Alex Jones looked different in the final hours of Infowars, as though he were ready for something new. Broadcasting from his Austin studio for the last time yesterday, Jones had shaved his head and ditched his standard shirt and blazer (no tie) in favor of a T-shirt with a massive red Infowars logo. For $49.99, you could buy the same shirt on his website. “Every purchase of this T-shirt goes directly to ensuring that no matter what obstacles arise, Alex Jones will continue to broadcast the truth,” the product description reads.

Jones had lost a yearslong legal battle with the parents of Sandy Hook victims, who were terrorized by Infowars fans after Jones falsely accused them of being “crisis actors.” Last year, he was ordered to pay more than $1 billion in damages to the Sandy Hook parents, forcing him to declare bankruptcy and sell his company. Yesterday morning, The Onion announced that it had bought Infowars at auction, and would turn the site into a satire platform. During his final broadcast, Jones said he was supposed to vacate the Infowars headquarters at some point that day. After 25 years, during which Jones turned a local talk-radio show into his own conspiratorial media empire, it was all ending.

Or was it? “The studios are humming and ready,” Jones said into the camera during the final stream, which happened on X rather than on the Infowars website. “They’re just three miles from here. We’re ready to go.” Jones has already established his next plan: He will, of course, continue streaming through a new website unaffiliated with the Infowars brand. And there’s good reason to suspect that it will work. After Tucker Carlson was fired from Fox News, he continued to stay relevant and garner an audience on the show he hosts on X. Jones still has 3.2 million followers on X that he can direct to wherever he ends up going. (He was banned from Twitter in 2018 but reinstated by Elon Musk last year.)

His approach to conspiracism—world-encompassing theories in service of far-right ends—is now common, a fact that the show itself likes to take credit for. Modern conspiracism is all “downstream from Alex Jones,” another Infowars personality, Owen Shroyer, said in the show’s final stream. “What started at Infowars has metastasized.”

Losing Infowars is still consequential for Jones, even as he begins broadcasting from a new studio and website. Infowars’ precise influence is hard to track, but as of 2022, his show was broadcast on about 30 radio stations, and to millions who tune in online. Jones also still faces financial challenges. The Onion has taken over his supplement business, a significant source of his revenue. He will owe money to Sandy Hook families until he pays off his remaining debt.

Jones will weather this with the support of some powerful friends, however. Steve Bannon appeared on the final stream, and on Wednesday, Roger Stone broke the news live on Infowars that Tulsi Gabbard is Donald Trump’s pick for director of national intelligence. Jones also has had a relationship with the president-elect that could be to his advantage in the future: He interviewed Trump in 2015, early in his presidential campaign. In 2016, he was a VIP guest at Trump’s GOP-nominee acceptance speech. And in 2021, J. D. Vance praised him as a “truth-teller.”

At one point while I watched the Infowars broadcast, the video cut away from Jones. This was it. Then, Shroyer and another Infowars personality, Harrison H. Smith, popped up to keep things going. Jones yelled something at them from off camera about lawyers coming in. Each successive moment of the stream felt like it could be the final one. Shroyer and Smith kept speaking in a series of dramatic aphorisms, as though they were putting the finishing touches on a monologue. Then they would pick right back up and do it again. “The system doesn’t want you to know this information” flowed into “This is not a victory for the bad guys. This is them being revealed and brought out in the open. This will only backfire.” After teasing that the stream was about to end, Shroyer interjected with: “It’s all happening right now. History is unfolding.” This had to be it. Nope. He continued: “We are the Jedi; we are destined to win in the end.”

Then Jones came back for more. “I will never surrender; I will never back down,” he said. Jones then began to muddle his way through something about how his sinking ship was tied to a new ship and that a whole armada was coming, but the armada was a stand-in for the American people. He couldn’t end his ending. The camera cut to a zoomed-out shot of him in his studio, alone at his desk, glumly looking down at some papers, with monitors showing the Infowars logo around him for the last time. The stream cut out.

And then it came back. Jones appeared in the studio, but in a different shirt, suggesting that the segment was prerecorded. Wistful, cinematic music played while Jones excitedly hawked one of his supplements—something called “Ultimate Hydraforce.” Jones joked that he was going to get in trouble for false advertising because, as it turned out, Ultimate Hydraforce wasn’t just hydrating; it was also a pre-workout supplement and has some other beneficial stuff as well. “I always seek to bring you the very best supplements; you can get the best results and come back and get them again,” Jones said. Infowars is ending. But Infowars will never really be over.

If this wasn’t the Podcast Election, it was certainly a podcast-y election. Millions of people watched the results come in on a handful of livestreams hosted by popular podcasters, including one hosted by Tucker Carlson from Mar-a-Lago, on which Donald Trump’s sons Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump appeared as guests.

Trump also enjoyed a late-breaking endorsement from Joe Rogan, host of the world’s most popular podcast. For the past several months, much was made about the Trump campaign’s podcast strategy, reportedly masterminded by Trump’s son Barron, which included interviews with the tech-world whisperers Lex Fridman and the All-In Podcast. Trump took advantage of every opportunity to be interviewed at length and in casual conversation for huge audiences of young men; Harris did not, and immediately after her loss, this stood out to many people as a big problem. As New York Times editor Willy Staley put it in a wry (or grim) post on X, there is now palpable “soul-searching among Democrats about the podcast situation.”

I spent Election Night watching a livestream hosted by The Free Press, the media company founded by the former New York Times writer Bari Weiss. The guest list was a strange assemblage of iconoclasts and establishment castoffs, and it was obvious from the comments that many viewers were just there to watch It Girls Dasha Nekrasova and Anna Khachiyan, hosts of the cultish podcast Red Scare, smirk and sip teensy glasses of champagne while barely saying anything. (One of Nekrasova’s longer sentences of the night was “He’s winning like crazy, right?”)

[Read: Bad news]

A little after 8 p.m., the former presidential candidate Andrew Yang called in from a parking lot in Philadelphia. “I gotta say, the vibe’s kind of Trumpy,” he told Weiss. He had voted for Kamala Harris, he told her, though he hadn’t been excited about it. He offered his critique of the campaign run by Harris and Tim Walz, which he felt was overly risk-averse and uncharismatic. Specifically, he called out the missed opportunity to appear on The Joe Rogan Experience, as both Trump and J. D. Vance had done. (Harris purportedly could have appeared on the show if she followed the host’s terms; in late October, Rogan wrote on X that, contrary to the campaign’s desires, he would not accept a one-hour time limit on the interview and that he wanted to record in his studio in Austin.) “It pisses me off,” Yang said.

“That was a gimme,” he went on. “The Rogan interview would have been almost entirely upside. It’s low-propensity male voters, people that are not inclined to vote for you, so you have nothing to lose.” On Carlson’s Election Night livestream, Elon Musk made a similar argument, alluding to the parasocial, possibly persuasive power of podcasts: “To a reasonable-minded, smart person who’s not hardcore one way or the other, they just listen to someone talk for a few hours, and that’s how they decide whether you’re a good person, whether they like you.”

As I watched, I felt annoyed. Rogan’s anti-vaccine rhetoric and anti-trans shtick—among many other bizarre statements, such as his claim that intelligence agencies provoked January 6—should make him radioactive for any politician, let alone a Democrat in 2024. And anyway, “more podcasts” sounds like a pretty desperate response to such a monumental loss. But these are stupid times.

According to exit polls, Harris did do poorly with young men. Yang was clearly correct that she had nothing to lose. As my colleague Spencer Kornhaber wrote on Thursday, Harris may have avoided Rogan’s three-plus-hour, formless interview format for fear of messing up, “but given who ended up winning the election, this … seems like an antiquated concern.” Was this the difference? Definitely not. But it was a difference. Next time, I would guess, Rogan and his ilk will not be snubbed; the oddball internet is mainstream enough to seriously court.

Obviously, political campaigns always prioritize making their candidates appear accessible, relatable, authentic, and so on. For a useful historical parallel, I looked to 1976—another election in which a key issue was inflation, a key concern was turning out disaffected young voters and restoring faith in American institutions, and a key problem with the Democratic presidential campaign was that many people said they had no idea what it was about.

Jimmy Carter, after seeing what an interview in Playboy had done for California Governor Jerry Brown’s polling numbers during the primaries, agreed to sit for his own. The interviewer, Robert Scheer, wrote in the introduction: “For me, the purpose of the questioning was not to get people to vote for or against the man but to push Carter on some of the vagueness he’s wrapped himself in.” But in September 1976, when the magazine published the 12,000-word Q&A, it was regarded almost immediately as a disaster. Carter infuriated Christians and gave satirists plenty to lampoon with his description of feeling “lust” and “adultery” in his heart at times. (Many also read parts of the interview as obliquely referring to his Democratic predecessor, Lyndon B. Johnson, as a liar.)

Scheer later said that the idea was to use the length and intimacy of the interview to answer the questions of young voters who “wondered if he was this Southern square.” He also thought that the interview had done exactly what the campaign wanted it to, even if it had made them nervous in the process.

Voter turnout in 1976 was abysmal, as expected in the aftermath of Watergate. But, although the interview was regarded by the national media as a major gaffe, apparently many voters didn’t think about it that way. Some were asked about it in polling conducted the same week it was published—of 1,168 respondents, 289 said they hadn’t heard about the interview, while 790 said they had but it hadn’t changed their minds. Carter did lose some small number of voters, at least in the moment—28 respondents said that the interview had caused them to change their vote from Carter to Gerald Ford, while only four said it had caused them to change their vote from Ford to Carter.

[Read: Why Democrats are losing the culture war]

In the end, Carter won with a narrow margin in the popular vote and outperformed Ford with voters ages 22 to 44, while falling short with voters 45 or older as well as with those 18 to 21. Voters recorded their feelings about the Playboy interview again in exit polls. They were asked whether there was anything they disliked about Carter and given eight choices of response, “I didn’t like his Playboy interview" among them. Again, the respondents said that they cared little about it. (They cared more that he was too pro-union.)

If you read all the critiques of the Harris campaign being written right now, you could come to the conclusion that she was both too online and not online enough. She misunderstood her youth support by looking too much at the wrong parts of TikTok; she went on Call Her Daddy, a massively popular podcast that began as part of the Barstool Sports extended universe but was, I guess, the wrong part. She won the endorsement of the two most popular musicians in the world, whose fans wield a ton of online “power,” however you define it. The default political and cultural stance on the Girl Internet is liberal to leftist and was pro-Harris, so maybe she spent too much time there and not enough in unfriendly corners.

There’s a more compelling case this time around that online misogyny had something to do with the results than there was after Trump’s first victory, in 2016, when reporters were so quick to explain how young men were radicalized in spaces like 4chan—a website that was always fairly niche, even if it did influence broader internet culture in certain ways. Today, discontented men are among the most popular influencers on major platforms.

The next Democratic candidate will surely sit for Rogan wherever he asks them to sit. They won’t have a choice. They’ll have to take the risk and act like they have nothing to lose—right now, that’s certainly the truth.

After the last time Donald Trump won the presidency, in 2016, The New York Times confronted its readers with a vivid illustration of how out of touch most of them were with their fellow Americans. In a series of maps, the newspaper color-coded the United States by TV-viewing preferences, highlighting which parts of the country preferred Game of Thrones (cities) and which ones preferred American Dad! (rural areas). The starkest factoid: Trumpland’s favorite TV show was Duck Dynasty, a hunting-themed reality series that many liberals had never seen one second of.

The Times feature was just one of many pieces of media meant to serve as a wake-up call to blue America, bemoaning how the nation had split into silos. Pundits agreed that restoring unity—and curbing Trump-era extremism—would require voters to get out of their comfort zones in order to understand, connect with, and persuade the other side.

Eight years later, with Trump taking the White House in part by bringing young people to the right, it may seem that those calls were simply never heeded: that liberal America instead drew itself further inward and is now facing the fallout. But that’s not quite right. Trump’s first term was marked by concerted cultural efforts that spread “resistance” ideology into conservative enclaves. Hollywood’s endorsement of the #MeToo movement rippled into everyday workplaces; calls for racial justice were turned into prime-time football spectacles; enormously popular children’s movies and blockbusters made the case for multiculturalism. These were attempts on the left to do what it knew how to do best—influence whatever remained of “the mainstream.” But the very shape of culture was changing, and it’s now quite clear that only one side knows what to do about that.

Arguably the key architect of this ongoing political era was Andrew Breitbart, the conservative pundit—and compatriot of Trumpism’s most cunning culture warrior, Steve Bannon—who founded a series of online publications in the 2000s and died in 2012. The so-called Breitbart Doctrine stated that “politics is downstream from culture”—that is, the ideas conveyed by popular entertainment shapes consumers’ worldviews. This proposition called for conservatives to build a shadow Hollywood that tells conservative stories and raises up conservative stars (Duck Dynasty’s un-P.C. patriarch, Phil Robertson, won an award named for Breitbart in 2015). In the long run, though, the doctrine’s biggest impact has been encouraging the right to get creative with online culture.

Social media’s role in the 2016 election—helping bundle a variety of grievances into one exciting, factually pliant narrative of elites oppressing regular Americans—has been highly publicized. What’s less talked about is that it triggered a strangely regressive counteroffensive. Democrats, of course, made memes and organized online during Trump’s first term, but they also channeled energy into reforming social media through content moderation and regulatory efforts. These efforts were prudent, and notionally bipartisan. But while Democrats seemed to yearn to bring back a less anarchic paradigm, Republicans railed against perceived liberal bias in tech—meaning they wanted, in effect, an even better mouthpiece. As media theorists such as Marshall McLuhan have long argued, new communication formats change the way a society thinks of—and speaks to—itself. By all rights, an effective political movement should prioritize harnessing such changes, not reversing them.

In the 2020s, as many Democratic voters and politicians stepped back a bit from partisan warfare, the gears of culture were being refitted yet again. The old social-media platforms had been somewhat defanged, but action was happening on emerging platforms like TikTok, livestreams, and podcasts. These hypnotizing microforms—which captured most of young America, but also cut inroads across demographics—made old cultural fault lines, such as A&E versus HBO, look quaint. Conservative ideas popped up in a flurry of new fads and scenes: the manosphere, the tradwives, anti-woke comedians playing to cryptocurrency conferences. Livestreamers saw an influx of money from right-leaning interests (and, in some cases, Russian ones). When it came time for Trump to mount his comeback campaign, he could plug into a booming world of sympathetic influencers with enormous followings.

[Read: Trump’s red-pill podcast tour]

By contrast, Joe Biden’s signature effort in regard to TikTok was his administration’s support for banning it. When Kamala Harris became the nominee, she did unleash a wave of coconut-themed memes that, more than anything, excited fans of the pop stars whose songs were in the background. Late in her brief campaign, she and her surrogates also made some forays into popular podcasts. But in any analysis, these were marginal efforts compared with the old-school influence methods her campaign relied on: ad campaigns, door-knocking, and rallies headlined by mainstream celebs.

Now that she has lost, one of the many what-ifs to argue over is this: What if Harris had tried to court the millions of subscribers to Joe Rogan’s bro-beloved podcast? Trump and J. D. Vance each did their own three-hour conversation with Rogan. The host wanted to talk with Harris, but he and the campaign couldn’t agree on the logistical details: Harris’s camp had wanted Rogan to travel to her from his Austin studio, and to chat for only an hour. These were reasonable requests when judged by the standards of a traditional politician at the height of campaign season, but they were also a sign of the Harris side’s inability or unwillingness to play by the rules of the new media. The refusal may have also been a strategic move to avoid the possibility of making a gaffe on mic—but given who ended up winning the election, this, too, seems like an antiquated concern.

After all, the hottest commodity of today’s online cultural ecosystem is open conflict. Chitchat on podcasts and livestreams is transfixing because it’s unruly, argumentative, and unafraid of causing offense. (Note how videos of dozens of voters engaged in free-for-all debates, produced by the media company Jubilee, took off this election cycle). Theoretically, it’s not hard to infiltrate the new conservative information environment: Rogan tried to talk to Harris, and the similarly influential podcaster Theo Von booked Bernie Sanders. But most Democratic surrogates seem stuck on a 20th-century performance style, defined by slick sound bites or soaring, cinematic monologues. They seem reluctant to do what these new formats require, which is fight.

One example came when Rogan recently interviewed John Fetterman, the senator from Pennsylvania whose entire brand is allegedly being no-nonsense. Rogan presented him with the conspiracy theory that Democrats were importing undocumented immigrants to swing states, and planning to give them amnesty, in order to expand their voter pool. Fetterman could have debunked that idea in any number of ways, and forcefully. Instead he did what politicians have long been trained to do in contentious interviews: find a point of agreement—“you know, immigration is always going to be a tough issue in this nation”—and change the subject. Rogan, and probably many of his listeners, took this gauziness as evidence that the conspiracy theory was right. The day before Rogan endorsed Trump, the podcaster posted the clip of the exchange with the note “I think everyone should understand exactly what is happening.”

Harris wouldn’t have won just by going on a few more podcasts—but if more Democrats had spent more of the past four years in the mix, figuring out how to spar, complicating the right’s narratives about inflation and immigration, finding ways to redirect attention toward their own agenda, who knows? This new ecosystem is now so visible—and so obviously connected to the rightward shift among young people that helped reelect Trump—that to label it alternative seems ridiculous. Still, the temptation to ignore it, for people who are less than enchanted with Trumpism, will only grow under the new administration. Calls to disengage from X, now that Elon Musk has turned it into a white-supremacist haven, certainly have a moral appeal. But if this election showed how difficult it is to meaningfully “deplatform” speakers you disagree with, it also demonstrated the danger of ignoring the platforms where they speak. Unfortunately, the only way to change what’s happening in an echo chamber may be to add your own noise.

Military judge rules Defense Secretary Austin did not have the authority to rescind plea agreements with three accused.

Donald Trump’s history of racism is breathtaking. His track record of prejudice is so prodigious that keeping all of the incidents straight is difficult: There’s the Central Park Five, the “Muslim ban,” his response to Charlottesville. “Shithole” countries and lamenting that Nigerian immigrants won’t “go back to their huts.” The fabrications about Haitians eating pets. There’s Sunday’s horrifying Madison Square Garden rally, where Trump surrogates made racist comments about Harris and Puerto Rico. The list goes on. And grows. You would be hard-pressed to find a more brazenly racist major American politician on this side of the Civil Rights Act.

Future historians will therefore marvel at the fact that Trump has increased his support among African Americans since he was elected to the presidency in 2016. No serious person expects Trump to win anything close to a majority of Black voters in this year’s election. But months upon months of polls—from a welter of different pollsters—predict Trump substantially growing his share of those voters, particularly young Black men. In a recent poll of Black voters, 58 percent of Black men said they’d support Vice President Kamala Harris if the election were held today, and 26 percent said they’d vote for Trump—a percentage that would represent record-setting support for a Republican candidate.

Other forms of evidence—shoe-leather reporting, first-person testimony, 16 years of declining Black male support for Democratic presidential candidates, the presence of the Black manosphere—suggest that we are in the midst of a substantial racial realignment. If Democratic candidates have long benefited from Black magic—the near-universal support of African Americans—the spell has been broken for a growing share of Black men. Now Democrats, including the Harris campaign, are trying to figure out how to cast a new one. But the chances of stopping the realignment appear slim, because Black voters are both more culturally conservative and more economically liberal than the current version of the Democratic Party.

[Read: Why do Black people vote for Democrats?]

Lauren Harper Pope, a political and communications strategist, told me politicians need to start thinking of Black men—in contrast to more reliably Democratic Black women—as politically independent. “I’ve been telling people for months: Black men, Hispanic men, minority men are independent voters,” she said. “People need to look past the concept that if you’re a Black man with a college degree, you’re going to vote for a Democrat. No. Absolutely not. I’ve got plenty of Black friends who have college degrees who are from the South, not from the South, whatever, who are genuinely concerned about things the Democratic Party is doing.”

Sharon Wright Austin, a political scientist at the University of Florida, also believes that some level of realignment is happening. “I do think we have to take the polls seriously, because they are showing that Donald Trump is getting more support among Black men,” she told me. “I don’t know if the numbers are going to be as high as the polls indicate. I do think there are going to be some African Americans who are going to vote for Trump because they find him to be a better candidate.” Austin noted that the strength of the economy under Trump, as well as some Black men’s discomfort with Democratic positions on cultural issues such as abortion, trans rights, and immigration, are likely driving some of this defection.

Other political scientists who specialize in Black politics contest the idea that Black voting habits are meaningfully changing. Justin Zimmerman, a political-science professor at the University of Albany, said that the kind of frustration Black men are exhibiting isn’t new. “It’s not so much that there’s no Black political disenchantment with the Democratic Party,” Zimmerman told me. “That’s always been there.” He said that most rankled African Americans will likely hold their nose and vote for a candidate they may not be enthusiastic about, something Black voters have had to do throughout American history.

Christopher Towler, who directs the Black Voter Project and is a partner at Black Insights Research, also dismissed the notion that African Americans are undergoing a meaningful transition away from the Democratic Party. He argues that polls frequently rely on small sample sizes of Black voters, which makes getting a representative cross-section of the Black community impossible.

“You have a sample that has [18 to19] percent support for Trump, but it has a nine-point margin of error,” Towler told me. “That means it could be as low as 10 or as high as 27 percent. That tells us absolutely nothing.”

Although this point about sample size is reasonable and was echoed by other political scientists I interviewed, it fails to explain why those sample-size errors would lead to polling consistently skewed in one direction. And, more important, it discounts historical trends: Democrats have been bleeding male Black voters for nearly two decades.

Some degree of realignment was probably inevitable, given the widening mismatch between the worldview of many Black men and that of the Democratic Party. Many Black voters are quite conservative, especially culturally, and they may hold views on issues like abortion and gender that are more at home in the Republican Party. In June, the Pew Research Center released what is perhaps the most comprehensive recent survey of American opinions about fraught cultural issues. Conducted when Joe Biden was still the Democrats’ presidential nominee, Pew’s polling illustrates notable contrasts between the views of Black and white supporters of the Democratic candidate. On an array of cultural questions, Black Biden supporters were not simply more conservative than their white peers; they were more conservative than any other demographic group in the Democratic coalition.

Pew found that Black Biden supporters were the least likely to answer questions about immigrants favorably, trailing white supporters by double digits. Similarly, Black Biden voters were about twice as likely to say that “an emphasis on marriage and family makes society better off” compared with their white counterparts. And whereas only 32 percent of white Biden supporters agreed that “gender is determined by a person’s sex assigned at birth,” 64 percent of Black Biden voters said they agreed. Black Biden voters were also much less likely than any other group of Biden voters to say they were comfortable with they/them pronouns. When the questions turned to religion, the differences were even more stark: 35 percent of Black Biden voters said “government should support religious values” and more than half—a higher percentage than among Trump supporters —said “belief in God is needed for morality.” Only 7 and 8 percent of white Biden supporters, respectively, said the same. A different Pew survey from the same period also found that majorities of Black men and Black women agreed that “the government [promotes] birth control and abortion to keep the Black population small.” Again, these polls were not conducted when Harris was the candidate, but there is little reason to believe that cultural attitudes among Black Democrats suddenly changed when she became the nominee.

Since Trump’s rise, Democrats have seemed to assume that if they yell about his racism, misogyny, and authoritarian tendencies enough, African Americans will be scared or shamed into voting for Hillary Clinton, Biden, and now Harris. Eight years ago, the Clinton campaign dropped an ad tying Trump to Ku Klux Klan members; after she lost the election, she warned that Trump supporters wanted to take away the rights of Black Americans. For this year’s presidential race, the Harris campaign has commissioned former President Barack Obama to scold Black men for allegedly being too sexist to vote for the first Black woman president. Harris is hammering messages about fascism, racism, and democracy in the campaign’s final week even though polls have shown that these talking points are among the least popular with voters of all kinds—to say nothing of the fact that Black voters have been moving toward Trump despite nearly a decade of those messages being shouted from a bullhorn.

Democrats seem unwilling to believe that a small but significant portion of Black voters might be willing to overlook Trump’s racism, and are even drawn to aspects of his nationalism, xenophobia, and traditionalism. When Biden won in 2020, many liberal talking heads cheered that “Black voters saved democracy” and heaped praise on Black “superhero women”  as part of an outpouring of awkward gratitude that several Black pundits noted was a little fetishistic and traded in “magical negro tropes.” Some progressives seem to imagine minority voters as mythical beings, electoral angels who radiate light and virtue. In their minds, the Democratic Party is a Marvel movie coalition of Nice Whites and Saintly Blacks and Browns who team up every four years to try to save the country from the Bad Whites: the hodgepodge of unsavory working-class whites and car-dealership-owning whites and Christian-nationalist whites who make up Trump’s coalition. But people of color are people, not saints or saintly monoliths, and the cost of this idealization has been a certain blindness in Democratic circles to the actual, rather than imagined, political landscape within minority communities. And it’s not just African Americans: Other male minority voters are also generally less liberal than white Democrats. Recent polls found that 44 percent of young Latino men back Trump and more than half of Hispanic men support deportations of undocumented immigrants (51 percent) and building the border wall (52 percent). These men are more than twice as likely to say Trump, compared with Biden, helped them personally.

The question, then, is what to do about these growing tensions between the cultural views of Black Americans and other minority voters and those of the Democratic Party. Despite their competing views on realignment, the experts I spoke with largely agreed that Democrats tend to take Black voters for granted, and that the Harris campaign should have started doing targeted outreach to Black voters much sooner. “What Black folks want is an identifiable, explicit agenda,” the political scientist Sekou Franklin told me, one that appeals to their unique needs and interests. He added, “That’s what they’re seeing with LGBTQ+ persons … That’s what they’re seeing with women, so they want the same thing.” Others said that some in the Black community think too much money is going to help foreign countries overseas, while Black Americans—especially Black men—struggle at home. Black Americans are among the least supportive of sending military aid to Ukraine and Israel.

[Daniel K. Williams: Democrats can’t rely on the Black Church anymore]

What Harris has offered to combat these perceptions has been less than inspiring. Trying to court young Black men with policy proposals on crypto, weed legalization, and mentorship programs—the focus of a recent policy rollout—is both confusing and condescending. One ambitious proposal, handing out loans to Black Americans on the basis of race, is very possibly illegal, and thus likely an empty promise. And although Harris has moved to the right explicitly and implicitly on a number of cultural and economic issues, there is approximately zero chance that she can outflank Donald Trump on problems such as immigration, no matter how much she wants to expand the border wall. Anyone whose primary concern is the southern border is almost certainly going to vote for the former president. So if shifting right on cultural and social issues is unlikely to move the needle, what will?

The answer is staring Democrats in the face. If Black voters are perhaps the most culturally conservative wing of the Democratic coalition, they also tend to be among the most progressive on economic issues. A survey this summer found that Black voters are almost twice as likely as other racial demographics to say that “the government should provide more assistance to people in need” and also more likely than any other group to say that Social Security benefits should be expanded. And roughly two-thirds of African Americans say that the government should have a more active hand in solving problems. Another survey found that a majority of African Americans have critical views of the country’s prison system (74 percent), courts (70 percent), policing (68 percent), big businesses (67 percent), economic system (65 percent), and health-care system (51 percent). These are issues that the Democratic Party can credibly claim to be better at addressing than Republicans.

Black voters’ realignment seems less like a sea change than something akin to coastal erosion: a grinding process that can be stopped with concerted collective effort. Democrats cannot out-Republican the Republicans on cultural issues, and it would be a fool’s errand to try. What they can do is spend the final days of the campaign playing to their strengths: loudly championing the kind of bold populist vision that is actually popular with voters, including African Americans.