Throughout this election cycle, Don Lemon has been taking the pulse of the election person by person in cities across the country. During his walkabouts, the former CNN personality spoke with all kinds of people, gauging their sentiments about Vice President Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, the president-elect for a second time.
Snippets of Lemon's vox pop conversations proved popular and were shared and reshared across social media. Some answers were surprising. Many were predictable but entertaining, capturing a cross-section of humanity in our politics.
But on the cold November morning following Trump’s re-election, we should recognize the ways those battleground interactions warned us. I’m not talking about the election’s outcome, although, as "The Don Lemon Show" host told his former CNN colleagues, he learned a few things the Harris campaign reportedly ignored.
What I’m referring to is something most news organizations, pundits and every unreformed poll addict hasn't accepted, which is the profound extent to which the public's aversion to facts and information has reorganized our reality.
This isn’t exactly breaking news. Years of polls cite the downward trend in the public’s trust in establishment news and the concurrent rise and expansion of the right-wing media ecosystem.
But as we process what went wrong with election coverage – again, and probably not for the last time – part of that reckoning requires studying why so many voters ignored informed warnings of what a second Trump term would mean for the world.
Lemon’s clipped-out conversations contain a few clues, especially about how Gen Z digests political information. The TL;DR version? They don’t. Mainstream news doesn't exist to them because facts are what they or Elon Musk's social media platform make of them, if they matter at all.
There were the first-time (non) voters like the two young women who told Lemon that they either didn’t intend to vote or already did, and for Trump. Why? “No reason. No specifics,” one told Lemon when asked to explain her candidate choice, who she left unspecified. Her companion, who wasn’t voting, said she’d choose Trump if she were to cast a ballot but couldn't say why other than, “It’s just where I’m from.”
Another young woman in Georgia had already voted for Trump, explaining that her father was a cop for 28 years who was running for sheriff.
When Lemon asked how her vote squared with the knowing Trump's supporters attacked police officers at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, she admitted she didn’t talk to her father about "that whole thing, for Jan. 6." Then she shared an illuminating insight. “I think it all gets jumbled up. And I think a lot of it is based off of, like, how you see the person,” explaining that most people are voting based on who they like or don’t like. “I don't think people think about, like, what it's actually going to do for, like, economy-wise and everything like that.”
Few journalists are fans of man-on-the-street interviews. In classic newsrooms of yesteryears, the roaming reporter gig fell to interns or green staffers as a way of paying their dues. It’s a tough assignment because most people don’t want to talk to a reporter either because they don’t have the time or they despise journalists.
Having been on both sides of such microphones, I get it. Having a stranger walk up to ask your opinion about some issue of the moment that you may know or care very little about is intrusive and off-putting. Reporters may not be fans of the format, but social media content producers love it. So do comedians like Jimmy Kimmel, whose roving segments regularly entertain the audience with gleeful reminders of how little the public knows about . . . everything.
Entire TikTok, YouTube and Instagram accounts thrive on recording the opinions and reactions of random people willing to play along with whatever their brand represents. Meeting news consumers on those platforms is crucial. Especially TikTok, which 39% of adults under 30 cite as a regular news source, according to a Pew Research Center survey.
But it's not simply a matter of being there. Interviewers like Lemon prove there’s an art to successful field reporting. You can tell his subjects enjoy speaking with him. His familiarity as a former CNN primetime host explains some of that, but I doubt most of the Gen Z voters he talked to recognize him from cable news.
He’s personable, knowledgeable, curious and holding a mic. To members of an age group that commits their every move to video, that's really all he needs.
Lemon was clear in his support for Harris throughout the fall. But when he speaks to Trump voters and gently questions their understanding of the policies they may or may not understand, he doesn't attack them.
A few he peppers with rapid-fire refutations attempting to show why their reasons don't align with fact, but one gets the sense he isn't trying to win a debate as much as grant his subjects an opportunity to double down.
Lemon doesn’t even flinch when one man politely explains one reason he's choosing Trump is that he doesn’t stand for LGBTQ rights, and that “it’s clearly in the Bible that you can’t be gay,” unaware that his interviewer is a gay man.
To a person, their answers were offered in a spirit of friendliness and candor, facilitating a better understanding of their motivations. Unsurprisingly, most of it boils down to fear.
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It would be dishonest of me to refrain from mentioning the other common conclusion which is widespread ignorance – meaning, a lack of knowledge, education or awareness. Some of that is a product of an educational system scrubbed clean of inconvenient history and basic civics lessons by conservative lobbyists and politicians.
Much more has to do with a reductive view that the news is little more than misleading noise, which explains why tuning in to a handful of clear voices claiming they have the answer holds a fierce appeal. One North Carolina man to whom Lemon spoke summed up his reason for voting for Trump this way.
“All of the propaganda has me leaning towards Trump. I don’t know,” he said.
“But what do you mean? What propaganda?” Lemon asked.
“Everything external to me. You know, all my sources of information. You know, nothing being original.” Lemon asked him to cite examples. He couldn’t. But he found it easier to say why he didn't like Harris — again, without giving fact-based examples.
The common sentiment among the high-volume information consumers and the chattering class is that low-information voters are a major reason Trump won. That ignores a vital truism driving Gen Z to the Joe Rogans of the world: To them, people who get their news from network and cable sources and legacy media outlets that once printed blog posts on paper are the low information demographic.
Podcasters validate their fears and doubts, cite fallacious research, or more speciously, quote the all-purpose source of “some” or “they” without evidence.
They encourage outsized skepticism about everything. To be clear, this isn't healthy skepticism, the foundation of critical thinking. It isn’t a skepticism that encourages consulting accredited experts or peer-reviewed research, tracking down solid sources or anything beyond cursory searches.
Instead of questioning everything, it preaches the virtue of believing in nothing but the confident voices of those who validate their anxieties without offering honest reasons or answers as to why they exist. It encourages the abdication of our duty to remain informed about what people in power are doing or intend to do with or to us.
Stephen Colbert, in his satirical guise as host of Comedy Central’s “The Colbert Report,” defined this phenomenon as “truthiness," a term that's since become a dictionary entry. Merriam-Webster defines it as “a truthful or seemingly truthful quality that is claimed for something not because of supporting facts or evidence but because of a feeling that it is true or a desire for it to be true.”
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In 2005, when he coined the term Colbert was referring to the worldview espoused by Fox News and conservative radio. Now it defines how many people interface with the waking world in the modern age.
My former Salon colleague Matthew Sheffield pointed out on election night that “The average American is surrounded by partisan brainwashing media. There are now 7 right-wing infotainment channels and 1 MSNBC.” Not included in that count are the dozens of personality-driven, right-wing podcasts and YouTube channels, along with influential entertainment figures like Rogan whose conversation with Trump sold him to a demographic that shuns standard news: white college students, primarily male.
The electorate that ushered Trump back into office trusts their fears and patriarchal order and takes conversational declarations that are the podcast personality’s specialty as gospel. Among the voters who aren’t zeroed in on those sources simmers a profound sense of disconnectedness or any inkling that the election mattered at all.
This is why Lemon’s pavement pounding in this election cycle was crucial. He’s one of the few journalists consistently taking the public’s temperature outside of network studios and curated undecided voter groups, not to mention the highest profile. And if you paid attention to his chats, this election's outcome may not have shocked you quite as much even as it may frighten you to the marrow.
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