The end-of-year obituary packages are publishing — remembering the people who shaped our world in ways large and small.
We decided to do something a little bit different. This year, we asked POLITICO reporters to tell us: What are the trends in politics that died in 2024 — or that are at least heading into obsolescence?
From the way campaigns are run, to how pop culture shapes politics, to the very foundation of American law, they identified how the events of 2024 have also meant the end — or growing irrelevance — of key aspects of our political ecosystem.
Read on, and feel free to offer a quick moment of silence for nine notions that we may not see again.
Celebrity endorsements
Dating back to at least Frank Sinatra’s “High Hopes” becoming John F. Kennedy’s campaign jam in 1960, celebrity and pop-culture endorsements have been as essential to presidential elections as patriotic bunting. In 2024, Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign took that to the next level, siphoning up much of the Hollywood and entertainment A-list, from Arnold Schwarzenegger to Bad Bunny. Vogue at one point compiled a list of 37 stars who endorsed Harris. President-Elect Donald Trump tried to counter with endorsements from the likes of Jason Aldean or Kid Rock, but he couldn’t keep pace. “We don’t need a star because we have policy,” Trump said at a rally in Pittsburgh. In some ways, he wasn’t wrong: Trump won without the elite sheen of Harris’ fleet of surrogates. If anything, her star-studded backers may even have hurt her campaign, giving credence to conservatives who cast her as an out-of-touch California elite. In a fractured country, with the monoculture all but gone, and with anti-elite sentiment building, it’s getting harder and harder for any celebrity — even Taylor Swift — to move enough voters to sway an election. —Adam Wren
Equal justice under the law
A foundational premise of our legal system is that no person is above the law. The phrase “equal justice under law” is even engraved above the front entrance of the Supreme Court. But Donald Trump’s odyssey through the American criminal justice system — and his eventual escape from it — exposed a glaring exception to this equality principle. To paraphrase Orwell: All defendants are equal, but presidents are more equal than others. We’ve long known that Trump was getting special treatment in the courts. But the Supreme Court itself reinforced that reality with its July decision granting Trump sweeping immunity for alleged crimes he committed while president. And his imminent return to power is causing the four criminal cases against him to further unravel. That outcome confirms not only that Trump himself will never face serious legal accountability, but also that the aspirational mantra on the Supreme Court’s front facade is more myth, less truth. — James Romoser
Traditional Canvassing
Walking with somebody door to door is a reminder: People might vote, and they might not. People might know who or what is on the ballot, and they might not. But most people? The cars are in the driveway, but nobody’s home. Doorbells don’t ring so much as keep a wary watch. People don’t trust because they don’t know, and they don’t know because they don’t trust. They make their political picks not as a result of reasoned debate, but based on the intermittent awareness that creeps in on the scrolling blue light of their phones. Does the age-old nuts and bolts of organization and persuasion — door knocking, phone banking, even text blasting — still make a meaningful difference? Who knows. But in this new world, in the face of digital forums more and more people seem to see as more real than real life, diligent ground-game tactics are at best inefficient and at worst ineffective. — Michael Kruse
DEI Programs
The protests, unrest and political action set off by George Floyd’s 2020 murder spurred a quieter movement to acknowledge the nasty echoes of redlining, educational exclusion and job discrimination that continue to shape the economy. Jim Crow-era Confederate statues that had been so hard to remove just a few years earlier started getting plucked with relative ease. White corporate leaders began issuing statements about how “Black lives matter.” And companies and colleges set up or expanded offices to promote “diversity, equity and inclusion.” But now, these DEI projects are going through an extinction-level event. Conservative state lawmakers have spent years outlawing state-funded DEI programs, quashing them on campuses. Activists have deployed the Supreme Court’s limits on affirmative action in college admissions to stop DEI programs in the private sector. Just before Thanksgiving, America’s largest private employer, Walmart, pulled back on all of its diversity work, following similar decisions from other big companies like Ford, Lowe’s and Boeing. After Vice President Kamala Harris’ loss, it’s clear that many Democrats don’t know what to do about these programs, especially when the Trump administration has promised to wield the might of the federal government to eradicate them. — Darius Dixon
Campaigning on Abortion
After campaigns to preserve abortion rights helped halt a red wave in 2022 and won Democrats key races in 2023, many in the party headed into November confident that putting the issue directly on the ballot in nearly a dozen states would juice turnout and pull swing voters to the left — especially after Harris replaced President Joe Biden at the top of the ticket and made a forceful defense of abortion rights her leading message. Clearly, that didn’t happen. Yes, abortion-rights ballot measures passed in seven more states and won majority support in Florida, though the measure failed because the state requires a 60 percent supermajority for passage. But voters in those same states, on the same ballot, voted for Republicans with a history of opposing abortion rights. Most Arizona voters, for instance, overturned a 15-week abortion ban and checked a box for Trump. Polling before and after the election showed that other issues — including the economy and immigration — took precedence for most voters, steering them toward GOP candidates. And many strategists and abortion-rights advocates believe the ballot measures created a “permission structure” for Republicans voters who were worried about the impact of bans on the procedure. There are a handful of states left where citizens can put an abortion-rights measure on the ballot in the future, and groups in Arkansas, Florida, Nebraska and South Dakota are likely to try again after initiatives there fell short or were blocked by courts this year. But the era of Democrats counting on such measures to boost their candidates’ chances is officially over. — Alice Ollstein
Trusting the “Experts”
America’s great thinkers and investors spent 2024 pondering how soon AI, capable of synthesizing all the data on earth, would relegate the human brain to obsolescence. But the 2024 election cycle was a reminder that sometimes, the data can’t paint the full picture. Sometimes, it’s the vibes that matter. By and large, the folks on K Street, in the press and on Capitol Hill thought that President Joe Biden would never step aside. They were fooled — but your Boomer aunt in Tucson probably saw Biden’s demise coming from a mile away. And in the race between Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, the conventional wisdom missed again. The data promised a race so close that days could go by before the nation knew the winner, but the intangibles — the vibes — seemed to favor Trump. Whether it was the cocky bro podcasters, the Trump-curious men on TikTok, the wellness moms, or the way-too-online Silicon Valley investors, the influencer class — our national curator of vibes — turned out to be a better indicator of the direction of our politics than talking heads and polling aggregators. Would we be wise to listen to tune into the vibes again in 2028? Or will Chat GPT ship a new election forecasting feature first? — Alex Keeney
The Kennedy Mystique
The allure of America’s most glamorous political dynasty has intoxicated America for over half a century, but this year, it seems like the buzz is finally wearing off — and the hangover is starting to set in. One Kennedy scion revealed himself to be not just a vaccine-skeptic, but a political opportunist with a taste for saturated fats and a troubling history involving a dead bear. Another made a name for himself as a thirst-trapping social media influencer (and a solidly mediocre political reporter). Yet another tried to nepo-baby her way into the senior ranks of Donald Trump’s CIA. The mask, it seems, is finally off. Not that there was much mystery about what was behind it. — Ian Ward
The “Misinformation” Industry
Misinformation — or lying, as it was once called — had a banner year. In the U.S., President-elect Donald Trump ramped up his decadeslong war on veracity; Vice President Kamala Harris got in on the fun with her presidential campaign’s unsuccessful attempt to persuade voters that Trump’s return would turn America into the Galactic Empire plus Nazi Germany; and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. parlayed his conspiracy theories into a Cabinet nod. Abroad, a previously unknown far-right candidate, Cǎlin Georgescu, scored a shocking win in Romania’s presidential elections after denying the mere existence of Covid-19. And yet the misinformation industry, the nascent group of think tanks, nonprofits, universities and NGOs dedicated to identifying lies and limiting their spread, has lost much of its credibility and clout. That’s due in large part to three key factors: Trump’s decisive electoral win, coming as he’s vowed to ban the federal government from even using the word “misinformation”; tech moguls like Mark Zuckerberg pushing back on government efforts to police “misinformation” on their platforms, while currying favor with Trump; and backlash even from stalwart liberal activists against the most extreme forms of policing misinformation. (Romania actually nullified its election results on the grounds of Russian misinformation despite no evidence of direct vote tampering, a move that even Georgescu’s progressive opponent condemned.) Understandably, then, wonks are warning of the “floodgates” opening for false information online during Trump’s second term — but their cries are falling on deaf ears, with the governments and tech platforms actually calling the shots unlikely to do anything about it. The misinformation-industrial complex isn’t surrendering, but increasingly, no one is listening. Just look at the reaction to last fall’s catastrophic hurricanes in the southeastern United States, where millions of users enthusiastically shared and engaged with blatant lies about the disaster on Elon Musk’s X, none of which were taken down. In 2025, misinformation crusaders might have to bid farewell to their seemingly fruitless crusade to suppress lies, and pivot to persuading their audience of the truth. — Derek Robertson
Politics on SNL
“Locked box.” “Strategery.” “I can see Russia from my house.” For much of Saturday Night Live’s history, the show didn’t just poke fun at politics, it shaped how American audiences saw their politicians. But over the last few years, political humor on SNL entered a downward spiral that hit rock bottom in 2024. After sidelining the show’s cast for celebrity ringers like Alec Baldwin and Jim Carrey in 2020, SNL creator Lorne Michaels apparently learned the wrong lesson, returning to the guest-star well in 2024, when he brought back Maya Rudolph as Kamala Harris and added Dana Carvey, Andy Samberg and Jim Gaffigan. With the exception of James Austin Johnson’s take on Donald Trump, the show no longer featured cast members crafting their own takes on presidential candidates. As a result, the bite has gone from SNL’s political opening sketches. Instead we got celebrities merely parroting things the actual candidates said — or delivering the same lines over and over again, like Carvey’s Joe Biden repeating “no joke” and “I’m serious” week after week. Most absurd of all, SNL all but passed on spoofing JD Vance despite his awkward trips to donut shops, cat lady comments and, um, the couch thing. Maybe our politics have become so bizarre there’s no longer a punchline. SNL definitely couldn’t find one. — Bill Kuchman
