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Postmortem by Gaslight: Nate Cohn and the New York Times's Autopsy of Democracy, Minus the Mirror [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2025-06-27

In the grand forensic tradition of whodunits, Nate Cohn’s recent newsletter in The New York Times attempts to answer the question: Who killed the Democrats in 2024? And like any good sleight of hand, he pulls the reader away from the crime scene just as the murder weapon is being polished in the next room.

Spoiler: it was the media with a heavy assist from Mr. Cohn himself.

Cohn’s June 26 post-election piece — “The Tilt: Final Word on 2024 Turnout” — arrives as the Gray Lady’s version of a coroner’s report. It’s polished. It’s clinical. It’s laced with data-matched voter files and clean graphs that point to a now-familiar conclusion: young, nonwhite, irregular voters either switched to Trump or stayed home, and contrary to Democratic fantasy, turnout wouldn’t have saved Kamala Harris.

But look closer. There’s a chill in the tone, a remove in the prose, a studied absence of context. No mention of voter suppression. No critique of Republican disinformation. No interrogation of mainstream media’s role in the erosion of civic trust. And certainly no reflection on how The Timeshelped sandblast Harris’s candidacy into a glassy haze of unlikability and inevitability.

“This is postmortem by gaslight — an autopsy written by the accomplice |who forgot to wear gloves.” — F. P. Dunneagin

The Gentle Art of Burying the Lede

Cohn’s central thesis is blunt: Harris didn’t lose because turnout was low; she lost because disaffected Democrats — especially young and nonwhite ones — either voted for Trump or opted out. He draws on solid post-election studies to support this: Pew, NYT/Siena, Blue Rose Research. All point to the same conclusion — the Democrats’ once-assumed base grew alienated, and that alienation favored the other guy.

But buried in this analytical gravitas is a quietly explosive admission: nonvoters preferred Trump. That’s not an indictment of policy failure. That’s a screaming red flare in a democracy already skidding on bald tires.

So, what does Cohn do with this? Does he ask why traditionally Democratic voters might drift toward authoritarian populism? Does he explore the Republican Party’s deliberate targeting of disenfranchised voters through TikTok culture wars and disinformation machines? Does he wonder aloud whether years of centrist pablum and donor-class triangulation might have pushed a generation into nihilism?

He does not. Instead, he presents this civic disengagement as voter preference, as if democracy were a shopping cart at Target. And wouldn’t you know it, the nation just happened to choose the orange autocrat in aisle three.

When “Both Sides” Become One Side in a Lab Coat

Cohn’s stylized neutrality is part of a larger Timesian tic: performative centrism dressed in data-driven drag. It’s the editorial equivalent of asking whether climate change has two sides — but this time, with pivot tables.

In 2024, Kamala Harris ran against a man who’d been indicted, convicted, and found liable for sexual assault. She also ran against The New York Times. While Trump’s every outburst received front-page handwringing and viral framing — “Trump’s Base Unshaken Despite Legal Troubles” — Harris’s campaign got the editorial version of a DMV appointment: delayed, drab, and defined by bureaucratic scorn.

But you won’t find that in Cohn’s postmortem.

You won’t find analysis of the long-tail impact of the Times’ coverage, or of Ezra Klein’s many chin-stroking podcasts asking if Harris was “the wrong candidate” in the most soothing tones possible — as if it were the weather, not a media creation. You won’t find reference to the 11 stories The Times ran in 2023 dissecting her likability, tone, and inability to inspire enthusiasm, compared to exactly zero stories noting that Trump speaks like a mobbed-up chatbot on a four-day Red Bull bender.

What you get, instead, is data journalism as damage control — a polite erasure of media culpability.

America Didn’t Vote for Trump. It Gave Up on Believing We Could Do Better.

Cohn insists — and he’s not wrong — that Harris would have underperformed even if the “lost voters” had shown up. But what he declines to say is far more damning: this wasn’t a Trump victory so much as a systemic collapse. Voters didn’t show up because nothing felt worth saving.

And who helped ensure they felt that way?

The same legacy media institutions that refused to call lies lies, that translated Trump’s fascism into “norm-busting,” and that fretted more over Joe Biden’s age than Trump’s open contempt for the Constitution. These outlets framed the 2024 election as a choice between continuity and chaos, without acknowledging that they had helped paint “continuity” as a tedious, failing bureaucracy and “chaos” as edgy populism.

“The Gray Lady didn’t lose her moral bearings. She pawned them for access — then sent Nate Cohn to tell us it was inevitable.” — F. P. Dunneagin

The Ezra Kleinification of Everything

Let’s be honest: Nate Cohn didn’t build this narrative alone. He had help from his podcast-hardened comrade in centrist banality, Ezra Klein — a man whose career has been defined by asking the wrong questions in the right voice. Klein’s signature move is turning existential threats into marketplace metaphors: Is democracy… scalable? Are fascist movements… sticky?

Cohn and Klein have become the Bert and Ernie of institutional acquiescence. Earnest, well-credentialed, always with a chart in hand — and always, always two steps behind the moral curve.

They don’t hate democracy. They just don’t want to seem partisan in defending it. And that cowardice has become a media doctrine.

Postscript: When the Voters Gave Up, So Did the Editors

I called this trajectory months before the data came in my September 2024 Daily Kos piece—one that drew nearly 200 Comments and over 500 Recommendations. I foresaw The Times laying the groundwork for a Harris collapse not just as forecasters but as active participants in the erosion. My warning was that “bothsidesism” had metastasized—that The Times was prewriting its absolution in real time.

Well, now we’ve read the final version. And it sounds exactly like I predicted: a diagnosis without a mirror, an explanation without a reckoning.

This isn’t journalism. It’s brand management for elite media’s failures.

So let us be clear: the most shocking part of the 2024 election wasn’t that some Democratic voters defected. It’s that so many of them no longer believed there was anything worth showing up for — not because they were lazy or uninformed, but because the people paid to inform them told them, again and again, that hope was naïve, that Harris was weak, and that Trump was inevitable.

The Times got the turnout they helped produce, and now they’d like you to believe it was your fault.

~Dunneagin

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