Against "Vibes"

A quick word on a word that we should all leave behind next year.

(Credit for the voiceover for this article goes to the great Samuel Lipson)

In the two years that I have written for this newsletter, I have been quite liberal in the kind of language that I use. Over the course of the 2024 election, however, I developed something of an informal rule against a word that became very, very popular among political writers: “vibes.” From opinion articles to polling summaries to even reports from newswire services, it was hard to find any writing on the race that didn’t use this new word. Campaigning was described as a “battle of the vibes.” Major developments in the race were referred to as “vibe shifts.” Both campaigns were said to be benefiting from their mastery of the vibes one way or another, sometimes even at the same exact time. Given this, it was no surprise that the consensus takeaway from the eventual results was that the vibes had proved to be more important than anything else.

It was asinine. As time has passed, I have grown to truly dislike this word. Not only do I consider it obscenely overused, but I have come to believe that its usage has made politics worse. Instead of delineating things that are legitimately difficult to describe, it has obfuscated many eminently understandable and very important trends. Not only has this resulted in bad news coverage, but it directly inspired suboptimal campaign strategies that repeatedly gave Trump major advantages. Here’s the case for why every writer’s new favorite word should be left behind in 2024, whether it be for the sake of good prose, good politics, or actually knowing what happened during the last two years.

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The first thing to understand about the word “vibes” is the same thing that makes its domination of the 2024 campaign so remarkable: it is hardly new. Words pointing at vague feelings and associations have dominated social media for well over a decade, from the wide-ranging millennial “moods” and “energies” to the more specific Gen Z declarations that something is “x-core” or “y-pilled.” “Vibes” came in as a later entry into that airy former category, reportedly rising in prominence as a way to describe “vague feelings of uneasiness in the beginning of the pandemic.” It was a pop culture word that stayed tightly within the bounds of pop culture during the first few years of its life in the 2020s, employed exclusively by cultural critics. They used it for what it was worth and then, as always happens, decided that it had run its course. By the start of 2023, the New York Times styles desk predicted that it would fade away over the course of that new year. “At a certain point,” as they declared, “mere ‘vibes’ crystallize into hard facts, and we’re forced to look around and evaluate the circumstances of our lives.” They would put this prognostication at the top of their list of predictions for life in 2023.

Such an end must have made complete sense to the writers on the Times’ style desk, who had seen the uncertain pandemic-era cultural conditions give way to a more “normal” state as COVID dissipated. For liberal political writers, on the other hand, the situation was inverted. Their return to predictability had happened with the election of Joe Biden, who was inaugurated promising a new era of normalcy that he seemed to deliver. As his presidency went on, things went largely as writers thought they would, providing little need for new words meant to explain new phenomena. Biden began popular, as presidents always did, and gradually became unpopular, as presidents also always did. A cost-of-living crisis provided a clear, predictable explanation as to why he was faltering, and Republican victories in off-year elections stood as clear, predictable consequences of his woes. Things were mundane, ordinary, even boring.

Then the 2022 midterms happened. This represented the first major break between expectations and reality of the Biden era. Although results came with a bevy of obvious explanations, the fact that they came in spite of high inflation meant that they still stood as something that wasn’t “supposed” to happen. By voting for who they did, the public was being weird. It wasn’t voting with its pocketbooks as the conventional wisdom said it always did. This all presented an image of a new, strange, even post-material kind of politics. Nobody would use the words “vibes” to describe the central force of this supposedly new world quite yet, but the groundwork for a phrase like it had been laid for the next time that things didn’t go as expected.

This subsequent seeming break from reality would come around the spring of 2023. This was the time that Biden officially declared his re-election bid, trying the fate of the Democratic Party to him and his chronically low approval ratings. The great hope among liberals at the time was that a reduction in inflation without a concurrent increase in the unemployment rate—a so-called “soft landing”—could revive his political standing in time for the election, much like how improving election-year economies had brought Obama, Clinton and Reagan back to positive approval ratings. And in May of that year, less than a week after Biden officially declared his re-election campaign, the economy reached a major milestone. Wage growth had registered higher than inflation for the first time in years. The economic crisis, at least by that metric, was over. Now, voters had no “real” excuse not to fall in line behind their glorious 80-year-old leader.

The public, however, would not prove to be as appreciative of the President and his economy as liberals wanted them to be. Biden’s approval rating stagnated even as wage growth stayed positive. Overall views of the economy remained poor. Even at the time, there were quite a lot of coherent explanations for both of these phenomena for those intellectually curious enough to look for them. First and foremost, the assumption that Biden’s approval rating was based on economic conditions was never entirely solid. He had been sent underwater by the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the questions raised by that were entirely about his perceived competence (or lack thereof). No amount of positive job numbers was ever going to make him any younger or re-establish his pre-presidency reputation as an elder statesman. As far as economic numbers were concerned, even the much-heralded gap between expected and actual consumer confidence could be explained by economic factors. It was hardly a situation where the only logical conclusion one could come to was that TikTok had changed the very nature of democracy forever.

Had liberals accepted these explanations, it would have led them to a number of conclusions that, although uncomfortable, could have sent them in productive directions. Taking a more critical view on Biden’s political viability could have increased pressure for an open primary before it was too late. Understanding economic angst as a reasonable reaction to real conditions would have put them on the same page as the voters they needed to win. But liberals would not accept either of these things. The reasons for their woes, many of them decided, was something other than what was actually happening in the real world. Voters, they said, were no longer responding to reality. Instead, they were caught up in negative feelings about the state of affairs. Where these feelings came from was never entirely clear, but they needed to be corrected before Democrats could do anything else. “Vibes” was chosen as a shorthand for these emotions, providing the budding theory with a catchy, memeable tagline that headline editors the country over would utterly fail to resist.

The choice to use this specific word turned out to be incredibly important. It turned what could have been a productive line of inquiry in how voters think into a deeply counterproductive exercise in paternalism and condescension. With discontent now categorized by liberals as simply “vibes,” all aspects of politics that didn’t involve appreciation of the economy (and Joe Biden by extension) were cast as wholly illogical and, most importantly, fundamentally incomprehensible. Such beliefs had to invariably be products of lies, and lies could not be dealt with on their own terms. To fix this, it followed, the only path forward was to win the information war by convincing voters not to believe their lying eyes.

No less than the White House itself would take up this precise task in the summer of 2023. With the launch of its “Bidenomics” PR campaign—a major break from the “I feel your pain” messaging that Biden engaged in the year prior—the administration sought to take full ownership over the economy. They repeated constantly that the status quo was not only a success story, but the explicitly desired outcome of their economic plan. It provided the relentlessly positive story that the vibesologists had long waited for, directly challenging the pessimistic beliefs about the economy that so many felt. If it really were the case that it was just the tone of political discourse that was causing people to feel down, this full-court-press of optimism would have been just what was needed to fix it.

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It didn’t work. The White House’s effort to rescue the vibes would end up a complete flop, so ineffective that it would be all but abandoned before the end of the calendar year of 2023. Instead of changing minds, both this and other Democratic efforts to tell voters they were wrong about their own lives only succeeded in wedding the party further to things that voters disliked. It was the precise opposite of what the moment demanded, and it would haunt the party well after its leaders finally realized that it wasn’t working. Not even the GOP itself could come up with attacks more harmful than this effort that Democrats expected to help them. According to Harris’ own top advisors, the sole most effective attack ad produced by the Trump campaign simply consisted of clips of her from 2023 touting “Bidenomics.” Voters, as it turned out, did not appreciate being told that they were wrong about their own lives.

But this is all well known. Since Trump won the election, everyone and their mother has joined in on pillorying this sort of thinking, casting it as the reason why Democrats lost and/or lose in general. It’s a correct conclusion that doesn’t go far enough. Efforts like Bidenomics, while important, only scratch the surface of how the “vibes” theory led Democrats astray during the election cycle. As a philosophy, it would reach the apex of its influence over the course of Kamala Harris’ 107-day general election campaign. This was where the theory proved to be at its most destructive: not when it was used by a losing party trying to understand why it was doing poorly, but when it was used by a rising party trying to understand why it was doing well.

The first month of the Kamala Harris campaign provides a perfect case in point. When the Vice President entered the race, she began would could have been justifiably described as a suicide mission at the time. Her boss, Joe Biden, had just come off the heels of a historically disastrous debate and three mortifying weeks of intra-party crisis that ended with him being pushed off of the ballot by force. Leading models gave him only a one-in-four-chance of winning the election by the time he dropped out. Private polling reportedly showed him losing more than 400 electoral votes. Harris, for her part, had historically polled worse than him in general election surveys and suffered equally poor personal favorable and approval ratings. She hadn’t faced a Republican at the ballot box in a decade. Now, needed to make up a massive gap in a historically short period of time, all against an opponent who had just narrowly survived an assassination attempt.

And then: she did it! Kamala would make up this entire gap within roughly the first week of her campaign. She found a lead against Trump in the national averages before the end of July. Her once-catastrophic personal favorables would rapidly rally, outpacing even a post-assassination Trump’s within a matter of days. Suddenly, the question shifted from how Kamala could possibly come back to what had caused her to do exactly that so quickly. And if one took public opinion seriously (even if not sympathetically), they would have come to a number of quick conclusions with specific lessons. Biden, for instance, had long been deeply despised, and Kamala Harris was not him. It was likely that this was a big reason why voters were now open to her, meaning that further success could very well follow if she made efforts to break from him more substantially. Kamala also represented a different, more ideologically distinct political style than her boss, which could have been plausibly appealing to a public that had been constantly saying it was seeking change. That, too, could be easily stressed, even if it meant that her future administration would have less flexibility than she and her team might have wanted.

But Harris and her campaign—which, it’s always worth noting, consisted of the exact same geniuses that pushed forward with Bidenomics the year prior—would adopt none of these perfectly logical explanations. Instead, they followed the lead of many political commentators in crediting her success to a supposed sudden mastery of the “vibes.” It gave them the exact opposite of a clear path forward, and it was also exactly what her campaign wanted. Instead of having to make any choices (not hard choices—literally any choices at all), they could revel in their supposed mastery of pop culture. Following this, they ran a profoundly unserious campaign, one that, according to CNN reporting, explicitly focused on events with celebrities over “big speeches” and “policy rollouts.” Things as basic as one-on-one interviews and policy platforms were stalled even as the public repeatedly voiced concerns about not knowing what she stood for. They were running the campaign they wanted to run, not the campaign they needed to run.

It all perfectly matched with their understanding of voters as fundamentally unserious children. Unfortunately, it wasn’t all that effective at winning over voters in reality, who, surprisingly enough, took their own concerns seriously. As the campaign went on, Harris would be dogged by a mounting reputation that she didn’t stand for anything and only represented the status quo. Yet again, her campaign would attempt to confront this by winning a battle of the vibes, simply asserting that she was a change candidate while hardly doing anything to substantiate it. Like the Bidenomics push before it, this push would fail. After 107 days of curating what the party described to be “immaculate vibes,” Kamala Harris would lose the election without winning a single swing state. Not even bona fide success on TikTok was enough to save her.

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If there’s anything that we can learn from this saga, it’s a lesson that nobody should have needed to be taught in the first place: even if you don’t respect how voters feel, you should at least try to understand what they think. Call them stupid, emotional, and illogical to your heart’s content, but pause a little before calling them incomprehensible. In almost every instance, the popular views that liberals spent years writing off as incoherent nonsense could be understood with at least some effort. In many of those instances, these beliefs were even correct. Voters were right in thinking that Biden was too old, as he was. They were also right in thinking that Kamala Harris didn’t represent meaningful change from him, as she did not. They were even right in thinking that the economy under Biden was bad and that the one under Trump was better. Not everything in the world is simply a matter of perception. To think so is to put oneself on the losing side of quite a lot of battles.

Do I agree with the decision many voters made after coming to these conclusions: i.e., voting for Trump? Not at all. But I still can understand it. The process of cause and effect is obvious enough. The logic is there, even if it is undeniably based on ignorance. To throw our hands up and say that their actions were all the result of unknown, indescribable processes is to come to an unduly pessimistic conclusion and let a lot of guilty people off the hook for no real reason. Perhaps some day in the future, voters will hold beliefs that are so removed from reality that it would be irresponsible to indulge in them. In that case, describing them as esoteric creatures of vibes may be warranted. But that day has not come yet. Until it does, the politics of vibery are best left in the past, where they have already done enough damage.