person’s profit). But just as people notice when their PC is crashing, people notice when their grocery bills are higher, and their rent eats up an ever-larger chunk of their paycheck. Not being experts in the economy (and who really is?) they do not really know why this is happening and have no idea what complicated solutions are needed. Instead, just as my friends and relatives turn to me to fix their technology woes, voters look to politicians to offer simple explanations and easy to understand fixes. But there are obvious differences in that I am honest about technology problems, and I know how to fix them (only one partial failure in over thirty years). When it comes to the economy, as noted above, the Republicans have embraced strategic lying.

They offer simplistic and untrue explanations, such as blaming migrants. But this appeals to people since they are offering an explanation they can understand without being experts in economics: migrants are hurting the economy and hence hurting them. They can then offer a simple, easy to grasp solution (that will make things worse): the Republicans will round up and deport the migrants. This solution will not work for obvious reasons and will most likely make things work because a cornerstone of American food production and construction is cheap migrant labor. This means that the Republicans might suffer some loses when the economy does not improve (or gets worse) but perhaps they can use strategic lying to avoid blame for that. Given that the Republicans have adopted strategic lying, one might think that the Democrats could have won by telling the truth about the cause of Americans’ economic woes and offering real solutions. But Democrats will (mostly) not tell the truth about the economy.

While the Republican rhetoric accuses the Democrats of being socialists and communists, this is also part of strategic lying. While it is true that there are Democrats who have views that are left of the current center, the mainstream Democrats are committed to (or bought by) the same capitalist system (and capitalists) that the Republicans work hard to serve. There is, however, a meaningful difference in that the Democrats push back against some of the worst excesses and favor relatively timid and mild regulations and protections for the lower classes and the environment. In contrast, the Republican party seems to favor allowing the elites to do as they wish without regulation (as long as they do not wish to appear “woke” for marketing purposes, as Disney found out). While some Democrats might have laudable motives, there is also a practical reason to keep the excesses of capitalism in some degree of check, since failure to do so could result in social upheaval and revolt. But getting back to Democrats not telling the truth.

Harris decided to run from the center, making a show of embracing rebel Republicans such as Liz Cheney and “good” billionaires. Despite the claims that the Democrats lost because they were too “woke” or too into identity politics, Harris and her fellow Democrats steered away from “wokeness” and generally avoided identity politics. They even took harder lines on immigration and crime. While acknowledging the economic woes of the lower classes, the Democrats generally did not tell the truth about the cause of those woes nor did they offer any meaningful solutions. This is because telling the truth about these woes would reveal that they are the result of the actions of the elite classes and that significantly improving the conditions for the lower classes would require meaningful changes to the status quo and not just band aids. One of the many reasons that the Democrats cannot do this is that they are, like the Republicans, reliant on the economic elites for their re-election funding. There are also the financial rewards politicians receive for serving these interests, be they Democrats or Republicans. Congress has, to no one’s surprise, an abundance of millionaires. Democrats, I suppose, deserve some faint praise for not engaging in scapegoating migrants or the poor for the economic woes most Americans face. But they deserve criticism for not telling the truth.

While it can be pointed out the Republicans’ strategic lie beat the Democrats’ strategic silence, it can be argued that the Democrats could have won if they had adopted views like those of Bernie Sanders. While some pundits and liberal elites are quick to claim that people who voted for Trump did so because they are dumb racist misogynists, I recommend that people think about my tale about fixing technology: people rationally want someone who can explain complicated problems in simple terms and offer a promise that they will fix the problems. The Republicans did offer explanations, although they were mostly lies. They also offered simple solutions (albeit ones that will just make things work). The next election cycle the Democrats should heed my advice and take my approach: offer a simple but honest explanation and offer a simple explanation of the complicated fix that is needed. Then fix the problem and remember that people will forget you fixed it until they have another problem.