It shouldn’t be the least bit surprising what many pundits who assured people about Kamala Harris’s almost certain victory are blaming for the election result: misinformation. They’re right — just not in the way that they think.

Misinformation did play a major role in Democrats’ election defeat. Only it wasn’t ordinary voters who were led astray by bad information but the president, his team, and other party elites. And this misinformation mostly didn’t come from shadowy, fringe sources on social media platforms or podcasts: it came from establishment news outlets and mainstream media pundits that are eagerly read, watched, and listened to by people in power.

Specifically, I’m talking about the narrative repeated endlessly for years by some of the White House’s favorite news sources: that the Joe Biden economy was strong and delivering for people, that the unhappiness Americans constantly reported they felt about it was pure delusion caused by partisanship and the media, and that Biden simply had to get it into people’s thick skulls how good they had it and how much he had accomplished — or, as quite a few of them insisted, that he couldn’t do anything at all and needn’t bother trying.