After staying up all night to watch the election returns, Vogue’s political correspondent Jack Schlossberg arrived at The Run-Through studio on Wednesday morning none the worse for wear—but in a reflective mood about the meaning of the historic vote. He spoke to Chloe Malle and me about what this week’s result means for the Democratic Party–and why he’s feeling hopeful for the future. Listen to the entire conversation below—and read an edited version here.
Chloe Malle: Jack, tell us about your night last night?
Jack Schlossberg: I was by myself. I tried to watch with my sisters and dad and but I lasted about five minutes. At that point, I was still excited and I didn’t know what was going on.
Malle: What did you eat?
Schlossberg: Steak because I got so much steak earlier this week. Leftover steak—nothing wrong with that. And I’ve made mayonnaise kind of my thing this year, so I did put mayonnaise on it.
Taylor Antrim: God, I love mayonnaise. I love it. My daughter and I love mayonnaise.
Malle: What time did you go to bed and what was happening?
Schlossberg: I did not go to bed… I’m not sad. I’m disappointed the person that I voted for didn’t win.
Malle: And that you worked frankly really hard campaigning for—
Schlossberg: Yeah, and I really believed, and still do, in the Democratic Party, and I feel like I have a unique perspective on that. I think that a lot of people my age maybe aren’t really proud to be a Democrat. And I think that this election is very interestingly showing that Democrats have some work to do there. So, it didn’t work out—but you don’t always win. I think she ran a great campaign under the circumstances—but it wasn’t like this was everybody’s idea of a perfect plan from the beginning.
Malle: You’ve been with a lot of young people across the country over the last two months and I am curious what you found.
Schlossberg: Well, in trying to think of a positive lining this morning, I thought about how I traveled to almost all of the swing states, to tons of events, and met thousands of…frankly, young women, not many young men, but so many young women, who were excited, enthusiastic, engaged, making friendship bracelets, completely committed and doing on-the-ground work, and I think that if Kamala Harris hadn’t been the nominee and President Biden hadn’t graciously stepped down, none of those people would have gotten involved in this election. And so things could be way more bleak and instead—even though we didn’t win—we did get a lot of people who otherwise wouldn’t have been excited involved.
Malle: It was galvanizing. There was electricity to the campaign that wouldn’t have been there otherwise.
Antrim: I think that’s right, and I think back to those early first rallies Vice President Harris did, and to the convention, and it is hard not to feel a little bit of a disconnect with the results. Donald Trump has won the electoral college and notably, he won the popular vote, which no Republican has done since George W. Bush. So, it’s hard for me to sort through the contradiction between the energy from the convention and those early rallies, and where we’re sitting this morning. How do you square it all?
Schlossberg: I think both things can be true. I think people were really excited and I also think that the economy is the most important thing in every election. And so people can be really really excited about a lot of different things but if you’re going up against the ultimate headwind of inflation, then it’s going to be tough to win for anybody at any time. And I think that Democrats didn’t do a great job selling the economic record over the last four years and so all of a sudden it was up to her to do that in a hundred days. Clearly, the electorate voted on the economy this time, and for a very clear message from Trump of lower taxes and anti-immigration. Those aren’t as exciting issues as what we latched onto: democracy, freedom, reproductive rights, economic opportunity. Those are also more vague, and maybe they didn’t translate as well.
Antrim: Trump seemed to do better almost everywhere. The New York Times has these maps where they have these little red arrows that show where he outperformed compared to 2020, and it’s just a sea of red arrows. It’s very dramatic.
Schlossberg: He built a really diverse, broad coalition. But the lesson that I hope Democrats don’t learn here is that we focused too much on social media, and that it’s got to be economics all the way. I don’t think that’s why Trump won. I think that Trump won because he’s an amazingly omnipresent media figure, and we didn’t do a good job of making a ton of media until the very end. I really hope that people don’t think, ‘Oh, Brat summer was fluff or hype and that didn’t pan out.’ I feel like my lesson from it was: No, that was a vein of energy that the Democrats tapped into and finally harnessed. I think that it really did make a big difference for people.
Malle: You spent a lot of time in Pennsylvania. What was your feeling on the ground in person? Where were you?
Schlossberg: I was in Philadelphia and Bucks County and I think my broad impression of the whole time on the road was that the message from Democrats was resonating really well with a very specific person. And that Trump had become something other than what I thought of him as: a mainstream, down-the-middle option. Which I didn’t see coming. And I think kind of happened pretty fast. There’s been a trend on conservative media, especially social media, reinforcing his image as a masculine hero which I think did a lot to make him feel more mainstream.
Antrim: I think that if you look at your media appetite and you think about the election, there’s a whole side of things that you just never got. Like, this idea that Trump is down-the-middle… If you were reading The New York Times the last few weeks, it seems like Trump was deranged and about to collapse on stage.
Malle: Well, let me tell you, my mother is a faithful New York Post reader, and any time I’m over there, I’m astounded at how normalizing it is of Trump.
Antrim: What is your thinking about a media appetite, Jack? What is the way to be an informed person now?
Schlossberg: I don’t know that I’m the archetype of a responsible media consumer, but I will say that a story from this election that is undoubtedly true and going to shape politics going forward, is how social media is now central to political campaigns and I saw that firsthand. Whenever we would go to a governor in Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada, Pennsylvania—senators, too—they all have these little production companies, or like two 25-year-olds who just like crank out videos and they don’t do traditional media as much anymore. Or they do a podcast, like Joe Rogan, which is not how it used to be.
So, I don’t know where traditional media goes from here. No one that I know watches cable news. You have to make social media videos or they’ll be watching something else.
Malle: Abortion was a major issue going into this election, it was very much top-of-ballot for a lot of people. What happened?
Schlossberg: I think that reproductive rights were extremely motivating during the midterm elections, but during the presidential election, it seemed to be less of a concern and factor in voting preferences. So that’s a big surprise, actually. I think the Harris campaign, to their credit, said, okay, democracy and reproductive rights are the things that we’re gonna hammer. But I think, obviously, a different message resonated this time.
Malle: Ok, what were a few bright spots for Democrats?
Antrim: I mean, I think about North Carolina where Josh Stein beat Mark Robinson.
Schlossberg: Senator Tammy Baldwin held onto her seat in Wisconsin. That’s great. I’m very excited about that. Hopefully, Laura Gillen in New York, in Nassau County, will win.
Malle: Sarah McBride, the first transgender rep in U.S. history, won in Delaware.
Antrim: I’m curious about who this election is going to make space for in the Democratic Party. I wonder if there are any people that have really impressed you and that you’ll be paying attention to in the years to come.
Schlossberg: The Democratic Party has tons of super-compelling, inspiring senators and governors across the country: Governor Shapiro, Pennsylvania; Governor Whitmer, Michigan; Governor Newsom, California. There’s a lot of very exciting people.
I think that, hidden behind all of this is a changing of the guard. The old guard held on a pretty long time, but, for example, Speaker Pelosi is no longer going to be running the party. President Biden won’t be either. And at the same time, the party clearly needs to change what it’s focusing on. So I think there’s a lot of room for development.
Antrim: I think also about Maryland Governor Wes Moore. He’s a superstar. To spend 10 minutes with him is to feel like, okay, the Democratic Party’s got some interesting people in it.
Schlossberg: The next person has got to be really good on social media. I’m convinced of this. I think if nothing else that’s now paramount to any campaign. You have such an advantage if the candidate is a content machine.
Antrim: What did you make of the word-salad criticism of Harris? The criticism that she wasn’t able to kind of marshal herself rhetorically to speak in a way that was clear and direct.
Schlossberg: I think part of running a successful presidential campaign is getting to win a primary and then adapting and figuring it out as you go—and that’s the only and the best training for running a successful campaign. And they didn’t get to do that or test anything so everyone was kind of guessing. Like, okay, I think it’s reproductive rights and democracy, but then, obviously, we found out that people were more focused on the economy.
Malle: What would you say to people who are struggling this week and advice on getting through it? Chloe Schama wrote a nice piece about how to talk to your kids about the election. I really struggled with that this morning.
Schlossberg: Well, there’s midterms in two years. Trump is a one-term president. Even if Harris had won, we would still have to keep working really hard. And, you know, Democrats lost for a really long time; my parents always say that. But I grew up with Bill Clinton and Obama, so it seemed like we could win. And then we’re fighting this thing that’s happening around the world: incoming governments are getting displaced because of inflation.
Antrim: Yeah, I mean, I got my kids out the door this morning—my kids are older, 10 and 12—and I was very straightforward and said, ‘Trump won. It’s going to be ok.’ That feels like the message that I want to send as a parent, which is, ‘We got you, life goes on.’ After I got my kids off to school I took the subway into work and the G train and the A train were so crowded. The normalcy of that, of everyone being on the subway together and just heading in, to me felt quite sustaining, so I thought to myself, in the days and weeks to come, if I want to feel normal, what I’m going to do is go about my daily life with the rest of the city… What are you planning to do in the days and weeks ahead?
Schlossberg: Well I started reading poetry last night, which shows you my mental state. I googled ‘super tragic poems famous’ and I found some good Robert Frost and Civil War poems and “The Charge of the the Light Brigade,” and thought about how bad people had it in the past, what it could be like, how lucky we are.
Malle: Poetry is actually a very good note. I support that.
Antrim: What are your poetry search terms, Chloe? Actually…let’s save that for another pod.
