In the aftermath of the 2024 presidential election, some commentators have argued that Americans don’t believe that the Democratic Party shares their political priorities. According to a large survey we conducted immediately after the election, these critics are onto something. Americans overwhelmingly—but, it turns out, mistakenly—believe that Democrats care more about advancing progressive social issues than widely shared economic ones.

More in Common, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization we work for, asked a representative sample of 5,005 Americans to select the three issues that were most important to them. We then asked them to identify “which issues you think are most important to Democrats,” and the same about Republicans. We used broad category labels rather than asking specifically about, say, “Democratic voters” or “Republican candidates,” to capture general perceptions of each side. Then we compared these perceptions with reality.

Let’s start with reality. We found that Americans have clearly shared a top concern in 2024: the “cost of living/ inflation.” This was the No. 1 most chosen priority within every major demographic group, including men and women; Black, white, Latino, and Asian Americans; Gen Z, Millennial, Gen X, Baby Boomer, and Silent Generation age groups; working-class, middle-class, and upper-class Americans; suburban, urban, and rural Americans; and Democrats, Republicans, and independents. Democratic respondents’ top priorities after inflation (40 percent) were health care and abortion (each at 29 percent), and the economy in general (24 percent). For Republicans, immigration came in second place (47 percent), followed by the economy in general (41 percent).

When it comes to how Republicans’ and Democrats’ priorities were perceived, however, we found a striking disparity: Americans across the political spectrum are much better at assessing what Republicans care about than what Democrats care about.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams: What the left keeps getting wrong]

When asked about Republicans’ priorities, all major groups, including Democrats and independents, correctly identified that either inflation or the economy was among Republicans’ top three priorities.

By contrast, every single demographic group thought Democrats’ top priority was abortion, overestimating the importance of this issue by an average of 20 percentage points. (This included Democrats themselves, suggesting that they are somewhat out of touch even with what their fellow partisans care about.) Meanwhile, respondents underestimated the extent to which Democrats prioritize inflation and the economy, ranking those items fourth and ninth on their list of priorities, respectively.

By far the most notable way that Democrats are misperceived relates to what our survey referred to as “LGBT/ transgender policy.” Although this was not a major priority for Democratic voters in reality—it ranked 14th—our survey respondents listed it as Democrats’ second-highest priority. This effect was especially dramatic among Republicans—56 percent listed the issue among Democrats’ top three priorities, compared with just 8 percent who listed inflation—but nearly every major demographic group made a version of the same mistake.

What explains why Democrats’ priorities were so badly misunderstood while Republicans’ were not? Our research suggests that one reason is the Democratic Party’s relationship with its left wing.

In 2018, More in Common conducted a study called “Hidden Tribes,” in which we identified clusters of like-minded Americans who share certain moral values and views on things such as parenting style. The study grouped them into seven distinct “tribes,” each with a different worldview and way of engaging with politics. It also showed that much of the national political conversation is driven by small, highly vocal camps on each side of the political divide: on the left, a group we called “Progressive Activists”; on the right, a group we called “Devoted Conservatives.”

Because these groups’ voices are heard more frequently in the national discourse, their views tend to be confused for those of their party overall. (Think, for example, of the profusion of social-media posts, op-eds, and news coverage about the idea of defunding or abolishing the police in the summer of 2020—a view that was never widely embraced even by the populations most affected by police violence.) This leads people to think that each party holds more extreme views than it really does. For instance, Democrats think Republicans are more likely than they actually are to deny that “racism is still a problem in America,” and Republicans think Democrats are more likely than they actually are to believe that “most police are bad people.”

Our data, however, suggest that Devoted Conservatives’ priorities are more aligned with those of the average Republican than Progressive Activists’ are with those of the average Democrat. For example, Progressive Activists are half as likely as the average Democrat to prioritize the economy and twice as likely to prioritize climate change. By contrast, the biggest difference between average Republicans and Devoted Conservatives is on the issue of immigration, but the discrepancy is much smaller: Devoted Conservatives rank it first and Republicans rank it second. This asymmetry makes the confusion between parties’ mainstreams and their more radical flanks costlier for Democratic politicians.

The outsize influence of Progressive Activists, however, does not fully account for the mismatch between perception and reality when it comes to Democrats’ views on transgender policy. Our survey found that even Progressive Activists listed the issue as their sixth-most-important priority. So the belief that transgender policy is Democrats’ second-highest priority must have other causes.

[Read: Why Biden’s team thinks Harris lost]

One possibility is that Democratic advocacy groups are prominently pushing ideas that even their own most progressive voters are lukewarm about. Another is that Donald Trump’s campaign successfully linked Kamala Harris’s campaign with controversial transgender-policy stances. In a widely seen attack ad, a 2019 interview clip of Harris explaining her support for publicly funded sex-change surgeries for prisoners, including undocumented immigrants, was punctuated by a voiceover intoning that “Kamala is for they/them; President Trump is for you.” In tests run by Harris’s main super PAC, 2.7 percent of voters shifted toward Trump after being shown the ad—a massive result. The constant reinforcement of the link between Harris and this policy, coupled with Harris’s apparent inability or unwillingness to publicly distance herself from it, likely reinforced Americans’ association of trans issues with Democrats.

If elections are battles of perceptions, our data suggest that this was a battle Democrats lost in 2024. Despite the Harris campaign spending almost half a billion dollars more than the Trump campaign, Trump appears to have been more effective at defining Democrats’ priorities to the American public. Caught between their leftmost flank and their opponents’ attacks, Democrats were unable to convince the American electorate that they shared voters’ concerns. If the party wants to gain ground in future elections, it will need to solve this perception problem.

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We warned you last month to “Throw Out Your Black Plastic Spatula.” In a recent study conducted about consumer products, researchers concluded kitchen utensils had some of the highest levels of flame retardants, which you do not want anywhere near your hot food. After the article was published, its author received reports, possibly exaggerated, of people in Burlington, Vermont, throwing their black plastic spatulas out en masse. You should too.

That article was just the appetizer. This episode of Radio Atlantic is the entire meal, coming to you in time for Thanksgiving. We talk to its author, staff writer Zoë Schlanger, about every other plastic thing in your kitchen: cutting boards, nonstick pans, plastic wrap, slow cookers, sippy cups. Read it before you cook. And prepare to hassle your plastic-loving hosts. Politely.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: Well, it’s Thanksgiving—the day on the American calendar centered most around food, when we gather together to cook for our families and friends. And in this episode, we’re going to talk about our kitchens and the things in them that we should maybe be worrying about.

I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. And this week, we’re here to ruin your Thanksgiving. A little bit. Just kidding. Mostly.

What I’m talking about is an Atlantic story from a few weeks ago that hit a nerve with people.

The headline of that story was, “Throw Out Your Black Plastic Spatula,” and I’m joined in the studio by the author of that story, staff writer Zoë Schlanger, who writes about science and the environment. Hi, Zoë.

Zoë Schlanger: Hi, Hanna.

Rosin: Um, I have a black plastic spatula.

Schlanger: Oh no.

Rosin: I do. I’ve been using it for so many years that I can’t—you know what, Zoë? I have two black plastic spatulas.

Schlanger: Because the first one started melting?

Rosin: (Laughs.) Because the first one just ate into my brain, and I didn’t—

Schlanger: It told you to acquire a second.

Rosin: It told me to acquire a second. Exactly.

So, okay. You said the black plastic utensils are “probably leaching chemicals” into our cooking, and I want to understand why. But I will say that your story opened up a whole bunch of worries besides the spatula that I want to run by you, not just for me, but for a lot of my friends. And I’m sure that happened to you as well.

Schlanger: Oh yes.

Rosin: Yeah. Were a lot of people writing you?

Schlanger: Everyone was texting me. Someone texted me that the entire town of Burlington, Vermont, was throwing their spatulas out the window at the same time.

Rosin: (Laughs.) You know what? I absolutely believe that. That’s an incredible image. Were people texting you like, What about this? And what about that? And what about this other thing?

Schlanger: Absolutely. There’s a lot of discussion about how to tell silicone apart from plastic, whether different color plastic was okay, which, like—spoiler alert—probably not, but black is worse.

Rosin: I feel like what’s going to happen on Thanksgiving—sorry, everyone. Happy Thanksgiving. We really do wish you the best and most peaceful Thanksgiving. People are going to be sneaking into—if they’re not the cooks, they’re going to be sneaking into the kitchen of whoever is cooking and, like, monitoring their kitchen utensils and implements just in case.

Schlanger: I love that.

Rosin: Anyway, it’s better than political arguments, so it’s not so bad.

Okay, let’s start with what you wrote about. Why should I throw out my black plastic spatula? Which by the way, I haven’t done. It’s only because you’re here with me in person in the studio.

Schlanger: So I have to convince you?

Rosin: You have to convince me face-to-face because it sounds like other people you know have thrown theirs out, but I haven’t.

Schlanger: So the reason black plastic spatulas are particularly concerning, and I will caveat this by saying you should really throw out any plastic spatula you have of any color, but black plastic has this particularly noxious place in our product stream because it can’t be fully recycled.

Recycling plants just ignore black plastic. They can’t really see the plastic that’s black, because they use optical sensors. So that means, instead of coming from a clean recycling stream, some black plastic products seem to be made out of dubious recycled products, particularly e-waste—electronic waste—often abroad with very little oversight.

And electronics are imbued, often, with flame retardants. So we’re talking about, like, the black plastic housing on your computer monitor or your cell phone or your keyboard. Those can all have flame retardants in them to keep them from catching fire. And flame retardants are associated with a huge range of health hazards, from cancer, diabetes, thyroid issues.

And then they may end up remolded into implements that are touching your food, which they were never meant to be part of. And then you use those implements with heat and oil, which are all things that encourage these compounds in the plastic to migrate out of the object. And then you just eat a lot more of those gross things.

Rosin: Wow. That was a lot. I’m going to slow that down, so I understand. Okay, there are so many facts I learned there. I just want to make sure I learned them correctly. Black plastic is probably recycled from electronics?

Schlanger: Right. Not all of it is. Certainly there could be new, pure black plastic that is not coming from recycled e-waste, but there’s no way to tell.

Rosin: Now, regular plastic in a recycling facility gets rid of these toxins—is that what happens? Like, it can notice them and get rid of them, but in black plastic it just can’t be treated properly?

Schlanger: No, actually. There’s lots of toxins in all recycled plastic, but we’re mostly just talking about flame retardants here. And in the U.S. and in lots of other places, there are laws against or rules against combining electronic waste with the general-consumer recycling flow. So really, these flame retardants are never supposed to get into your consumer products, but they are.

Rosin: Okay, so that’s the black plastic. It can have flame retardants in it. It might come from e-waste. What about gray, white, red—all the other color spatulas? I do have two black ones and one gray one. So what about those?

Schlanger: Why plastic, though? It’s just, it’s—well, first of all, from a purely utilitarian perspective, plastic’s just a terrible thing to use when you’re dealing with a hot pan.

I mean, the thing melts. It’s just not a very durable product. But plastic of all colors probably has stuff in it that you don’t really want interacting with your food. I mean, at the very bottom of this long list is microplastics. If you have a piece of plastic that you’re using regularly in the kitchen, it’s sloughing off microplastics into your food.

Rosin: No matter what? This is nothing to do with heat. It’s just giving off little flakes?

Schlanger: It’s, like, use.

Rosin: Dandruff—just like plastic dandruff is coming off.

Schlanger: (Laughs.) Exactly like dandruff. I mean, one thing I also noticed in people’s kitchens is how common a plastic cutting board is. And that’s just you slicing chunks of plastic into your tomatoes every single time. And I get why people have it. It’s easier to make it sanitary, and they wash quite well. But it’s just not worth it. You can use anything else.

The other problem with most plastics is that there are other molecules in that material—in that base polymer—that are added there to make the plastic flexible or make it really thin, and those things are broadly called “plasticizers.”

They include things you might have heard of, like phthalates, that have also been associated with lots of harmful health outcomes. Basically, there’s no good plastic, particularly not in your kitchen.

Rosin: Okay, so no cutting boards. I’m not going to give you “no good plastics” yet. I have to go through it a little slowly. What about storage containers? Like, I have just a million plastic storage containers.

Schlanger: Can you tell me more about them? Are they hard and sturdy, or are they like what you got your takeout in, like, seven months ago, and you’re still using them?

Rosin: Both? (Laughs.) Both. I have a couple of these very hard ones with the click-in tops, but then those get lost because those are the most used. So they end up in my kid’s backpack, and they end up at school. And so then we just revert to the 3,000 takeout containers that we have sitting around.

I can already see—I already feel bad. Okay. What’s coming?

Schlanger: I mean, I get it. It’s like, there’s so much convenience to this. So typically, my understanding is—one rule of thumb is that harder, sturdier plastic is maybe shedding fewer phthalates than the very flexible ones, but they could be shedding other compounds of concern.

And the thing about containers is that if you’re putting something in that container that is fatty—if it has an oil, an animal fat, anything like that—lipids encourage these compounds to migrate out of the plastic and into the food. These plasticizers I was talking about are lipophilic, meaning they easily transfer when in contact with fats. So we’re often putting our leftovers in these bins, and, almost always, those have some kind of fat. And then it also depends if you’re heating things in that plastic. Heat is something that degrades plastic quite readily.

(Laughs.) I see you smirking and—

Rosin: —I am going to confess something now. This is what I think happens to most of us: We know, and we don’t know. So we sort of know what you said, and then it goes into a short-term memory hole.

So what I know and don’t know is that my son loves leftovers. He loves leftovers. Like, he’ll take it over anything for lunch the next day. Of course he microwaves it. Like, of course he puts it in the takeout container, takes it to school, and then microwaves it. That’s like a perfect storm, right?

Schlanger: Yeah. It’s not the best. It’s great that he is eating leftovers. We don’t like food waste either.

Rosin: Right. Right.

Schlanger: Yeah. Microwaving plastic is one of those ones that I just don’t do anymore.

So heat degrades plastic. Cold—my understanding is that cold actually makes plastic a bit more chemically stable, at least in the short term. But then, I have seen at least one paper that found that the cycle of heating and freezing, if you use the same container to do both many times, will also enhance degradation and also enhance those plasticizers leaching out.

And that was a study that was looking at, actually, farmers. They put these big plastic tarps over their fields to suppress weeds, and those get heated and frozen over and over again. So I assume you could apply that to consumer plastic goods too. It’s all polymers. It’s all the same base material, but that was done in farm fields.

Rosin: Interesting. So is where we’ve landed with plastic, no plastic at all? Or, Use the hardest plastic you can find? Like, what about those very sturdy plastic containers, or are we just going for Pyrex glass?

Schlanger: I have now transitioned entirely to glass in my own kitchen. And I think that that’s more of a risk-tolerance thing. We all do things that will slowly kill us, and it’s sort of choosing which things those are. I mean, we’re bombarded by problematic compounds in every aspect of our life, and you cannot eliminate them all. So if you want to use your sturdy plastic containers to store fat-neutral things, like crackers, that’s probably fine.

Rosin: I think what you’re saying is that I should send my son to school with his leftovers in a glass Pyrex container.

Schlanger: Yeah. It’s heavier, which is a pain, but I’m saying yes, definitely.

Rosin: You’re saying yes.

Schlanger: And I don’t know how old your kids are, but some of these things matter a lot for children, because one of the big concerns about plastic additives getting into our bodies is that they mimic estrogen and can have endocrine-disrupting properties, meaning they mess with your hormone system.

And for a developing hormone system in a child, that’s especially crucial. It’s also crucial for pregnant people or people of childbearing age. So there’s different moments when it’s really critical to avoid this stuff.

Rosin: Okay, so we have to throw out those plastics. We do have to cook, though. We’re back preparing the Thanksgiving meal. What is a substitute for the plastic spatula? What kind of spatulas do you have?

Schlanger: I have silicone spatulas—they’re great—wooden spatulas, and stainless-steel spatulas.

Rosin: Interesting. I just got my first wooden spatula. My friend’s mother, who lives in Norway, gave it to me, and it was made by hand by her neighbor on the farm. And I don’t understand why I’ve never used a wood spatula before. It’s fantastic. Like, it’s so good.

Schlanger: It’s a great material. I think people hate that you can’t really put them in the dishwasher, but you just rinse it off. No big deal.

Rosin: Yeah. Okay. So silicone. Is silicone always okay? What is silicone?

Schlanger: Silicone, to my understanding, is made out of a number of things, but notably silica, which is essentially sand, which is the same thing that glass is made out of.

So as far as we know now, silicone is inert. It’s considered not reactive with food or with body material, with fat, or anything like that. So I think all signs right now point to silicone being a very good choice. I know that at very high temperatures, I think if you’re baking at above 400 or 500 degrees, silicone can emit a gas of some kind that might be a problem, but if you have to bake in something that isn’t stainless steel or ceramic or cast iron, that’s not the worst thing in the world. I’m pro-silicone for now. I mean, maybe we’ll learn something else later.

[Music]

Rosin: When we return, Zoë and I keep going through the kitchen list, from sippy cups to gas stoves.

[Break]

Rosin: All right. So no plastic spatulas. Sort of no plastic storage containers. I asked people on Instagram—I posted your article, and I asked people on Instagram, and I got a lot of questions from people about other things in their kitchen. So can I run them by you?

Schlanger: Please.

Rosin: Okay. No. 1: sippy cups. They’re always labeled as BPA-free plastic. I remember that. Even when I had little kids, everything was BPA-free. Does that make a difference?

Schlanger: In a way, it does. BPA was researched intensively. We know it’s bad, and so everyone’s trying to avoid making things with it. But then what companies went and did was create a bunch of alternatives to BPA, which at least some research finds is not any better than the BPA. The way that chemicals are regulated in this country is: No one has to really prove they’re safe before they go in the market.

And so we have a trickle of information coming out that suggests that the replacements aren’t any better. I would say no to plastic sippy cups.

Rosin: Whoa. Whoa. You said it, though. Okay. Just to be very accurate about this, you said “a trickle of information.”

So there was a kind of panic about BPA. People created replacements for BPA. But we just don’t know yet if they’re better, and the early signs are that they may not be. Is that a fair summary?

Schlanger: Exactly. There was this moment in, like, 2015, 2016 when there was a smattering of studies coming out highlighting the BPA replacements and looking at their potential toxicity and finding that they might just be as endocrine disrupting as BPA was. So the thing with BPA is that it mimics estrogen in the body, which is not something you want to keep adding through your diet.

And it’s associated with all kinds of issues—thyroid issues, fertility issues. And researchers on these few studies I saw back then found that the replacements were as estrogenic or more so.

Rosin: Wow. Okay. I really want to Google, What is a safe sippy cup? But instead, I’m going to ask you. Do you know what a safe sippy cup is?

Schlanger: I was actually talking to this pediatrician about this for a story, and she was talking about how the rest of the world gives their kids things in stainless-steel containers. Like, it’s just, you know—you don’t have plastic plates for kids. You just have stainless-steel ones that they can throw on the floor.

And I know they make stainless-steel ones with, like, the silicone sippy tops and stuff for kids now.

Rosin: It’s interesting. I think we think of stainless steel as something—like metallic. There’s something that we resist about stainless steel, like it’s going to taste different or something. But you’re saying it’s safer.

Schlanger: Oh yeah.

Rosin: Yeah. Okay. “Oh yeah,” you say. That means it’s definitely safer. (Laughs.)

Okay. Another one that people ask me a lot about—a lot, actually—were the black plastic lids on coffee cups.

Schlanger: This just occurred to me recently. I mean, yeah. Presumably, if it’s black plastic, there is a chance it came from that material stream of recycled e-waste. And the last thing you want is scalding hot, foamy, creamy coffee passing through a little black plastic hole into your mouth. It’s not ideal. So I actually just got coffee right before this and did not take a lid.

Rosin: Yes, this is absolutely true: Someone sent me that request on Instagram—Please ask Zoë about black plastic coffee lids—almost at the instant that the barista in the place that I was put the black plastic coffee lid on top of my coffee, and I had the same reaction you did. I was like: Of course! And just flipped it right off again.

Schlanger: (Laughs.)

Rosin: Oh boy. Okay. So No. 2 on Instagram that people asked a ton about—I bet you can guess: nonstick cookware.

Schlanger: Mm-hmm.

Rosin: So many questions about nonstick cookware. Are there different kinds? Do I throw it out the second it has a scratch on it? Like: What do I do about nonstick cookware?

I think there’s a whole bunch of sort of short-term memory-hole feelings about it. Like, Ah, I kind of read this thing. But then, I like my pan, so I forgot about it.

Schlanger: Yeah. So I’d start by saying that the issue with nonstick—Teflon is one brand name for this, but there’s a bunch of them—nonstick pans are coated in a class of chemicals called PFAS. And these are also coating things like our raincoats, our hiking boots. Just anything that is nonstick is basically made out of these compounds that we’ve now found are very bad for our health in high concentrations.

So the people who are really affected by this are the ones living near a plant that made PFAS, and now their water supply has been contaminated for 30 years, or people who live near an Army base where they are using a lot of firefighting foam, which is full of PFAS. But then you zoom in on people using individual products, and it becomes a little hazier.

We do know that the PFAS in your pan becomes unstable at high temperatures. So there’s lots of warnings on these things that you’re not really supposed to use them to cook at, you know, temperatures higher than 400 or 500 degrees.

But who doesn’t accidentally leave their pan on the stove sometimes and scorch it, and then it smells terrible? You’re breathing in fumes from PFAS, most likely. You mentioned scratched coatings. It’s super easy to scratch. Actually, the No. 1 response to the “Throw Out Your Black Plastic Spatula”—when I was like, Just get stainless-steel ones—people were like, But it’ll scratch my nonstick pan. And just, my response to that is: Throw out your nonstick pan.

But we can’t necessarily ask everyone to do that. I get that. It’s so convenient to make an egg in a nonstick pan. I haven’t done it in years, but I hear it’s great.

Rosin: (Laughs.) That was amazing, Zoë. That was a great judge-but-not-judge.

Schlanger: (Laughs.) I don’t mean to sound judgy, but honestly, cast iron is just so much better.

Rosin: I’ve recently come to that conclusion. I noticed that my first reach for everything, including an egg these days, is my cast-iron skillet. So I’m like, Why don’t I just get a few more of those and call it a day, you know?

Schlanger: Yeah.

Rosin: So you do not use nonstick pans?

Schlanger: So I grew up in a house with a parrot when I was young, and bird owners know that cooking with nonstick pans could result in the death of your bird, so I just grew up not having them around.

Rosin: Why?

Schlanger: I think it’s because the gas volatilizes. PFAS, the nonstick compound, its fumes get in the air, and birds are much more sensitive than humans, like all small animals.

Rosin: This is a literal canary in a coal mine.

Schlanger: Yeah, it’s kind of like that.

Rosin: I feel like that image, more than anything you’re gonna say, is gonna convince people: If they had a bird, that bird would be dead. So these are real.

Schlanger: I mean, yeah. I feel like it’s the kind of thing with, like, dogs and chocolates. Like, they won’t die every time. But there was a chance, so we didn’t have it in the house. But there was never a discussion about it being bad for human health. It was just like, No, you have a pet bird. You can’t have nonstick.

Rosin: Wow. Okay. So no nonstick pans. Another one that came up, and this is specifically related to Thanksgiving: marinating things in plastic. Like, it is something that people do. It’s something that people do on Thanksgiving. Is that a problem?

Schlanger: I wouldn’t do it. My understanding is that—I was thinking about, like, sous vide bags too, you know?

Rosin: Yeah, like brining turkeys or sous vide bags. There’s a whole bunch of ways that meat and plastic have to do with each other.

Schlanger: It would violate my personal rule about, like, putting fatty things next to plastic, because I just know the chemistry of that means it encourages migration of compounds out of the plastic and into your food.

But my understanding is that the bags specifically designed for this are considered food grade and often can be labeled “phthalate-free” now. So there is knowledge about this in the consumer market enough for companies to make things that are less harmful. That’s not to say they’re not potentially problematic.

I mean, the way I think about this is: Everything could affect you negatively a little bit. And we are so bombarded by problematic things in our everyday life getting into our bodies, and you just want to lower your dose. So it’s kind of choosing how to lower your dose.

It’s not that your turkey bag is going to kill you. It’s that you’re just adding a little extra, and you don’t need to.

Rosin: Right. So if you needed to brine something, and you put it in, say, a glass bowl with plastic wrap on it, is it just that—oh God.

Schlanger: (Laughs.)

Rosin: Okay, so no to that, just because the plastic wrap would touch it. So in fact, you should just use tinfoil, is what you’re saying.

Schlanger: Mm-hmm. Or you just put a plate over it. Like, you don’t even need all this stuff. You know, plastic wrap’s gone through all these iterations. It used to be made out of much more harmful stuff, and then they eliminated some of it. I just avoid it.

Rosin: Really? You have no plastic wrap?

Schlanger: No.

Rosin: So you’re making a cake. What do you put over it? You just put a cake topper?

Schlanger: A bowl.

Rosin: You put a bowl or a cake topper? Okay. I’m trying to think of any other use I have for plastic wrap, particularly on Thanksgiving.

Schlanger: I wrap—you know, you get cheese, and you have to wrap it in something, so it doesn’t go bad immediately. I have—this is going to make me sound so crunchy—but I have those beeswax wraps. It’s like cloth waxed in beeswax, and that’s what people—people used to just use wax paper for everything. You can just do that.

Rosin: And you can reuse that, so that’s good. Okay.

I’m already imagining some of the people listening to this podcast walking into the kitchen of their parents and friends and causing all kinds of trouble. And this one is real trouble, but I’m going to ask you anyway, because a couple of people asked me about it: natural-gas stove.

So like, hassling your friends or parents about their natural-gas stove would be, like, a really, really low move. But I’m going to ask you anyway. There’s just so much talk about this. It was a big deal, like, a year ago. What about it?

Schlanger: So we know it’s not great to be in a home with a natural-gas stove. We know that it is associated with higher rates of child asthma, just breathing problems in general. You’re inhaling things like benzene. That said, many people have them. I have one. I’m a renter in New York. There’s no way I’m not going to have a gas stove. I can’t ask my landlord to buy a beautiful induction stove for me.

But one thing that makes a big difference is using your overhead vent, just gently turning on your family’s overhead vent while they’re cooking can actually take a lot of the problematic compounds out of the air.

Rosin: Oh really?

Schlanger: Yeah.

Rosin: Okay.

Schlanger: It’s not totally a fail-safe. It doesn’t get it all out. It would be nice if we all had induction stoves. But I also get, it does sometimes feel good to cook over fire.

Rosin: Yeah. One day I will make the transition, but I’m so used to seeing the fire. But I understand.

Schlanger: I will say that that is a really elaborate PR job by the natural-gas industry too. Do you remember this? There was this moment when they were, like, hiring Instagram influencers to promote gas stoves and things like that.

Rosin: Because it’s one of those things that seems good and natural but is the exact opposite. Like, it looks like the thing that you should be cooking things on, but in fact, it’s the unnatural option.

Schlanger: Exactly.

Rosin: Yeah, that was pretty good. Okay. So what else are we missing for Thanksgiving that we don’t know about? One just came to me: parchment paper. I bake a lot with parchment paper.

Schlanger: As do I. And I only recently learned that some parchment paper is coated in PFAS. That’s what makes it nonstick. So you actually want to check. And I recently got parchment paper that’s coated in silicone instead and is nice and nonstick because of that, and it doesn’t cost any more.

Rosin: Oh really? You have to look online and see what it’s coated with. Interesting.

Anything else we’ve forgotten about the Thanksgiving dinner? Let’s just do a tour. So you walk into an average kitchen. There are containers with plastic wrap on them. We’ve already covered that. There are things that have been cooked with nonstick pans. We’ve already covered that. There are deadly spatulas. We’ve covered that. (Laughs.)

Schlanger: (Laughs.)

Rosin: Anything else that we are forgetting for a typical Thanksgiving meal that could kill you?

Schlanger: Right. None of this is going to kill you, but I recently went down the rabbit hole of trying to buy a slow cooker and pressure cooker, and I really wanted to get an Instant Pot. And then I went online and looked at their disclosures on the website, and it turns out those can contain PFAS. I was really surprised by that because the basin of an Instant Pot is just a stainless-steel bowl, but my assumption is there’s something in the lid that is in the food-contact surface that is also PFAS.

So just basically, many, many other kitchen appliances are coated in a nonstick layer of PFAS. I also tried to buy a toaster oven, like, for the counter, so I wouldn’t have to turn on my gas oven every single time I wanted to bake something, and a lot of those—the entire interior is just coated in PFAS.

Rosin: Interesting. So how do you figure—so your rule is: Very much limit plastics to almost no plastics, and definitely no PFAS.

Schlanger: Yeah.

Rosin: And how do you know if something has PFAS? Like, I wouldn’t have guessed about an Instant Pot, which I do have, or about a toaster oven, which I don’t have. But I wouldn’t have guessed about either of those.

Schlanger: They put it on their website. If you look in, like, the Materials and Care section of most of these things, it’ll let you know.

Rosin: Okay. So maybe now that we have—would you say, is there any way to say that we haven’t ruined people’s Thanksgivings? Like, no. We’ve made them less stress-free? Possible? Depends when they listen to this?

Schlanger: Well, it’s so important to remember: Stress is also a major health hazard, so I don’t want anyone to get super stressed out about this or blow it out of proportion. You’re not going to die because of any of this, but you are just accumulating things you don’t need in your body.

Rosin: Your kitchen is just slightly less stress for you. Like, you look around your kitchen, and because you’re attuned to microplastics, you just don’t see them everywhere. So in fact, for you, it’s less stress.

Schlanger: Yeah. I walk around all day. There’s so many inputs to my body I can’t control. But at least I can control the ones in my kitchen.

Rosin: Right. Your kitchen is a little sphere of control. I actually really like that idea.

Now, I’m having a Friendsgiving this year, and I am now actually gonna drive to my friend’s house who does most of the cooking and “evacuate” the dangerous utensils from his kitchen.

Schlanger: (Laughs.) I hope he thanks you and doesn’t get really pissed off. That could go either way.

Rosin: (Laughs.) As I fling away all his spatulas.

Schlanger: Are you going to bring him replacements?

Rosin: I guess you’re right. If I throw away all his spatulas, before I do that, I have to bring him silicone replacements for sure.

Schlanger: That seems only reasonable. I will say, you know, on other Thanksgivings, my two sides of my family have very different ideas about all this. So there is, like, one home I’d go into where basically everything is, you know, natural products and the other side where everything would be microwaved in plastic.

Rosin: Wow. So how do you handle that situation?

Schlanger: You just mostly have to live and let live. It’s like, also, you know, if I’m their daughter, and they’re not reading my articles, there’s not much I’m going to do, you know?

Rosin: (Laughs.) Right. I didn’t realize that was your actual parents. That’s funny. Yeah, I suppose the last thing we should do is give advice to people who walk into a kitchen, and everything has been, you know, baked in the microwave in plastic containers.

Schlanger: You just eat that meal, and go back to your own kitchen, and think about your own choices. I mean, okay, this is all to say: You eat in restaurants all the time. Restaurants are using plastic constantly. It’s really just like, you lower your own dose when you can.

Rosin: Yes. I think that’s what it comes down to. It’s not about policing everybody’s plastics and everything you put in your body. It’s about controlling what you can. And your own tiny or big or however size your kitchen is, that is a sphere you can control, so you might as well do that. And that’s a lovely thing. And everything outside of that, don’t worry about it.

Schlanger: I think so. I think that’s the moral here.

Rosin: Okay. Excellent. Thank you, Zoë.

Schlanger: Thank you.

Rosin: Happy Thanksgiving.

Schlanger: Happy Thanksgiving.

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Kevin Townsend. It was edited by Claudine Ebeid, fact-checked by Will Gordon, and engineered by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I’m Hanna Rosin.

Happy Thanksgiving. Enjoy the turkey. Enjoy the mashed potatoes. Enjoy the stuffing. And enjoy all the plastic you’re eating.

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present, surface delightful treasures, and examine the American idea.

I love a good bean: tossed with vinaigrette in a salad, spooned over pasta, served on a plate with rice and corn. The bean is a powerful little food, all the more for its shapeshifting capacities. Many people can appreciate that these legumes are cheap and healthy, but they still fall short of widespread adoration or even respect.

Yet, over the decades, Atlantic writers have turned to the bean’s revolutionary potential again and again. The humble bean, small, unglamorous, packed with protein, has been a source of inspiration for those seeking to remake the food system, fight climate change, and add some better flavors into American homes. In a 1975 article loftily titled “A Bean to Feed the World?” the historian Richard Rhodes made the case for centering the soybean in the American diet. “We continue to sing of amber waves of grain, not dusty pods of beans,” he bemoans in the opening line.

Noting that the soybean was, at the time, the No. 1 cash crop in the country, Rhodes argues that Americans should be eating it as a source of protein on its own, rather than feeding it to the farm animals that then became dinner. “Conversion of soybeans to food for humans is worth looking at,” he writes. (The soybean, a cousin of the lentil and black bean, has about 30 grams of protein per cup.) Alas, soybeans remain primarily the provenance of livestock today, with the exception of the small percentage used to make popular foods such as tofu.

In 2017, James Hamblin made the urgent climate case for replacing beef with legumes in Americans’ diets, given that cows are among the top agricultural sources of greenhouse gasses worldwide and take up great swaths of arable land. Hamblin explained that by swapping beans for beef, the U.S. could “achieve somewhere between 46 and 74 percent of the reductions needed” to meet the 2020 greenhouse-gas-emission goals set out by President Barack Obama in 2009. (Americans have not wholesale rejected beef in favor of beans, but, in large part because the pandemic slowed travel and economic activity, we did end up meeting those climate goals.)

Part of the problem with beans is that they are not that attractive a food. In a 1992 article, the food writer Corby Kummer acknowledges the “insipid” nature of beans before walking readers through some ways to prepare tasty—and easily digestible—bean-based dishes. But for the horticultural writer Richardson Wright, the bean’s humility is what makes it heroic. During World War II, he wrote that “the coincidence of Saturday night and baked beans was of divine provenance, and with the ardor of the freshly converted, I insisted that we practice.” In a time of loss, a pot of beans—which he calls “farinaceous catechumens,” likening them to starchy bodies readied for baptism—can mean everything. The quasi-religious tone of his Proustian meditation on beans is moving; still, his dietary choice was borne out of desperation and limited rations.

The image of beans as a backup when you don’t have, or can’t afford, anything better has proven hard to shake. Even as vegetarian diets are on the rise and Americans recognize the environmental impact of beef, eating meat remains an intractable part of American life. For all the trendiness of brothy beans and Rancho Gordo subscriptions in recent years, many Americans still haven’t made legumes central to their diets. One estimate found that, as of 2019, the average American ate approximately 55 pounds of chicken a year compared with roughly 2.5 pounds of cooked black beans (American bean consumption is low compared to many other countries). Still, there are reasons to hope: Americans have embraced hummus, which is made of chickpeas. Chic New York restaurants are serving bean-based dishes. And a climate campaign with ties to the United Nations is pushing to double global bean consumption by 2028. Though the bean may not be the flashiest ingredient, it is persistent—and it may even shape a better world in its image.

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For anyone who teaches at a business school, the blog post was bad news. For Juliana Schroeder, it was catastrophic. She saw the allegations when they first went up, on a Saturday in early summer 2023. Schroeder teaches management and psychology at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. One of her colleagues—­­a star professor at Harvard Business School named Francesca Gino—­had just been accused of academic fraud. The authors of the blog post, a small team of business-school researchers, had found discrepancies in four of Gino’s published papers, and they suggested that the scandal was much larger. “We believe that many more Gino-authored papers contain fake data,” the blog post said. “Perhaps dozens.”

The story was soon picked up by the mainstream press. Reporters reveled in the irony that Gino, who had made her name as an expert on the psychology of breaking rules, may herself have broken them. (“Harvard Scholar Who Studies Honesty Is Accused of Fabricating Findings,” a New York Times headline read.) Harvard Business School had quietly placed Gino on administrative leave just before the blog post appeared. The school had conducted its own investigation; its nearly 1,300-page internal report, which was made public only in the course of related legal proceedings, concluded that Gino “committed research misconduct intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly” in the four papers. (Gino has steadfastly denied any wrongdoing.)

Schroeder’s interest in the scandal was more personal. Gino was one of her most consistent and important research partners. Their names appear together on seven peer-reviewed articles, as well as 26 conference talks. If Gino were indeed a serial cheat, then all of that shared work—and a large swath of Schroeder’s CV—was now at risk. When a senior academic is accused of fraud, the reputations of her honest, less established colleagues may get dragged down too. “Just think how horrible it is,” Katy Milkman, another of Gino’s research partners and a tenured professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, told me. “It could ruin your life.”

Juliana Schroeder (LinkedIn)

To head that off, Schroeder began her own audit of all the research papers that she’d ever done with Gino, seeking out raw data from each experiment and attempting to rerun the analyses. As that summer progressed, her efforts grew more ambitious. With the help of several colleagues, Schroeder pursued a plan to verify not just her own work with Gino, but a major portion of Gino’s scientific résumé. The group started reaching out to every other researcher who had put their name on one of Gino’s 138 co-authored studies. The Many Co-Authors Project, as the self-audit would be called, aimed to flag any additional work that might be tainted by allegations of misconduct and, more important, to absolve the rest—and Gino’s colleagues, by extension—of the wariness that now afflicted the entire field.

That field was not tucked away in some sleepy corner of academia, but was instead a highly influential one devoted to the science of success. Perhaps you’ve heard that procrastination makes you more creative, or that you’re better off having fewer choices, or that you can buy happiness by giving things away. All of that is research done by Schroeder’s peers—­business-school professors who apply the methods of behavioral research to such subjects as marketing, management, and decision making. In viral TED Talks and airport best sellers, on morning shows and late-night television, these business-school psychologists hold tremendous sway. They also have a presence in this magazine and many others: Nearly every business academic who is named in this story has been either quoted or cited by The Atlantic on multiple occasions. A few, including Gino, have written articles for The Atlantic themselves.

Francesca Gino (LinkedIn)

Business-school psychologists are scholars, but they aren’t shooting for a Nobel Prize. Their research doesn’t typically aim to solve a social problem; it won’t be curing anyone’s disease. It doesn’t even seem to have much influence on business practices, and it certainly hasn’t shaped the nation’s commerce. Still, its flashy findings come with clear rewards: consulting gigs and speakers’ fees, not to mention lavish academic incomes. Starting salaries at business schools can be $240,000 a year—double what they are at campus psychology departments, academics told me.

The research scandal that has engulfed this field goes far beyond the replication crisis that has plagued psychology and other disciplines in recent years. Long-standing flaws in how scientific work is done—including insufficient sample sizes and the sloppy application of statistics—have left large segments of the research literature in doubt. Many avenues of study once deemed promising turned out to be dead ends. But it’s one thing to understand that scientists have been cutting corners. It’s quite another to suspect that they’ve been creating their results from scratch.

[Read: Psychology’s replication crisis has a silver lining]

Schroeder has long been interested in trust. She’s given lectures on “building trust-based relationships”; she’s run experiments measuring trust in colleagues. Now she was working to rebuild the sense of trust within her field. A lot of scholars were involved in the Many Co-Authors Project, but Schroeder’s dedication was singular. In October 2023, a former graduate student who had helped tip off the team of bloggers to Gino’s possible fraud wrote her own “post mortem” on the case. It paints Schroeder as exceptional among her peers: a professor who “sent a clear signal to the scientific community that she is taking this scandal seriously.” Several others echoed this assessment, saying that ever since the news broke, Schroeder has been relentless—heroic, even—in her efforts to correct the record.

But if Schroeder planned to extinguish any doubts that remained, she may have aimed too high. More than a year since all of this began, the evidence of fraud has only multiplied. The rot in business schools runs much deeper than almost anyone had guessed, and the blame is unnervingly widespread. In the end, even Schroeder would become a suspect.

Gino was accused of faking numbers in four published papers. Just days into her digging, Schroeder uncovered another paper that appeared to be affected—and it was one that she herself had helped write.

The work, titled “Don’t Stop Believing: Rituals Improve Performance by Decreasing Anxiety,” was published in 2016, with Schroeder’s name listed second out of seven authors. Gino’s name was fourth. (The first few names on an academic paper are typically arranged in order of their contributions to the finished work.) The research it described was pretty standard for the field: a set of clever studies demonstrating the value of a life hack—one simple trick to nail your next presentation. The authors had tested the idea that simply following a routine—even one as arbitrary as drawing something on a piece of paper, sprinkling salt over it, and crumpling it up—could help calm a person’s nerves. “Although some may dismiss rituals as irrational,” the authors wrote, “those who enact rituals may well outperform the skeptics who forgo them.”

In truth, the skeptics have never had much purchase in business-school psychology. For the better part of a decade, this finding had been garnering citations—­about 200, per Google Scholar. But when Schroeder looked more closely at the work, she realized it was questionable. In October 2023, she sketched out some of her concerns on the Many Co-Authors Project website.

The paper’s first two key experiments, marked in the text as Studies 1a and 1b, looked at how the salt-and-paper ritual might help students sing a karaoke version of Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’ ” in a lab setting. According to the paper, Study 1a found that people who did the ritual before they sang reported feeling much less anxious than people who did not; Study 1b confirmed that they had lower heart rates, as measured with a pulse oximeter, than students who did not.

As Schroeder noted in her October post, the original records of these studies could not be found. But Schroeder did have some data spreadsheets for Studies 1a and 1b—she’d posted them shortly after the paper had been published, along with versions of the studies’ research questionnaires—and she now wrote that “unexplained issues were identified” in both, and that there was “uncertainty regarding the data provenance” for the latter. Schroeder’s post did not elaborate, but anyone can look at the spreadsheets, and it doesn’t take a forensic expert to see that the numbers they report are seriously amiss.

The “unexplained issues” with Studies 1a and 1b are legion. For one thing, the figures as reported don’t appear to match the research as described in other public documents. (For example, where the posted research questionnaire instructs the students to assess their level of anxiety on a five-point scale, the results seem to run from 2 to 8.) But the single most suspicious pattern shows up in the heart-rate data. According to the paper, each student had their pulse measured three times: once at the very start, again after they were told they’d have to sing the karaoke song, and then a third time, right before the song began. I created three graphs to illustrate the data’s peculiarities. They depict the measured heart rates for each of the 167 students who are said to have participated in the experiment, presented from left to right in their numbered order on the spreadsheet. The blue and green lines, which depict the first and second heart-rate measurements, show those values fluctuating more or less as one might expect for a noisy signal, measured from lots of individuals. But the red line doesn’t look like this at all: Rather, the measured heart rates form a series going up, across a run of more than 100 consecutive students.

DATA FROM “DON’T STOP BELIEVING: RITUALS IMPROVE PERFORMANCE BY DECREASING ANXIETY” (2016), STUDY 1B (Charts by The Atlantic. Based on data posted to OSF.io.)

I’ve reviewed the case with several researchers who suggested that this tidy run of values is indicative of fraud. “I see absolutely no reason” the sequence in No. 3 “should have the order that it does,” James Heathers, a scientific-­integrity investigator and an occasional Atlantic contributor, told me. The exact meaning of the pattern is unclear; if you were fabricating data, you certainly wouldn’t strive for them to look like this. Nick Brown, a scientific-integrity researcher affiliated with Linnaeus University Sweden, guessed that the ordered values in the spreadsheet may have been cooked up after the fact. In that case, it might have been less important that they formed a natural-­looking plot than that, when analyzed together, they matched fake statistics that had already been reported. “Someone sat down and burned quite a bit of midnight oil,” he proposed. I asked how sure he was that this pattern of results was the product of deliberate tampering; “100 percent, 100 percent,” he told me. “In my view, there is no innocent explanation in a universe where fairies don’t exist.”

Schroeder herself would come to a similar conclusion. Months later, I asked her whether the data were manipulated. “I think it’s very likely that they were,” she said. In the summer of 2023, when she reported the findings of her audit to her fellow authors, they all agreed that, whatever really happened, the work was compromised and ought to be retracted. But they could not reach consensus on who had been at fault. Gino did not appear to be responsible for either of the paper’s karaoke studies. Then who was?

This would not seem to be a tricky question. The published version of the paper has two lead authors who are listed as having “contributed equally” to the work. One of them was Schroeder. All of the co-authors agree that she handled two experiments—labeled in the text as Studies 3 and 4—in which participants solved a set of math problems. The other main contributor was Alison Wood Brooks, a young professor and colleague of Gino’s at Harvard Business School.

From the start, there was every reason to assume that Brooks had run the studies that produced the fishy data. Certainly they are similar to Brooks’s prior work. The same quirky experimental setup—in which students were asked to wear a pulse oximeter and sing a karaoke version of “Don’t Stop Believin’ ”—­appears in her dissertation from the Wharton School in 2013, and she published a portion of that work in a sole-authored paper the following year. (Brooks herself is musically inclined, performing around Boston in a rock band.)

Yet despite all of this, Brooks told the Many Co-Authors Project that she simply wasn’t sure whether she’d had access to the raw data for Study 1b, the one with the “no innocent explanation” pattern of results. She also said she didn’t know whether Gino played a role in collecting them. On the latter point, Brooks’s former Ph.D. adviser, Maurice Schweitzer, expressed the same uncertainty to the Many Co-Authors Project.

Plenty of evidence now suggests that this mystery was manufactured. The posted materials for Study 1b, along with administrative records from the lab, indicate that the work was carried out at Wharton, where Brooks was in grad school at the time, studying under Schweitzer and running another, very similar experiment. Also, the metadata for the oldest public version of the data spreadsheet lists “Alison Wood Brooks” as the last person who saved the file.

Alison Wood Brooks (LinkedIn)

Brooks, who has published research on the value of apologies, and whose first book—Talk: The Science of Conversation and the Art of Being Ourselves—is due out from Crown in January, did not respond to multiple requests for interviews or to a detailed list of written questions. Gino said that she “neither collected nor analyzed the data for Study 1a or Study 1b nor was I involved in the data audit.”

If Brooks did conduct this work and oversee its data, then Schroeder’s audit had produced a dire twist. The Many Co-Authors Project was meant to suss out Gino’s suspect work, and quarantine it from the rest. “The goal was to protect the innocent victims, and to find out what’s true about the science that had been done,” Milkman told me. But now, to all appearances, Schroeder had uncovered crooked data that apparently weren’t linked to Gino. That would mean Schroeder had another colleague who had contaminated her research. It would mean that her reputation—and the credibility of her entire field—was under threat from multiple directions at once.

Among the four research papers in which Gino was accused of cheating is one about the human tendency to misreport facts and figures for personal gain. Which is to say: She was accused of faking data for a study of when and how people might fake data. Amazingly, a different set of data from the same paper had already been flagged as the product of potential fraud, two years before the Gino scandal came to light. The first was contributed by Dan Ariely of Duke University—a frequent co-author of Gino’s and, like her, a celebrated expert on the psychology of telling lies. (Ariely has said that a Duke investigation—which the school has not acknowledged—discovered no evidence that he “falsified data or knowingly used falsified data.” He has also said that the investigation “determined that I should have done more to prevent faulty data from being published in the 2012 paper.”)

The existence of two apparently corrupted data sets was shocking: a keystone paper on the science of deception wasn’t just invalid, but possibly a scam twice over. But even in the face of this ignominy, few in business academia were ready to acknowledge, in the summer of 2023, that the problem might be larger still—and that their research literature might well be overrun with fantastical results.

Some scholars had tried to raise alarms before. In 2019, Dennis Tourish, a professor at the University of Sussex Business School, published a book titled Management Studies in Crisis: Fraud, Deception and Meaningless Research. He cites a study finding that more than a third of surveyed editors at management journals say they’ve encountered fabricated or falsified data. Even that alarming rate may undersell the problem, Tourish told me, given all of the misbehavior in his discipline that gets overlooked or covered up.

Anonymous surveys of various fields find that roughly 2 percent of scholars will admit to having fabricated, falsified, or modified data at least once in their career. But business-school psychology may be especially prone to misbehavior. For one thing, the field’s research standards are weaker than those for other psychologists. In response to the replication crisis, campus psychology departments have lately taken up a raft of methodological reforms. Statistically suspect practices that were de rigueur a dozen years ago are now uncommon; sample sizes have gotten bigger; a study’s planned analyses are now commonly written down before the work is carried out. But this great awakening has been slower to develop in business-school psychology, several academics told me. “No one wants to kill the golden goose,” one early-career researcher in business academia said. If management and marketing professors embraced all of psychology’s reforms, he said, then many of their most memorable, most TED Talk–able findings would go away. “To use marketing lingo, we’d lose our unique value proposition.”

It’s easy to imagine how cheating might lead to more cheating. If business-school psychology is beset with suspect research, then the bar for getting published in its flagship journals ratchets up: A study must be even flashier than all the other flashy findings if its authors want to stand out. Such incentives move in only one direction: Eventu­ally, the standard tools for torturing your data will no longer be enough. Now you have to go a little further; now you have to cut your data up, and carve them into sham results. Having one or two prolific frauds around would push the bar for publishing still higher, inviting yet more corruption. (And because the work is not exactly brain surgery, no one dies as a result.) In this way, a single discipline might come to look like Major League Baseball did 20 years ago: defined by juiced-up stats.

In the face of its own cheating scandal, MLB started screening every single player for anabolic steroids. There is no equivalent in science, and certainly not in business academia. Uri Simonsohn, a professor at the Esade Business School in Barcelona, is a member of the blogging team, called Data Colada, that caught the problems in both Gino’s and Ariely’s work. (He was also a motivating force behind the Many Co-Authors Project.) Data Colada has called out other instances of sketchy work and apparent fakery within the field, but its efforts at detection are highly targeted. They’re also quite unusual. Crying foul on someone else’s bad research makes you out to be a troublemaker, or a member of the notional “data police.” It can also bring a claim of defamation. Gino filed a $25 million defamation lawsuit against Harvard and the Data Colada team not long after the bloggers attacked her work. (This past September, a judge dismissed the portion of her claims that involved the bloggers and the defamation claim against Harvard. She still has pending claims against the university for gender discrimination and breach of contract.) The risks are even greater for those who don’t have tenure. A junior academic who accuses someone else of fraud may antagonize the senior colleagues who serve on the boards and committees that make publishing decisions and determine funding and job appointments.

[Read: Francesca Gino, the Harvard expert on dishonesty who is accused of lying]

These risks for would-be critics reinforce an atmosphere of complacency. “It’s embarrassing how few protections we have against fraud and how easy it has been to fool us,” Simonsohn said in a 2023 webinar. He added, “We have done nothing to prevent it. Nothing.”

Like so many other scientific scandals, the one Schroeder had identified quickly sank into a swamp of closed-door reviews and taciturn committees. Schroeder says that Harvard Business School declined to investigate her evidence of data-tampering, citing a policy of not responding to allegations made more than six years after the misconduct is said to have occurred. (Harvard Business School’s head of communications, Mark Cautela, declined to comment.) Her efforts to address the issue through the University of Pennsylvania’s Office of Research Integrity likewise seemed fruitless. (A spokesperson for the Wharton School would not comment on “the existence or status of” any investigations.)

Retractions have a way of dragging out in science publishing. This one was no exception. Maryam Kouchaki, an expert on workplace ethics at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management and co–editor in chief of the journal that published the “Don’t Stop Believing” paper, had first received the authors’ call to pull their work in August 2023. As the anniversary of that request drew near, Schroeder still had no idea how the suspect data would be handled, and whether Brooks—or anyone else—would be held responsible.

Finally, on October 1, the “Don’t Stop Believing” paper was removed from the scientific literature. The journal’s published notice laid out some basic conclusions from Schroeder’s audit: Studies 1a and 1b had indeed been run by Brooks, the raw data were not available, and the posted data for 1b showed “streaks of heart rate ratings that were unlikely to have occurred naturally.” Schroeder’s own contributions to the paper were also found to have some flaws: Data points had been dropped from her analysis without any explanation in the published text. (Although this practice wasn’t fully out-of-bounds given research standards at the time, the same behavior would today be understood as a form of “p-hacking”—a pernicious source of false-positive results.) But the notice did not say whether the fishy numbers from Study 1b had been fabricated, let alone by whom. Someone other than Brooks may have handled those data before publication, it suggested. “The journal could not investigate this study any further.”

Two days later, Schroeder posted to X a link to her full and final audit of the paper. “It took *hundreds* of hours of work to complete this retraction,” she wrote, in a thread that described the flaws in her own experiments and Studies 1a and 1b. “I am ashamed of helping publish this paper & how long it took to identify its issues,” the thread concluded. “I am not the same scientist I was 10 years ago. I hold myself accountable for correcting any inaccurate prior research findings and for updating my research practices to do better.” Her peers responded by lavishing her with public praise. One colleague called the self-audit “exemplary” and an “act of courage.” A prominent professor at Columbia Business School congratulated Schroeder for being “a cultural heroine, a role model for the rising generation.”

But amid this celebration of her unusual transparency, an important and related story had somehow gone unnoticed. In the course of scouting out the edges of the cheating scandal in her field, Schroeder had uncovered yet another case of seeming science fraud. And this time, she’d blown the whistle on herself.

That stunning revelation, unaccompanied by any posts on social media, had arrived in a muffled update to the Many Co-Authors Project website. Schroeder announced that she’d found “an issue” with one more paper that she’d produced with Gino. This one, “Enacting Rituals to Improve Self-Control,” came out in 2018 in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology; its author list overlaps substantially with that of the earlier “Don’t Stop Believing” paper (though Brooks was not involved). Like the first, it describes a set of studies that purport to show the power of the ritual effect. Like the first, it includes at least one study for which data appear to have been altered. And like the first, its data anomalies have no apparent link to Gino.

The basic facts are laid out in a document that Schroeder put into an online repository, describing an internal audit that she conducted with the help of the lead author, Allen Ding Tian. (Tian did not respond to requests for comment.) The paper opens with a field experiment on women who were trying to lose weight. Schroeder, then in grad school at the University of Chicago, oversaw the work; participants were recruited at a campus gym.

Half of the women were instructed to perform a ritual before each meal for the next five days: They were to put their food into a pattern on their plate. The other half were not. Then Schroeder used a diet-tracking app to tally all the food that each woman reported eating, and found that the ones in the ritual group took in about 200 fewer calories a day, on average, than the others. But in 2023, when she started digging back into this research, she uncovered some discrepancies. According to her study’s raw materials, nine of the women who reported that they’d done the food-arranging ritual were listed on the data spreadsheet as being in the control group; six others were mislabeled in the opposite direction. When Schroeder fixed these errors for her audit, the ritual effect completely vanished. Now it looked as though the women who’d done the food-arranging had consumed a few more calories, on average, than the women who had not.

Mistakes happen in research; sometimes data get mixed up. These errors, though, appear to be intentional. The women whose data had been swapped fit a suspicious pattern: The ones whose numbers might have undermined the paper’s hypothesis were disproportionately affected. This is not a subtle thing; among the 43 women who reported that they’d done the ritual, the six most prolific eaters all got switched into the control group. Nick Brown and James Heathers, the scientific-integrity researchers, have each tried to figure out the odds that anything like the study’s published result could have been attained if the data had been switched at random. Brown’s analysis pegged the answer at one in 1 million. “Data manipulation makes sense as an explanation,” he told me. “No other explanation is immediately obvious to me.” Heathers said he felt “quite comfortable” in concluding that whatever went wrong with the experiment “was a directed process, not a random process.”

Whether or not the data alterations were intentional, their specific form—flipped conditions for a handful of participants, in a way that favored the hypothesis—matches up with data issues raised by Harvard Business School’s investigation into Gino’s work. Schroeder rejected that comparison when I brought it up, but she was willing to accept some blame. “I couldn’t feel worse about that paper and that study,” she told me. “I’m deeply ashamed of it.”

Still, she said that the source of the error wasn’t her. Her research assistants on the project may have caused the problem; Schroeder wonders if they got confused. She said that two RAs, both undergraduates, had recruited the women at the gym, and that the scene there was chaotic: Sometimes multiple people came up to them at once, and the undergrads may have had to make some changes on the fly, adjusting which participants were being put into which group for the study. Maybe things went wrong from there, Schroeder said. One or both RAs might have gotten ruffled as they tried to paper over inconsistencies in their record-keeping. They both knew what the experiment was meant to show, and how the data ought to look—so it’s possible that they peeked a little at the data and reassigned the numbers in the way that seemed correct. (Schroeder’s audit lays out other possibilities, but describes this one as the most likely.)

Schroeder’s account is certainly plausible, but it’s not a perfect fit with all of the facts. For one thing, the posted data indicate that during most days on which the study ran, the RAs had to deal with only a handful of participants—sometimes just two. How could they have gotten so bewildered?

Any further details seem unlikely to emerge. The paper was formally retracted in the February issue of the journal. Schroeder has chosen not to name the RAs who helped her with the study, and she told me that she hasn’t tried to contact them. “I just didn’t think it was appropriate,” she said. “It doesn’t seem like it would help matters at all.” By her account, neither one is currently in academia, and she did not discover any additional issues when she reviewed their other work. (I reached out to more than a dozen former RAs and lab managers who were thanked in Schroeder’s published papers from around this time. Five responded to my queries; all of them denied having helped with this experiment.) In the end, Schroeder said, she took the data at the assistants’ word. “I did not go in and change labels,” she told me. But she also said repeatedly that she doesn’t think her RAs should take the blame. “The responsibility rests with me, right? And so it was appropriate that I’m the one named in the retraction notice,” she said. Later in our conversation, she summed up her response: “I’ve tried to trace back as best I can what happened, and just be honest.”

Across the many months I spent reporting this story, I’d come to think of Schroeder as a paragon of scientific rigor. She has led a seminar on “Experimental Design and Research Methods” in a business program with a sterling reputation for its research standards. She’d helped set up the Many Co-Authors Project, and then pursued it as aggressively as anyone. (Simonsohn even told me that Schroeder’s look-at-everything approach was a little “overboard.”) I also knew that she was devoted to the dreary but important task of reproducing other people’s published work.

As for the dieting research, Schroeder had owned the awkward optics. “It looks weird,” she told me when we spoke in June. “It’s a weird error, and it looks consistent with changing things in the direction to get a result.” But weirder still was how that error came to light, through a detailed data audit that she’d undertaken of her own accord. Apparently, she’d gone to great effort to call attention to a damning set of facts. That alone could be taken as a sign of her commitment to transparency.

But in the months that followed, I couldn’t shake the feeling that another theory also fit the facts. Schroeder’s leading explanation for the issues in her work—An RA must have bungled the data—sounded distressingly familiar. Francesca Gino had offered up the same defense to Harvard’s investigators. The mere repetition of this story doesn’t mean that it’s invalid: Lab techs and assistants really do mishandle data on occasion, and they may of course engage in science fraud. But still.

As for Schroeder’s all-out focus on integrity, and her public efforts to police the scientific record, I came to understand that most of these had been adopted, all at once, in mid-2023, shortly after the Gino scandal broke. (The version of Schroeder’s résumé that was available on her webpage in the spring of 2023 does not describe any replication projects whatsoever.) That makes sense if the accusations changed the way she thought about her field—and she did describe them to me as “a wake-up call.” But here’s another explanation: Maybe Schroeder saw the Gino scandal as a warning that the data sleuths were on the march. Perhaps she figured that her own work might end up being scrutinized, and then, having gamed this out, she decided to be a data sleuth herself. She’d publicly commit to reexamining her colleagues’ work, doing audits of her own, and asking for corrections. This would be her play for amnesty during a crisis.

I spoke with Schroeder for the last time on the day before Halloween. She was notably composed when I confronted her with the possibility that she’d engaged in data-tampering herself. She repeated what she’d told me months before, that she definitely did not go in and change the numbers in her study. And she rejected the idea that her self-audits had been strategic, that she’d used them to divert attention from her own wrongdoing. “Honestly, it’s disturbing to hear you even lay it out,” she said. “Because I think if you were to look at my body of work and try to replicate it, I think my hit rate would be good.” She continued: “So to imply that I’ve actually been, I don’t know, doing a lot of fraudulent stuff myself for a long time, and this was a moment to come clean with it? I just don’t think the evidence bears that out.”

That wasn’t really what I’d meant to imply. The story I had in mind was more mundane—and in a sense more tragic. I went through it: Perhaps she’d fudged the results for a study just once or twice early in her career, and never again. Perhaps she’d been committed, ever since, to proper scientific methods. And perhaps she really did intend to fix some problems in her field.

Schroeder allowed that she’d been susceptible to certain research practices—excluding data, for example—that are now considered improper. So were many of her colleagues. In that sense, she’d been guilty of letting her judgment be distorted by the pressure to succeed. But I understood what she was saying: This was not the same as fraud.

Throughout our conversations, Schroeder had avoided stating outright that anyone in particular had committed fraud. But not all of her colleagues had been so cautious. Just a few days earlier, I’d received an unexpected message from Maurice Schweitzer, the senior Wharton business-school professor who oversaw Alison Wood Brooks’s “Don’t Stop Believing” research. Up to this point, he had not responded to my request for an interview, and I figured he’d chosen not to comment for this story. But he finally responded to a list of written questions. It was important for me to know, his email said, that Schroe­der had “been involved in data tampering.” He included a link to the retraction notice for her paper on rituals and eating. When I asked Schweitzer to elaborate, he did not respond. (Schweitzer’s most recent academic work is focused on the damaging effects of gossip; one of his papers from 2024 is titled “The Interpersonal Costs of Revealing Others’ Secrets.”)

I laid this out for Schroeder on the phone. “Wow,” she said. “That’s unfortunate that he would say that.” She went silent for a long time. “Yeah, I’m sad he’s saying that.”

Another long silence followed. “I think that the narrative that you laid out, Dan, is going to have to be a possibility,” she said. “I don’t think there’s a way I can refute it, but I know what the truth is, and I think I did the right thing, with trying to clean the literature as much as I could.”

This is all too often where these stories end: A researcher will say that whatever really happened must forever be obscure. Dan Ariely told Business Insider in February 2024 : “I’ve spent a big part of the last two years trying to find out what happened. I haven’t been able to … I decided I have to move on with my life.” Schweit­zer told me that the most relevant files for the “Don’t Stop Believing” paper are “long gone,” and that the chain of custody for its data simply can’t be tracked. (The Wharton School agreed, telling me that it “does not possess the requested data” for Study 1b, “as it falls outside its current data retention period.”) And now Schroeder had landed on a similar position.

It’s uncomfortable for a scientist to claim that the truth might be unknowable, just as it would be for a journalist, or any other truth-seeker by vocation. I daresay the facts regarding all of these cases may yet be amenable to further inquiry. The raw data from Study 1b may still exist, somewhere; if so, one might compare them with the posted spreadsheet to confirm that certain numbers had been altered. And Schroeder says she has the names of the RAs who worked on her dieting experiment; in theory, she could ask those people for their recollections of what happened. If figures aren’t checked, or questions aren’t asked, it’s by choice.

What feels out of reach is not so much the truth of any set of allegations, but their consequences. Gino has been placed on administrative leave, but in many other instances of suspected fraud, nothing happens. Both Brooks and Schroeder appear to be untouched. “The problem is that journal editors and institutions can be more concerned with their own prestige and reputation than finding out the truth,” Dennis Tourish, at the University of Sussex Business School, told me. “It can be easier to hope that this all just goes away and blows over and that somebody else will deal with it.”

Pablo Delcan

Some degree of disillusionment was common among the academics I spoke with for this story. The early-career researcher in business academia told me that he has an “unhealthy hobby” of finding manipulated data. But now, he said, he’s giving up the fight. “At least for the time being, I’m done,” he told me. “Feeling like Sisyphus isn’t the most fulfilling experience.” A management professor who has followed all of these cases very closely gave this assessment: “I would say that distrust characterizes many people in the field—­it’s all very depressing and demotivating.”

It’s possible that no one is more depressed and demotivated, at this point, than Juliana Schroeder. “To be honest with you, I’ve had some very low moments where I’m like, ‘Well, maybe this is not the right field for me, and I shouldn’t be in it,’ ” she said. “And to even have any errors in any of my papers is incredibly embarrassing, let alone one that looks like data-tampering.”

I asked her if there was anything more she wanted to say.

“I guess I just want to advocate for empathy and transparency—­maybe even in that order. Scientists are imperfect people, and we need to do better, and we can do better.” Even the Many Co-Authors Project, she said, has been a huge missed opportunity. “It was sort of like a moment where everyone could have done self-reflection. Everyone could have looked at their papers and done the exercise I did. And people didn’t.”

Maybe the situation in her field would eventually improve, she said. “The optimistic point is, in the long arc of things, we’ll self-correct, even if we have no incentive to retract or take responsibility.”

“Do you believe that?” I asked.

“On my optimistic days, I believe it.”

“Is today an optimistic day?”

“Not really.”

This article appears in the January 2025 print edition with the headline “The Fraudulent Science of Success.”

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Donald Trump appears to experience the world through the glow of a television screen. He has long placed a premium on those who look the part in front of the camera. Paging Dr. Mehmet Oz.

Trump has picked Oz to lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. CMS, as the agency is known, falls under the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Last week, Trump nominated Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to serve as HHS secretary. As you may have guessed, Kennedy and Oz are not only friends but kindred spirits. Oz is a global adviser at iHerb, a for-profit company that offers “Earth’s best-curated selection of health and wellness products at the best possible value.” He and Kennedy, two relative outsiders, are now positioned to enjoy a symbiotic relationship within Trump’s chaotic ecosystem.

Oz was last seen running for a Pennsylvania Senate seat in 2022. He lost to John Fetterman, who, despite dealing with the aftereffects of a stroke, carried the state by five points. Throughout that race, Oz struggled to combat the perception that he was a charlatan and carpetbagger who primarily lived in New Jersey. (Fetterman’s team repeatedly tagged Oz as an out-of-touch elitist, trolling him, for example, when he went grocery shopping for crudités and lamented high prices.) After that electoral defeat, Oz’s political dreams seemed all but dashed. But he wisely remained loyal to Trump—a person who has the ability to change trajectories on a whim.

In the pre-Trump era, it might have been a stretch to describe CMS administrator as an overtly political position. But Oz’s objective under Trump couldn’t be clearer. In a statement, Trump, using his reliably perplexing capitalization, telegraphed that Oz will bring a certain ethos to the job—a little MAGA, a little MAHA. Oz, Trump promised, will “cut waste and fraud within our Country’s most expensive Government Agency, which is a third of our Nation’s Healthcare spend, and a quarter of our entire National Budget.” And, because he’s Trump, he mentioned Oz’s nine daytime Emmy Awards.

Some 150 million Americans currently rely on the agency’s insurance programs, including Medicaid, Medicare, and Obamacare. Oz has been a proponent of Medicare Advantage for All. Though that sounds like the Medicare for All initiative championed by progressives such as Senator Bernie Sanders, the two programs are quite different. At its core, Medicare for All would set the U.S. on a path toward nationalizing health care. Trump would never go for that. But Medicare Advantage already exists within America’s patchwork private/public system, and Oz might push to strengthen it. He could also face budgetary pressure to weaken it. Oz’s own health-care views haven’t remained consistent. Though he once praised the mandatory universal models of Germany and Switzerland, as a Republican politician he threw his support behind privatized Medicare.

When asked about Oz’s nomination, Fetterman, his former opponent, told CNN: “As long as he’s willing to protect and preserve Medicaid and Medicare, I’m voting for the dude.” Some people were pissed. Victoria Perrone, who served as the director of operations on Fetterman’s Senate campaign, called out her old boss on social media: “Dr. Oz broke his pledge to ‘do no harm’ when he said red onions prevent ovarian cancer. My sis died of OC in 6/2022. This is a huge personal betrayal to me. We know he won’t protect the Medicaid that paid for her treatments,” Perrone posted on X. “I feel like I’ve been duped and 2 years of working on your campaign was a waste,” she added.

The above argument is illustrative of another reality Trump acknowledged in announcing his pick: “Make America Healthy Again” keeps growing. Oz, Trump declared, “will work closely with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to take on the illness industrial complex, and all the horrible chronic diseases left in its wake.” He went a step further, promising that Oz will bring “a strong voice to the key pillars of the MAHA Movement.” Oz holds degrees from Harvard and Penn, and he worked as a professor of surgery at Columbia. In spite of that pedigree, Oz has spent years facing credible accusations of medical quackery for his endorsement of dietary supplements. In 2014, he received a dramatic dressing-down on Capitol Hill. Senator Claire McCaskill read three statements that Oz had made on his eponymous show:

“You may think magic is make-believe, but this little bean has scientists saying they’ve found the magic weight-loss cure for every body type: It’s green coffee extract.”

“I’ve got the No. 1 miracle in a bottle to burn your fat: It’s raspberry ketone.”

“Garcinia cambogia: It may be the simple solution you’ve been looking for to bust your body fat for good.”

Oz’s defense that day was that his job was to be a “cheerleader” for the Dr. Oz audience. “I actually do personally believe in the items I talk about in the show. I passionately study them. I recognize oftentimes they don’t have the scientific muster to present as fact, but nevertheless, I would give my audience the advice I give my family,” he testified.

He emerged from that hearing largely unscathed. Two years later, Oz would go on to read what he claimed were Trump’s medical records on that same show. He famously praised Trump’s testosterone levels and supposed all-around health. Four years after that, once Trump was president, Oz sent emails to White House officials, including Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, pushing them to rush patient trials for hydroxychloroquine, an unproven treatment for COVID.

In the next Trump administration, those are the sorts of exchanges Oz could be having with Kennedy—or with Trump himself. How did we get here? Oz landed this gig because he’s good on TV, yes, but also because, when he entered the political arena, he fully aligned himself with Trump. The 47th president rewards loyalty. If there’s one thing that’s become clear from his administration nominations so far, it’s that.

Some of Trump’s appointments will be less consequential than others. Anything involving the health and well-being of tens of millions of Americans is inarguably serious. Oz’s confirmation is not guaranteed, but his selection has already confirmed that nothing about Trump 2.0 is mere bluster.

Related:

Trump is coming for Obamacare again. (From January) Why is Dr. Oz so bad at Twitter? (From 2022)

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Another theory of the Trump movement What the men of the internet are trying to prove Arash Azizi: The problem with boycotting Israel

Today’s News

Republican members of the House Ethics Committee blocked the release of the investigation into the sexual-misconduct and drug-use allegations against former Representative Matt Gaetz. Jose Ibarra, who was found guilty of killing Laken Riley on the University of Georgia campus, was sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole. Trump tapped former WWE CEO Linda McMahon, who previously led the U.S. Small Business Administration during Trump’s first term, to be the secretary of education.

Dispatches

The Weekly Planet: Drought is an immigration issue, and Trump’s climate policies are designed to ignore that, Zoë Schlanger writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Video by Joanne Imperio / The Atlantic. Sources: Archive Films / Getty; Internet Archive; Prelinger Associates / Getty.

Put Down the Vacuum

By Annie Lowrey

The other night, a friend came over. A dear friend. A friend who has helped me out when I’ve been sick, and who brought over takeout when I had just given birth. Still, before he arrived, I vacuumed.

I thought about this while reading the Gender Equity Policy Institute’s recent report on gender and domestic labor. The study finds that mothers spend twice as much time as fathers “on the essential and unpaid work” of taking care of kids and the home, and that women spend more time on this than men, regardless of parental and relationship status. “Simply being a woman” is the instrumental variable, the study concludes.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

The cancer gene more men should test for We’re about to find out how much Americans like vaccines. Apple lost the plot on texting. What going “wild on health” looks like

Culture Break

Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: Getty

Read. If you feel upset about the election, these seven books are a prescription for rage and despair, Ruth Madievsky writes.

Gather. Group fitness classes aren’t just about exercise—they’re also a ridiculous, perfect way to make friends, Mikala Jamison writes.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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In his tenth novel, Lazarus Man, Richard Price is, to borrow one of his own lines, on a “hunt for moments”—snapshots in time, chance encounters, fleeting interactions that reveal someone or something in a startling new light. “I’ve got like X-ray eyes for the little gestures that go right by everybody,” he explained in a profile timed to the publication of his 1992 novel, Clockers. “I don’t go for the big picture so much as a lot of little big pictures.” Mary Roe, a detective and one of the characters in his new book, shares that instinct. At the scene of a “larger horror,” what hits her most forcefully is not the dead bodies but a crushed USPS mail cart, “an everyday object so violently deformed.” It beckons her toward “an unasked-for comprehension of the whole.”

The currency that Lazarus Man—a patchwork of scenes from urban working-class life, set in the spring of 2008—trades in is the micro-epiphany. Price’s four interlaced East Harlem protagonists are big-souled people navigating narrow, “negotiated life.” What they want for themselves—someone to lie beside, a little more money, work that doesn’t involve selling something—rarely outpaces what is possible. They do not ask for much more of the world, or New York City, than it is ready to give. Each one of them is decent.

Felix Pearl is a 20-something photographer with a gig taking video footage of a playground and basketball courts for the parks department (to monitor safety protocols) and a habit of getting bamboozled by a pretty junkie. Mary, a respected member of the police department, is also the daughter of a prizefighter tormented by a mistake he made as a young man. Anthony Carter, a middle-aged divorcé, is a former salesman, former teacher, and former cokehead hoping to stumble onto a metaphysical truth that will mend the broken parts of his life. Royal Davis, a failed NBA hopeful, runs a funeral home and wishes he didn’t. When a tenement building collapses in Harlem, their paths become entangled and they reexamine their lives.

This disaster, which leaves six dead, is ostensibly the big event that sets the novel in motion, but it also feels almost beside the point. No one, including Price, shows much curiosity about what caused the collapse. In fact, Lazarus Man seems deeply uninterested in the idea of cause at all. The characters we encounter live a challenging existence; they are not quite on the cliff’s edge, but they are close enough to peer into the canyon without craning their neck. The novel has all the trappings of fiction as gritty urban social portraiture—the kind of enterprise that Price is associated with as the author of the drug-trade-steeped novel Clockers and a writer for HBO’s The Wire. Yet it isn’t.

[From the September 2024 issue: A satire of America’s obsession with identity]

Nor has Price written a gentrification novel about a changing Harlem, even as its Harlem is changing. Or a novel of proletarian discontent, though it is about discontented proletarians. Lazarus Man isn’t about structural racism either, despite being populated with minorities down on their luck and harangued by the police. What Price has given us is a retrograde novel. It is animated by unreconstructed, unembarrassed humanism.

His pages offer no fictional repackaging of uplift or pessimism or low-wattage Marxist theory. They depict no working-class heroes or Dickensian scoundrels. The characters are not pawns in some philosophical or political or cultural proxy war for which the novel is simply a vehicle. You would be forgiven for overlooking that the story is set amid the heat of Barack Obama’s historic presidential campaign, because this never comes up. Price’s characters are strapped but not completely stuck, battered by social structures but not paralyzed by them.

In his 1945 lecture “Existentialism Is a Humanism,” Jean-Paul Sartre observed that European existentialism had developed an undeserved reputation for being “gloomy,” denigrated as a philosophical movement obsessed with death, absurdity, anxiety, and the like. Sartre rejected this appraisal: Existentialism turned on the conviction that people can—in the face of history’s sweep, dehumanizing societal institutions, and unrestrained economic and technological development—choose how to live. Speaking before a sizable crowd at Paris’s Club Maintenant, Sartre addressed his critics. “Their excessive protests make me suspect that what is annoying them is not so much our pessimism,” the philosopher wryly observed, “but, much more likely, our optimism. For at bottom, what is alarming in the doctrine that I am about to try to explain to you is—is it not?—that it confronts man with a possibility of choice.”

Lazarus Man’s protagonists, confronted with exceptional circumstances they had no hand in generating, must nonetheless contend with the discomfiting reality of their own agency. This leaves Price walking a tightrope. His novel at once invites and undercuts the polarized attitudes toward social crisis that have recently become familiar—either fatalistic acceptance or righteous denunciation. Lazarus Man is about a traumatic event that defies a reflexive victim-culture response, as well as the lazy buck-up bromides favored by that culture’s critics.

Put a different way, it is a trauma novel without a trauma plot—pushing back against the formulaic storyline, so thoroughly skewered by The New Yorker’s Parul Sehgal, that reduces characters to predictable symptoms after some fateful event. The book’s author, too, isn’t readily fazed: Price, a white novelist writing yet again about Black urban life, betrays no signs of racial anxiety. “Northern white writers sometimes see black people as another species,” he noted in 2006. “I think the white writer sometimes says, ‘No, no, that’s a hornet’s nest.’ ” He’s still poking it.

The possibility that Price might have adopted the identitarian conventions of the previous decade or so—the last novel he wrote under his own name was Lush Life (2008), which unfolds on New York City’s Lower East Side—is swiftly ruled out by Anthony, the novel’s anchoring character. A half-Black, half–Italian Irish Ivy League screwup—years ago, he lost a full ride to Columbia for dealing drugs—he has been on a downward trajectory ever since. In his sober and unemployed middle age, he has been living in his dead parents’ tenement apartment and resists any attempt to frame himself as a victim. “A therapist suggested that as a Black student he might have subconsciously felt pressure to act out the role expected of him by the white students,” he reflects. Then he adds, “But that was bullshit.”

When Anthony is pulled out of the soot-gray rubble a third of the way through the novel—the reborn Lazarus of the book’s title—he is a changed man. Or, more accurately, he is a man desperately trying to play the part of a changed man. It is never quite clear, even as Lazarus Man rushes toward its devastating denouement, whom exactly Anthony is trying to convince of his redemption: the audiences who eventually come to hear him speak at community events, enchanted by the wisdom he has wrung from brute survival, or the man he sees in the mirror. To the extent that Price’s novel has a message, it is that epiphanies are a kind of theater we perform for ourselves. Faced with disaster or a momentous encounter, we are not gripped by revelation or metamorphosed in the fire of circumstance. Events do not transform us against our will. We decide, always retroactively, that some unexpected joy or undeserved blow is the stuff out of which a new life is made.

This idea, that we choose our own epiphanies, appears again and again. Mary, the worn-down detective, is especially epiphany-haunted, surrounded by people who have undergone sudden shifts of self. Her father, disturbed by his capacity for cruelty after a boxing opponent ended up permanently disabled, abruptly gave up the sweet science. Her husband is a reformed violent drunk whom Mary finds boring in his new meditative sobriety. And Mary herself lives in the long shadow of a halfway epiphany, restless in marriage and motherhood after a freak elevator accident two years earlier nearly killed her, leaving her searching for—and failing to find—new moorings. Mary spends much of the novel playing the role of dutiful detective, looking for a resident of the imploded building who hasn’t been seen since the day it crumbled. She tenuously connects the search to absolution for herself—guilt-ridden about being a distant mother—and for her father, convinced that discovering the missing man, dead or alive, will somehow land her on terra firma.

Lazarus Man possesses the same kind of telegenic quality that made Clockers an inspiration for The Wire. Some vignettes read like hilarious set pieces. When the tenement dissolves into a haze of white smog and rubble, Royal is dozing in one of his unsold coffins. Awoken by the noise, he pushes open the lid of his pine box and sits bolt upright, scaring witless the group of film-school students to whom he’s rented out his struggling funeral home so they can shoot a bad zombie movie. This slapstick gives way to something darker as Royal, knowing that the rumbling boom means bodies—and thus business—instructs his son to put on his best black suit and go hawk their services. Other moments give way to a gentle melancholy.

And as Anthony is slowly transformed into a minor New York celebrity—first thanks to a local-news appearance, and then through a series of speeches he is coaxed into giving—his ordeal gels into an earnest if squishy doctrine, one part self-help and one part call to duty. He proclaims again and again that his only goal is to “be of service.” His lectures are full of clichés and pseudo-profundities—“The street can be a brutal sculptor”—but his overwrought aphorisms also land, the kinds of phrases that audience members scribble down and later recite around the dinner table. Anthony’s underlying theme is always that change is possible, that the worst that comes to pass will end up being “the best thing that could possibly happen to you.” Personal catastrophe, Anthony preaches, is a gift. A sheep in wolf’s clothing.

[From the May 1976 issue: A review of Richard Price’s second novel, Bloodbrothers]

But in the end, Lazarus Man rejects its own Lazarus. Or at least Price subverts his post-traumatic gospel. When a woman approaches Anthony after one of his appearances, interrogating him about his mantra—“Whatever befalls you no matter how heartbreaking or onerous will turn out to be the best thing”—he finds himself, for the first time, at a loss for words. She tells him about a husband of two decades, newly dead. Three young kids at home and an ailing mother. An apartment slipping through her grasp. Plainly, no alchemy is forthcoming: The fragments of her life will not turn to gold if she just hopes hard enough. After Anthony mumbles something about God, she lets him have it.

When the novel at last gives up its final secret—who our Lazarus Man is, really—the big reveal does not hand over any certainty as to what lies in Anthony’s heart. The question that haunts the second half of the book is whether he is a con artist or a genuine street prophet. The answer ends up being neither. Or both. The simple truth is that one bad decision led to worse decisions, then to better ones. The same could be said of each character. As to the question of whether that building collapse truly made a new man, no one (including Anthony) is sure.

The genius of Price’s novel is that it rejects all mechanistic accounts of human existence—tragic or utopian, religious or otherwise—without downplaying the social forces that shape lives of labor. Price isn’t peddling a bootstraps humanism. Anthony, Felix, Royal, and Mary cannot pull themselves up into a more comfortable middle-class existence through sheer will, or by the thaumaturgic power of some hoped-for epiphany. They cannot be exactly who they want to be. But Price holds them accountable for who they are, and the choices they make within the world as it is given to them. Lazarus Man leaves us with four people still lurching toward an uncertain transformation. “I’m thinking a few things,” Royal muses. “All I know for sure is that I have to make a life that I can live with.”

This article appears in the December 2024 print edition with the headline “Richard Price’s Radical, Retrograde Novel.”

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In the aftermath of Donald Trump’s victorious reelection bid, Democrats are searching for an explanation of Kamala Harris’s loss in order to begin rebuilding for the future. So it goes every election cycle—a loss, a scramble for causality, and competing narratives begin to set.

Just one week out from Election Day, there are multiple dissenting and overlapping arguments being made to try to make sense of the results. In 2016, many Democrats believed that Trump’s attack on trade policies was core to his victory. As a result, the Biden-Harris administration pursued Trump-like policies on trade, none of which seem to have made a significant difference in increasing the union vote share, reducing Trump’s likelihood of victory, or stemming the flow of working-class voters out of the Democratic Party.

Now, again, various parts of the Democratic coalition are seeking to define the party’s loss. But what do we actually know about why the Democrats were defeated? There are still theories forming, but on today’s episode of Good on Paper, I talk with the former Republican strategist and current host of The Bulwark Podcast, Tim Miller about the postelection narratives jockeying for power.

“But for those of us who do have a belief that there’s something kind of special about the American system and that have revered America, that understand that America is flawed and has made mistakes, that still is a unique experiment in the world. That “America is an idea” type of thing. The idea is pretty dim at this point,” Miller argued.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

[Music]

Jerusalem Demsas: In the aftermath of a bruising electoral loss, the losing party begins participating in a well-worn democratic tradition: slinging takes about what happened.

This is democracy! When the voters send a dissatisfied response, the messy work of recalibration requires parsing the signal from the noise.

Were voters mad because of a global inflationary environment that no Democrat could dig their way out of? Did they want to see specific breaks between Harris and Biden on policy? Were they frustrated by a candidate they saw as too left on cultural issues?

There are data points in favor of many different theses. Here’s where I’d put my stake in the ground, with the caveat that we still don’t have a complete analysis on subgroup dynamics, or even a final vote count on all the races:

First, incumbents worldwide were facing tough election odds. Electorates were frustrated by the COVID inflationary years and were clearly seeking change. In Australia, Sweden, the Netherlands, France, and beyond, ruling coalitions lost power across the political spectrum.

Second, I don’t think Kamala Harris was ever going to be a great candidate. After Biden’s disastrous debate effort in late June and it seemed he might be pressured to drop out, I wrote an article calling on Democrats not to coronate their vice president, and pointing to key vulnerabilities she displayed and the value of an open democratic process.

Figuring out how much of this is in the campaign’s control—would it really have mattered that much if she’d gone on Joe Rogan’s podcast?—or figuring out what this means for America’s two political parties will take months, if not years. As you’ve heard on this podcast, I’m still arguing about what 2016 really meant on trade and immigration.

My name’s Jerusalem Demsas, I’m a staff writer at The Atlantic, and this is Good on Paper, a policy show that questions what we really know about popular narratives. As a disclaimer, I worked for the Harris primary campaign in 2019 before becoming a journalist, and my guest today, Tim Miller, is a political strategist who was Jeb Bush’s 2016 communications director on his presidential campaign. He’s been an anti-Trump conservative since then and is the host of The Bulwark Podcast.

Today we’re going to talk through some of these inchoate narratives and debate which ones we think are likely to hold water.

[Music]

Demsas: Tim, welcome to the show.

Tim Miller: Hey Jerusalem. What’s happening?

Demsas: Well, we’re recording this six days after Election Day. And—as you have seen on Twitter, and I’m sure in your various interviews—the takes are already coming in very, very hot. And this is a show where we often look at narratives that have already baked, and kind of look at the research and data behind how these narratives formed and what truth is there and what sorts of things have gotten ahead of themselves.

But we’re in an interesting moment right now where we’re seeing very important narrative formation happen in real time. In the aftermath of an election, everyone’s scrambling to define what happened in order to maybe wrest control of the future of the party from an ideological perspective or just a pure power perspective. And so we’re seeing a bunch of people arguing about why Trump won and why Harris lost in a time where there’s a bunch of unknowns. So we’re going to go through a few of these different narratives that are coming up.

But Tim, right off the bat, I wanted to ask you: What’s your perception of why Trump won and Harris lost?

Miller: I’m going to preempt my answer by saying that I think that uncertainty is important in this moment, and that false certainty can lead to some very mistaken and disastrous results. I say this from experience, having worked on the Republican autopsy in 2013, when the conventional wisdom congealed very quickly that Republicans, in order to win again, needed to moderate on immigration and cultural issues to appeal more to Hispanics and women. And not only was that wrong, but the person that became the nominee and then the president used that autopsy for toilet paper and went exactly the opposite direction.

It also always didn’t also work out in Trump’s favor. In 2022, the conventional wisdom was that Trumpism was badly hurt and that Ron DeSantis was ascendant. Right? So anyway, in the week after the election, bad takes abound.

Demsas: [Laughs.]

Miller: That said, my answer is, I’m open to a variety of different things that the Democrats might have to do, among them being maybe nothing and watch Trump self-implode. Might be as simple as that. That said, the one thing that I think is certain that the Democrats need to reflect on when it comes to this question of why Trump won and why Harris lost—it’s that the Democratic message is not landing outside of a particular demographic of middle- to upper-income, college-educated, not particularly religious, urban- and suburban-dwelling white Americans, in addition to Black women, right? Those are the demos that the Democrats are doing well with, that Kamala Harris grew her share with from last time, at least in the case of college-educated women. And I think that the Democrats are doing a very poor job of communicating to people in all of those other demographics.

On what they need to do, I’m very open to various possibilities about whether it’s about affect or vibe or policy or whatever. But I’m certain that there is—fair or unfair, there’s a perception that the Democrats don’t care about these other demographics, particularly working-class demographics, particularly working-class men. And that they did not offer them something that was more appealing than the nostalgia and promises of gold bullion that they got from Donald Trump. And so we can hash through all the different theories about why that was. But I think the fact that what happened—you can’t argue with.

Demsas: Yeah. I think that that’s very descriptively true. But I guess what I would want to know from you is do you feel like there are specific things that Democrats have done that tipped the scales against them? I think that what you’re outlining here is very sound. There’s a difference between why Harris may have lost and what the Democrats need to do going forward to be a more electorally relevant party at the presidential level. And so from your perspective, though, is there something about the Democratic argument around the economy or other issues that you think was particularly relevant this time around?

Miller: I think that, for starters, people were unhappy with the economy. And I don’t think that the Democrats presented a message to them about how they plan to change that for the better. But, again, I’m also not even really ready to concede that, with the exception of inflation being annoying and that broadly hurting people, the Democrats were hurt based on their economic argument. It might simply be cultural. It might be the way that they spoke, and having people feel like they weren’t being heard.

I think the Democrats in particular—I always want to immediately go to, What is the policy prescription that would have appealed? And I’m like, It’s possible that there wasn’t one.

Demsas: Yeah. An important backdrop that I think you’re alluding to here, as well, is that the inflationary environment was really, really bad for incumbents across the world, right? You’re kind of going into an election where the fundamentals are sort of rigged against incumbents because the inflationary episode was just really, really hard for people. I think one narrative that I’m seeing come up a lot is about campaign strategy. And this seems like something that’s going to be hashed out significantly. But I guess the question I have here is whether you think Harris could have won with a campaign run differently, even given the shortened timeline.

Miller: I’m giving another “I don’t know” answer to that question: I don’t know. I think that she, by all accounts, ran a strong campaign that was based on her strengths. And I think she had an undeniably dominating debate performance. They ran a nice convention. Her speeches were good. The messaging pivot, the launch was good. There wasn’t a lot of drama inside the campaign, right? There are other things that she isn’t particularly strong at. I don’t think that she is that great in unscripted moments. Sometimes she’s better than others.

And so then that’s the other thing that people come to, which is like, Oh, she should have done Rogan and all this. And I agree. I think she should have done more of those interviews, but they also weren’t really her strong suit. And I think that this was something that might’ve borne out had there been a longer primary, and maybe somebody else would have emerged. But that said, I don’t think so. I think Kamala Harris was going to emerge from a primary, no matter when Joe Biden dropped out.

And so I’m not saying, Oh, this was inevitable. Just give up. Life is pain. [Laughs.] That’s not really what I’m saying. Any specific thing that people are like, Oh, if this tactic had been different, that would have helped—I don’t really buy that. I mean, I think that broadly speaking, her having the ability to separate herself from the administration would have been helpful, and I think that was very challenging to do given the situation Joe Biden left her in and the time period that was left. And I think that it’s very likely that she might have separated herself from the administration more and still lost, and we would have been here on this podcast with people saying, Why did she distance? [Laughs.] You know what I mean? Why did she break up the Democratic coalition?

Demsas: Yeah. I mean, it’s funny. I think that, on the tactics, I’m sort of with you here. I was looking at some of the data analyses that are coming out now, and it looks like, at this point, given the data we have, while the national average from 2020 to 2024 shifts roughly six points, in battlegrounds, that number is going to end up closer to three points. And that speaks to campaign effects. That speaks to the fact that in battleground states where, again, the majority of the money is going, people are putting ads in battleground states, the campaign is putting rallies there, she’s visiting, they’re really working the press in those places to get her story and message out in a way that you’re not really going to do in a safe, Dem county in Illinois or something.

And so as a result, what they see is that the campaign effects were good on a tactical level. Their ads were persuasive. There’s evidence from Dan Rosenhack at The Economist that it looks like the campaign effects were more effective than Trump’s on things like—indicating things like ads and rallies were better for Harris.

I think on this kind of broader meta question that you kind of raised, right, about Harris as the nominee, I don’t think this is inevitable. I mean, I wrote an article on July 9th arguing that she was unlikely to be a good nominee and the party shouldn’t coronate her, and Nancy Pelosi to The New York Times—I don’t know if you saw this quote, after Harris’s loss—she says that she had expected that if the president were to step aside that there would be an open primary. And that maybe Kamala would have been stronger going forward if she’d gone through a primary and that the president endorsed Kamala Harris immediately, which made it impossible to have a primary at the time. But it sounds like you’re saying that you think that, regardless, this would not have really changed the game that much.

Miller: Yeah, I mean, I think that had Joe Biden followed the—you can argue whether it was a promise or whether it was an indication that he was going to be a one-term [president] and pass the torch. And had there been a two-year process, maybe Kamala Harris does not emerge. But, look, there are three things that I think of when I hear this counterfactual about what would have happened had it been a more open process. The first thing is, the Democrat—one of the things that the Democrats have a lot of baggage around is identity politics. I think it would have been very challenging for a Black woman to be passed over.

Demsas: But the Democratic primary voters did this in 2019, right? There was this argument being made, but they said, no, we care most about electability and they chose Joe Biden.

Miller: Right, that’s true. But Joe Biden had been the vice president in that case. Kamala Harris was the vice president. You already saw this on social media. I saw this on social media, and I was basically for Kamala but also, at the same time, was like, maybe I think it’d be healthy to have an open process. And I guess if you could wave a magic wand, I probably would want Shapiro, Whitmer. Because hopefully that would win two of the three states you need to win the presidency. And that just seems like a safer bet to me. That was my position: It was like pro-Kamala and/but. And I had hundreds of people calling me a racist over that.

So, I think that it would have caused a lot of turmoil within the party.

Now, again, in a longer, two-year process, is that a lot of heat that then just dies out after a while, and you settle on something that’s a little bit more electable and everybody gets behind it except for a few people who have hurt feelings? Maybe.

No. 2, an open process opens up Gaza [as a] wound and rips that apart even wider, and I think creates potentially even greater turmoil than she already was dealing with on that issue. And that’s cost her, frankly. And then No. 3 is then if the theory of the case is a more electable person with someone that could get more distance from the Biden-Harris administration, that assumes that the Democratic voters were looking for somebody to do that.

And that is really where the tension is here, Jerusalem, because if you look at the data, a majority of the Biden-Harris Democrats were basically happy with the administration, right? There were surely big parts of the Democratic coalition, particularly younger voters, particularly working-class Black and Hispanic voters, the types of people that they lost ground with, that were unhappy with the Biden administration. But I think that there was a plurality within the party that was not going to be for somebody—look at the response to Dean Phillips, not exactly the most talented candidate, but total rejection and mockery for somebody who ran trying to get distance from the Biden-Harris administration.

So I think it would have been very challenging to run as a candidate and get distance. So to me, it’s like if we lived in an imaginary world where identity politics wasn’t an issue, Gaza wasn’t an issue, and there was no backlash to distancing yourself from Biden, then certainly the Democrats could have come up with a stronger option.

We don’t live in an imaginary world. And I think that within the world that we live in, within all those constraints, I think it’s very challenging to see a situation where you end up with somebody stronger than Harris.

Demsas: Yeah, I mean, all those points I think are very well taken. And I think I’m seeing a lot of people make that argument of both Harris’s inevitability as the vice president, and also this sort of sense of It would have been a worse candidate. I do think that kind of my general belief is sort of, when you think you’re behind, you run a high-variance play. If you’re gonna lose anyway, you just kind of throw everything you can at the kitchen sink.

And on this kind of inevitability point, right, I think there is this burgeoning sense that Democrats were just repudiated across the board here. You kind of brought this up, this idea that Democrats do not have a good answer on economic issues or on the issues that Americans care about.

But I don’t know, how do you reconcile that with the clear ticket-splitting you see going on here? [Nebraska’s Dan] Osborne ran seven points ahead of the Harris ticket. [Montana Senator Jon] Tester ran seven points ahead of the ticket. Amy Klobuchar ran six points ahead. That’s just in the Senate. And in the House, we see over-performances from everyone from AOC to Jared Golden in Maine, who’s a much more moderate member of the Democratic coalition. Doesn’t that indicate at some level that candidate quality was important here and that there were other candidates that were much more electable?

Miller: For starters, running the presidential race is so far different from running a Senate or House race that it’s almost not even the same sport.

It’s literally like T-ball versus the major leagues. What people expect from their—I mean, nobody’s like, Oh man, does Amy Klobuchar have to go on Joe Rogan? Nobody watches Amy Klobuchar’s debates. Obviously it’s a little different in Montana, where you’re running a competitive race. But again, just the interest in Senate races is different. I think that the Democrats have a coalition that is perfectly durable and able to win nonpresidential elections. I think that this trade in the voters that has happened where the Democrats are picking up more high-trust, more middle- to high-income, more college-educated voters, and the Republicans are picking up more low-trust, more middle- to low-income, and less educated voters. As a trade, that accrues to Democrats benefits in off-year elections and midterms and special elections, just because it’s the type of person that shows up for those types of things, and it accrues to the Republicans benefit in presidential elections. So that’s not good when the Republicans are nominating Donald Trump, and the Republicans’ presidential nominee is an existential threat to the fabric of our republic. And so that’s a problem.

And so I agree that you can’t look at the data and say, oh, the Democratic brand is irreparably harmed. Like, no, the Democrats won. And a lot of these Senate races are going to end up very narrow minorities, in the House and the Senate, that they will probably be able to win back in the midterms, depending on what happens.

But I think that there are two things, which is, No. 1, the Democrats are not well suited to running presidential elections right now, in this media environment, and then No. 2 is that the Democrats have abandoned huge parts of the country where they are not viable. And that’s particularly problematic, given the Senate and Electoral College and the way that’s set up.

So okay, back to No. 1. Democrats are really good at running campaigns that are set pieces. They have professionals that are running these campaigns: the ads, the conventions, the speeches, the going to the editorial-board meetings, the 2004-type campaigns. And that’s how Senate and House campaigns are basically still run in most of the country, and even governor’s races, right? People just don’t care about those races at that deep of a level. But the presidential race is—the media environment around it is so different. I mean, people are consuming information about the presidential race on their TikTok, listening to sports talk, listening to their random podcasts that aren’t about sports at all that are cultural, on women’s blogs, at a school function, people are talking about it casually, you know what I mean?

I’m a parent, and obviously this is a little bit of selection bias since I’m in politics and people know that, but people don’t come up to me and ask me what I think about the House race in my district. Nobody’s mentioned Troy Carter to me at any events,, at any school functions or any of my kids’ sporting events.

Demsas: He’s got to get his name out there. [Laughs.]

Miller: And so the information environment is just a total category difference. And Trump and even J. D. Vance in certain ways were able to take advantage of that by running campaigns that are a little bit more unwieldy, that are better for viral clips, that are also better for sitting down for two hours and broing out with the Theo Von and talking about how you can’t even do coke in this country anymore because the fentanyl is in it, right?

She wasn’t doing any of that. And doing one of those interviews isn’t really the answer, right? It’s like, can you communicate in a way that feels authentic? It might be fake authenticity, but in a way that feels authentic to people in their Instagram Stories, in their TikTok, in their podcasts, whatever.

And Democrats are not producing a lot of candidates who I feel are good at that.

Demsas: But I think there’s also this broad concern that the media ecosystem itself is not producing convincing, progressive-sounding or left-leaning media personalities. There’s a 2017 AER study that I remember being very, very shocking to people when it first came out, right after Trump’s election in 2016. And there are a couple economists, they look at the effect of Fox News, and they find that watching Fox News for an additional 2.5 minutes per week increases the vote share by 0.3 percentage points. But watching MSNBC has essentially no effect, and they see that Fox News is actually able to shift viewers’ attitudes rightward. And they look at 2004 and 2008 and find that Republican presidential candidates’ share of the two-party vote would have been more than three points lower in 2004, and six points lower in 2008 without Fox News.

And so that’s something where I’m just like—there is something to the fact that the media ecosystem does not have that sort of targeted apparatus. But my usual belief about these sorts of things is that we’re discounting the fact that so much of the media is so liberal that Fox News can have this large effect because it I think stands out among a pack of more liberal institutions, but I am kind of surprised at MSNBC.

Miller: Yeah, I mean, as a person on MSNBC, did that study go on before I was a political contributor? I think it did. So we might need to update the study and have them focus on my hits and see if that changes anything.

I guess I want to noodle on that for a little bit. That does surprise me a little bit as well, but I would say this: I think that I’m less concerned. I think there’s a category of person out there, and maybe this is right, that is focused on Republicans have better propaganda outlets than the Democrats do.

Demsas: Yeah.

Miller: And maybe that’s true. I don’t know. So to me, then the question is, okay, what can be done? What is realistic in this media environment? And it goes back to this question of, can the Democrats speak more through using existing outlets or finding a candidate who has a compelling story in their own right, or compelling communication skills to figure out how to speak to people that don’t watch mainstream news?

And that’s just really what it comes down to. The Democrats are very good at talking to people that are high-information, high-engagement, high-education, middle-to-high-income, and offering persuasive arguments. I think that they’re not good at talking to anybody else. And Obama was good at that, and Clinton was good at that. And we’re in a totally different media environment now than we were back then. But I think that there’s still things that can be learned from that.

[Music]

Demsas: After the break, why the abortion-ballot-measure strategy didn’t pan out for the Harris campaign.

[Break]

Demsas: I want to pull us out of this media conversation here, because I think that there’s also this, let’s say things go a little bit differently—and again, the margins here are not very big—and Harris has won.

I think one of the big things we’d be hearing right now is that she won because of abortion, right? And looking at Election Night, you see a lot of wins for abortion. There are 10 states that have referendums on abortion policies, and seven of them win: New York, Maryland, Arizona, Nevada, Colorado, Montana, Missouri. And in Florida, where it loses, the threshold is 60 percent and it earns 57 percent, so it lost, but there’s clearly a majority in favor.

And, going in, I mean, especially after the midterms, there was a real feeling, kind of the big narrative that came out of those midterms was that abortion is the place where Democrats can clearly distinguish and can clearly win over Republican candidates, even in deeply Republican states, and especially in deeply purple states.

And I’m trying to think through this. What explains in your mind the sort of difference between how many voters were saying, Yes, I do have more liberal views on abortion; I’m willing to express those in these ballot measures; but no, I’m not going to then reward Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris for it?

Miller: Well, a couple of things. No. 1, this tension has always existed as old as time, and it’s particularly existed as old as time in places like Florida. I did one of these, you know, time is a flat circle—

Demsas: [Laughs.]

Miller: I forget which election it was at this point, but it was like, how did the minimum-wage-increase ballot initiative in Florida pass at the same time that Ron DeSantis won by 18 points or whatever, whichever election that was.

And it’s like, voters are complicated. Voters have complex views. And so you see this as kind of just a common thing in voter habits. In this case, I think that there are a couple of complicating factors in addition. No. 1 was, Donald Trump muddied the waters on his views.

Demsas: Yeah.

Miller: And I think that Donald Trump’s whole brand and vibe—I know we’re getting outside of the data space that you like to be in, Jerusalem, but there’s a certain group of people that are like, Yeah, that guy’s not gonna ban abortion. You know what I mean? And there’s just some percentage of voters out there that that’s just it. He doesn’t come off like Ted Cruz on abortion. He comes off as different, because they assume that he paid for an abortion or whatever, that he doesn’t care about it, and that he’s not gonna—this isn’t gonna be what he’s focused on. There are going to be people that are pro-choice that prioritize their economic views or their nativist views, right?

So that is going to be some of it. I think less so in Florida, but more in Arizona. To me, I think that there is actually a strategic backfiring of having these ballot initiatives on the ballot almost gave some people an out to do both, right? People that did not like Kamala Harris or that were more center-right and said, Oh, okay, great, I can protect abortion in Arizona and also vote for Donald Trump. I can have my cake and eat it, too.

Demsas: Yeah, I mean, I think my read of it is more that when you think about the specific argument being made about abortion, it was largely, he’s to blame for all these horrible things that are happening to women in states that have made abortion inaccessible. And by he, I mean Trump is to blame for that. And also, you know, he appointed these Supreme Court nominees who overturned Roe v. Wade. But as a prescription for the future, I feel like there was not a real clear argument made to voters of how Kamala Harris is going to actually protect abortion.

But again, it all comes back to the overarching question, did voters view this as an abortion election? And it seems clear that they viewed it as an inflation election. That was the core thing that they were focused on. And I think that one thing that I’ve heard a lot is what this means for understanding America, right?

So after 2016, people were just, I think, in shock, and were saying, I can’t believe this is the country I live in. And again here I’m hearing the sort of question of, you know, this is a black mark on the conscience of America, that people would vote for someone who threatened to overturn the results of the 2020 election, who talks with such liberal disdain for women and immigrants.

Something someone said to me in 2016 was really interesting: If your entire perception of America would have shifted if a few hundred thousand people voted differently, maybe don’t completely change everything you believe about everyone. And to me, I think that this framing about Trump’s reelection means something really dark about all the people that voted for him doesn’t really sit well with me because it seems like people are voting based on cost of living. At the same time, too, I think they’re taking their signal from Democrats who, if they’d taken their own warnings about the threat of fascism or the threat to our institutions, I think would have behaved very differently over the past couple of years in trying to win.

Miller: Yeah. It doesn’t change my view of the American people, really, that there are good people and bad people everywhere, that we all have good and bad inside of us. I’ll say that what it does impact for me—and maybe this is wrong and maybe I’m raw and it’s six days out—but for those of us who do have a belief that there’s something kind of special about the American system and that have revered America, that understand that America is flawed and has made mistakes but still is a unique experiment in the world. You know, the “America is an idea” type of thing.

The idea is pretty dim at this point. And, to me, that is the change, having him win again, that I’m having trouble getting over. Mentally, it’s not that it makes me look poorly at my neighbors, but that we just might be at the end of the experiment and the sense that America is something different than Hungary or Switzerland or whatever, any country—you name the country.

It was the old fight with Republicans and Democrats during the Obama years, which is, Obama doesn’t think of America as any different than Belgium. Obama believes in Belgian exceptionalism. And that to me is kind of where I am. I think that we’re about to move into an era where America’s flaws, in addition to all of our existing flaws like gun violence and our history of racism, et cetera—the American system’s flaws look a lot more like what flaws look like in other countries.

There’s going to be oligarchy, kleptocracy, corruption. There’s no special sense that the huddled masses around the world are welcome here any more than they might be welcome anywhere else. They frankly are probably going to be welcome here less than they’re welcome in certain other places.

And so to me, that is what I see differently. I reserve the right to change my mind about that at some point, but that’s where I’m at right now.

Demsas: Yeah. I think in contrast to this large view about the American idea of maybe being different than we believed beforehand is this, I think, really popular take that’s picking up steam, which is about just Democrats need to moderate on cultural issues, whether it’s about immigration, or it’s the issue of trans women and girls in sports. They’re just too left of the median voter, and you don’t actually need to do a bunch else other than accept that people are where they are on those places and not go so far away from it.

The data point that’s kind of in favor of this, particularly on the trans-girls-in-sports one, is Kamala Harris’s leading super PAC, Future Forward, finds that the most effective, or one of the most effective, Trump ads is one of the “Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you” ads. They find that it shifted the race 2.7 percentage points in Trump’s favor after people watched it.

How relevant do you think that the Democratic Party’s leftward shift on cultural issues is to Harris’s loss? And I mean, there’s some people who I think are really making the claim that you could just really focus on this and you don’t need to make these kind of larger arguments about strategy or how we’re speaking to America on economic policy.

Miller: I don’t think that this was alone to account for Harris’s loss or even maybe the biggest thing to account for her loss. I think that she didn’t really respond to that ad in particular quite well, and that maybe that was a strategic mistake. I think her campaign—and she didn’t run like an overly “woke,” culturally left campaign. Ao the question is, did the Democratic brand on those issues drag her down? I think possibly.

To me, look, could Kamala Harris have squeaked out a victory this time while holding the same positions on trans issues had inflation been 20 percent better? Maybe. Probably. It was a clear victory for Trump, but it wasn’t, you know, Reagan ’84.

A couple of things changed, and had that one, the cultural stuff stayed static, could she have still won? Clearly. I mean, Biden won in 2020, when all of those issues were more high-salience, I think, than they were this time. Biden, not a Black woman—so maybe there’s something to that as well, that he was able to be a little bit more resilient against attacks on those issues.

So maybe that’s worth thinking about. I would say this, though. If the Democrats want to have 60 senators again ever, then yeah, they got to moderate on cultural issues. You know what I mean? There are two ways to look at this: Can Democrats still win elections by maintaining their views on everything? Yes. Are the Democrats giving away huge swaths of the country by not really even engaging with their concerns about the leftward shift of the party on a wide array of issues? Yeah, they are. I get the land-doesn’t-vote thing, I get it, but look at the map.

Demsas: [Laughs.] We’ve all seen the map.

Miller: The map is still the map, you know what I mean?

And Trump gained in all of those little red counties out there where it’s just land, all right? But he gained. There are a handful of people out there, and he got more of them, in every county. And the Democrats’, I think, choice to just say, Well, we’re just giving up on that and we’re just going to focus on the more dynamic parts of the growing parts of the country and, eventually, demographics are destiny and blah, blah, blah, that looks like a pretty bad bet today.

I’m not out here being like, yeah, you got to throw trans people or migrants under the bus for them to win. But certainly the cultural leftward shift has created a ceiling on Democratic support that I think has a negative effect for the party, but also for progress on a lot of those issues.

Demsas: Yeah. I think it’s obviously very up in the air here, how people are gonna take this mantle of how you should moderate, and I think that there’s bad and good ways that people can take this. And I think that there’s a level to which people—you don’t have to be throwing trans people under the bus. Maybe we need to figure out ways, whether it’s how Democrats responded to this with gay rights, where they talked about federalism a lot and made sure the country moved toward the issue before making it a national issue.

But I think the most important and damning thing that Democrats are clearly responsible for in the choices they have made is about the poor governance in blue cities and states. This is one of my hobbyhorses, but you see massive shifts, as you mentioned, in high-cost-of-living places that are heavily democratic, in New York and in California and in a lot of the Northeast. And I think it’s hard to see that as anything other than just a repudiation of Democratic governance and particularly the cost of living and the cost of housing in these places.

And so, to me, when you talked about the Democratic brand, I mean, when you’re in a cost-of-living election, yes, there are marginal effects on these cultural issues we’re talking about here. Yes, there are things that campaigns can do better. Yes, there are candidate effects. But if people are asking themselves, What does it look like, how does it feel to my pocketbook to live in a Democratically run state versus a Republican one? I feel like they’re being told a very clear story.

Miller: I think that that’s true. I’ve been ruminating on this a lot over the past week. I live in Louisiana, so there is the kind of emotional guttural response I have to this, which is, do you think Louisiana is being governed that well? Because I don’t.

Demsas: Yeah. Well, on cost, though, right? It’s cheaper, obviously, to have a house in Louisiana.

Miller: It’s cheaper to have a house in Louisiana because of the economic destruction of the state over the past couple of decades and the fact that everybody that grows up in parts of the state that’s not this corridor between New Orleans and Baton Rouge leave home. And a lot of people in these places leave home, too, looking for better economic opportunities. And that’s sad for the state.

That is my initial response, which is emotional, which is like, okay, sure. But why does Kamala Harris have to carry the baggage for the place I used to live—Oakland—but Donald Trump doesn’t have to carry the baggage for the hollowing out of big parts of Louisiana? That said, it’s true that it hurt the Democrats, right? And it’s also true that the Democrats have been badly managing these big cities. And if you just look at the numbers, suburban Democrats—and this could be a counterargument. Now, I’m going to really give you a galaxy brain, Jerusalem, to your original data point earlier that the three-point effect in the battleground states versus national speaks to a campaign effect? Maybe.

Maybe it also speaks to the fact that a lot of these battleground states are made up of places that have mixed governance and big suburbs where the Democrats are doing better. Democrats are doing better in suburban America because they know they’re not feeling the acute pain of governing issues that have plagued a lot of the big cities. And surely there are a couple of big cities in those seven swing states, but none of the ones you think of when you think of major disruptions, and that maybe that explains it and that the Republican gains were in a lot more of those places like that, Illinois, New Jersey, California. Anyway, just something to noodle on.

But I think that it is objectively true that Democrats are doing better in places that have not been plagued by some of these bad governing decisions on crime and on housing that we’ve seen for in Democratic cities, and the Democratic mayors and Democratic governors in blue states should fix that.

And it’s the No. 1 thing—the last thing I’ll say on this is—the No. 1 thing that comes to mind when I already hear stupid parlor-game stuff about 2028 and it’s like Gavin Newsom and J. B. Pritzker. And to me, the No. 1 thing Gavin Newsom and J. B. Pritzker need to do if they want to run in 2027 is make Illinois and California run better in the meantime. Otherwise, nothing against either of those two guys, but I think that they’re going to carry this baggage that you’re talking about.

Demsas: Well, I could go on about housing in blue states forever. And there’s an article popping, I think today, listeners, as you’re hearing about this, about why I think this was a big issue for the election.

But Tim, always our last and final question.

Miller: Okay.

Miller: What is something that you once thought was a good idea but ended up only being good on paper?

Miller: Oh, okay. Hold on. I wasn’t prepared for this. I misread the question. I thought it was an idea that was only good on paper that then ended up being not good on paper.

Demsas: Idea could be good.

Miller: No, no, no. I’ll come up with one where I’m wrong. I’m happy to bet where I’m wrong. I was just saying the ideas are endless on those.

Demsas: Oh. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Something that you held, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Miller: An idea that I thought that was good on paper that ended up not being good on paper. Well, I guess I have to give the obvious answer to that question, sadly. I don’t get to rant about daylight savings time as I hoped to—an idea that was certainly good on paper in the 1800s or whenever they came up with it that’s no longer good. Falling back, that is. Permanent daylight saving time: good idea.

Changing times: not good.

Demsas: Four hundred electoral votes for whoever does this.

Miller: Yeah. The idea that I thought that was good on paper that is relevant to this podcast—because I literally put it on paper and wrote it—was the aforementioned 2013 GOP autopsy.

Demsas: Oh, yeah.

Miller: Well, how great! Compassionate conservatism. Republicans can diversify their party by getting softer on cultural issues and reaching out to the suburbs and reaching out to Hispanic voters and Black voters, criminal-justice reform, and that through criminal-justice reform and immigration reform and softening on gays, that Republicans can have a new, diverse electorate, and we can all move into a happy, bipartisan future.

That was a great idea on paper that backfired spectacularly, and now the Republicans have their most diverse electorate that they’ve had ever, I think, voting for Donald Trump after rejecting all of those suggestions that I put on paper. So there you go.

Demsas: As one vote of confidence for younger Tim, there are very many ways that history could have gone. I think that people often forget how contingent things are and how unique of a figure Trump is. And right now we’ve talked through a bunch of different ways that people are reading this moment, but there are a lot of ways that people can go, depending on what candidates do and say and how they catch fire and their charisma and what ends up being relevant in two years and in four years. So a little bit of sympathy for younger Tim.

Miller: I appreciate that. And that is true. Who the hell knows, right?

Demsas: Yeah, exactly.

Miller: Had Donald Trump not run that time and he decided he wanted to do some other scam instead, then maybe Marco Rubio is the nominee and those things do come to pass.

Demsas: [Laughs.] Yeah. If Obama doesn’t make fun of him at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, we’re not even sitting here on this podcast.

Miller: Great job, Jon Lovett, or whoever wrote that joke.

Demsas: [Laughs.]

Miller: I’m just joking.

Demsas: Yeah. Well, thank you so much, Tim. Thanks for coming on the show.

Miller: Thank you, Jerusalem.

[Music]

Demsas: Good on Paper is produced by Jinae West. It was edited by Claudine Ebeid and engineered by Erica Huang. Our theme music is composed by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio. Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

And hey, if you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts.

I’m Jerusalem Demsas, and we’ll see you next week.

Donald Trump is heading back to the White House. He has inflation to thank.

In poll after poll, focus group after focus group, Americans said the economy was bad—and the economy was bad because prices were too high. This was always going to be a problem for Kamala Harris. “Excess” inflation—defined as the cumulative growth of prices in one presidential term compared with the term preceding it—is highly predictive of electoral outcomes, according to the Northwestern economist Robert Gordon. It is a crucial part of how voters decide whether they are better off and want to stick with the incumbent. The measure strongly pointed to a Trump victory. Indeed, since the global post-pandemic inflation spike began, ruling parties around the world, on the left and the right, have been toppled.

Still, before this week, Democrats had good reasons to believe that they might be spared the inflation backlash. Households’ spending power improved more and faster in the United States than in other countries. On paper, families were doing better than they were before the pandemic, particularly at the low end of the income spectrum. Real wages—meaning wages adjusted for prices—jumped 13.2 percent for the lowest-income workers from 2019 to 2023; real wages for the highest-income workers climbed 4.4 percent.

[From the April 2024 issue: What would it take to convince Americans that the economy is fine?]

But voters do not make their decisions at the polls on the basis of price-adjusted time series. Nor do they seem to appreciate pundits and politicians telling them that their lived experience is somehow incorrect—that they are truly doing great; they just don’t know it.

Prices spiked more during the Biden administration than at any point since the early 1980s. In some categories, they remain unsustainably high. Home prices have jumped an astonishing 47 percent since early 2020. This has made homeowners wealthier on paper, but has priced millions of people out of the housing market. The situation with rented homes is no better. Costs are up more than 20 percent since COVID hit, and have doubled in some places. The number of cost-burdened renters is at an all-time high.

In response to inflation, the Federal Reserve raised interest rates. Inflation statistics do not include the cost of borrowing, but many Americans experienced higher rates—the supposed cure for higher prices—as making costs worse. Mortgage rates more than doubled from their pandemic-era level, adding insult to home-buying injury. The interest payment on a new-car loan has grown nearly as much. Credit-card APRs climbed to all-time highs, making many families’ buffer against month-to-month earnings and spending changes a costly one. If you include the cost of borrowing, inflation peaked at 18 percent, not 9 percent.

When asked over the past few years about their personal financial stressors, however, voters mostly haven’t focused on housing or auto loans. They overwhelmingly brought up everyday purchases, above all the price of groceries and fast food. Food inflation outpaced the overall rate for much of the Biden administration; in 2022, when inflation was 6.5 percent, the price of groceries grew by 11.8 percent. The price hikes cooled off in 2023, but prices themselves remained far higher than Americans were used to: Margarine, eggs, peanut butter, crackers, and bread all cost more than 40 percent more than they did just a few years ago. That everyday indignity seems to be what made inflation so salient for voters. The mental math families were tasked with felt excruciating. The sticker shock remained shocking.

[Annie Lowrey: The worst best economy ever]

The optimistic story for the Harris campaign was that, after a year of subdued price growth, the American people would have gotten used to higher bills and appreciated the earning power they gained from the tight labor market. Instead, anger at inflation lingered, even among tens of millions of working-class Americans who had gotten wealthier. This is not a purely economic story; it’s a psychological one too. People interpret wage gains as a product of their own effort and high costs as a policy problem that the president is supposed to solve. Going to the polls, voters still ranked the economy as their No. 1 issue, inflation as the No. 1 economic problem, and Trump as their preferred candidate to deal with it. In interviews, many voters told me they felt as if Democrats were gaslighting them by insisting that they were thriving.

Voters who expect Trump’s victory to herald a return to 2019 prices or relief from the cost-of-living crisis might be due for disappointment, though. Trump’s signature economic proposal of huge global tariffs would immediately raise the cost of household goods. And his promise to round up and deport millions of undocumented immigrants could create a labor shortage that would raise the cost of food, construction, home health care, and child care. He has offered no serious plan to address the deep, tangled problems that have made a middle-class life so unobtainable for so many Americans. Those problems preceded the Biden administration, and they will outlast the second Trump administration too.