Dems Need New Mediums—And a New Message
The problem is they’re not being heard in the current media landscape.
STILL SMARTING FROM DEFEAT, Democrats are hoovering up data, focused on how they can win back the working-class voters who left them for Donald Trump, tossing around names of people they hope can lead the party out of the wilderness.
Complaints and criticisms—about which policies were highlighted or not, which attacks went answered or not, which celebrity appearances might have turned off gettable voters—are being leveled at Kamala Harris’s losing campaign.
In one of many postmortems, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Cal.), a progressive interested in higher office, told the Washington Post, “We didn’t emphasize the economy. We didn’t emphasize the renewal of the American dream. We didn’t emphasize manufacturing and higher wages and corporations not having excessive CEO pay. Instead, we spent a billion dollars having concerts all over America. I mean, it was ridiculous.”
Khanna is wrong, Harris spoke exhaustively about her economic plans, but he clearly prefers a strategy of mobilizing more progressive voters with a populist agenda. Centrists like Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) think the party was hurt because swing voters associated it with biological males playing on girls’ sports teams. Moulton, worried about losing moderate voters to Republican candidates like Trump, believes in persuasion.
Debates over policies,persuasion, and mobilization are important. Necessary, even. But all of it is just so much teeth-gnashing unless Democrats can agree they lost the information war in 2024 and find a way to compete again in a radically altered media environment.
Democrats can’t win back voters who got away until they learn how to reach them. One interview with Joe Rogan or more appearances on Fox News won’t tip a close race—Democrats are locked out of a media landscape that caters to audiences who hold little interest in politics or aren’t political at all. They decide elections.
While running against Joe Biden and then against Harris, Trump reached a far broader spectrum of voters—and created new ones—by pressing his case, and attacking Democrats, in alternative online spaces. Democrats were speaking to their own, informed and engaged voters, in a silo that the bulk of the electorate ignores.
The least informed voters chose Trump—those who decided on a candidate at the very end were persuaded by Republicans.
Post-election polling by Blueprint showed voters who decided late broke for Trump 52-38. Of those, 27 percent decided in the campaign’s last days—15 percent in the final week, and 12 percent on Election Day. Among those who voted for Trump, 75 percent said the description of Democrats as “too focused on fighting Trump rather than bringing the country together,” was accurate and only 22 percent of them believed Harris prioritized “Americans like me” as opposed to party activists. Eighty percent of them believed that was true of Trump.
The same survey found that overwhelming majorities of swing voters believed that Harris supported policies that she had either disavowed or was not running on. They included spending tax dollars on transgender surgeries for illegal immigrants (83 percent), electric vehicle mandate (82 percent), decriminalizing border crossings (77 percent), banning fracking (74 percent), and defunding the police (72 percent). These decisive voters bought what the GOP was selling.
The final NBC News poll found those who follow politics closely supported Harris by five points and those who don’t supported Trump by 14 points. Data for Progress polling from October found that those who paid “a great deal” of attention to political news favored Harris by six points while those who paid “none at all” supported Trump by 19 points. The same survey showed that with low-propensity voters, who vote in presidential years but not in midterm elections, “what little political content reached them was overwhelmingly pro-Trump or, at the very least, open to his message.”
AMERICANS AREN’T LOOKING FOR NEWS, let alone political news. Engagement with news sites has dropped precipitously. To many consumers, news is too distant, while voluminous content and interesting conversations—even if they stray from facts—are algorithmically promoted, proximate, and seemingly authentic.
As consumption methods shift and Americans mostly read headlines or watch videos, just one or a few influencers and podcast hosts can become their sole sources of “information.” These hosts are usually not journalists. A new study from Pew Research Center found 77 percent of news influencers “have no affiliation or background with a news organization.”
And as digital media have supplanted traditional media, that new landscape has tilted rightward. Self-designated co-president Elon Musk is pumping out pro-Trump messages to his 205 million followers all day on X, now a conservative media behemoth. Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon, Megyn Kelly, Ben Shapiro, and Candice Owens have enormous followings.
Then there is Joe Rogan. Trump spent three hours with the pod-king in the closing days of the campaign—and after much speculation and some negotiations, Harris did not. Trump‘s conversation with Rogan got 40 million views in three days, but he had already invested hours and hours appearing on numerous non-political podcasts to reach low-engagers throughout the campaign.
Democrats are now fretting that there is no liberal version of Rogan.
Yet the search for a “liberal” Joe Rogan is complicated by the fact that personalities like Rogan—who doesn’t fit nearly into ideological compartments and has idiosyncratic views— build their audience, in part, by shaming the left. So argues Jeremiah Johnson, co-founder of the Center for New Liberalism and author of the Substack “Infinite Scroll,” in an appearance last week on Jon Favreau’s “Offline” podcast. He also notes that progressive media spaces, while smaller than conservative ones, join the ones on the right to “shit on Democrats.”
“From both sides, the Democratic party is just getting savaged and criticized no matter what they do, and that’s a real problem for Democrats—this kind of imbalance of how both ideological extremes basically make their money taking shots at Democrats,” Johnson said.
To fill this void, where there are no wildly popular hosts championing their ideas and refuting lies and conspiracies, Democrats will need to learn to communicate far more aggressively. Memes and TikTok provocations travel faster than published explainers on why the war in Gaza isn’t actually genocide or how the Federal Emergency Management Agency is indeed meeting the needs of victims of natural disasters.
An article titled “Republican Victory and the Ambience of Information,” published in the New Yorker last week, described the Harris campaign’s micro-targeting communication methods as a disadvantage. Nathan Heller wrote that “one often had the sense that she was trying to say as little as possible beyond her talking points,” and that ”the meat and specificity of her campaign—the access, the detail, and the identical coalitions—were instead concentrated on coalition-group Zooms, and on local and community audiences.” What Trump did, Heller wrote, was the opposite: The former president reached the barely engaged because “detail, even when it’s available, doesn’t travel widely after all. Big, sloppy notions do.”
To reach less engaged voters, Democrats will not only have to create digital spaces and pathways with appealing personalities to showcase their plans or positions, but adopt an entirely new mindset. The new media universe requires them to get comfortable with providing a constant supply of vibes-based content. While it may contain substance, it must be relatively free of talking points, and perceived as free flowing. Trump’s power, in clip after clip—for the millions of his voters who don’t watch his rallies—is the sense that he is letting it all hang out. His lies and bullshit are accepted as part of that.
Elected at age 29, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) understood the need for immediacy with constituents. She didn’t have to know the details of every policy perfectly. Instead, she took her voters on her journey, holding regular livestreams on Instagram. She was keen to how little information these New Yorkers—as well as supporters from around the country—were taking in from Washington.
“What people have to understand,” she said last week on MSNBC, is “there are millions of people in this country, and I was one of them, where you are working 2-3 shifts a day to try and make ends meet. You’re not reading the newspaper every morning with a cup of coffee. You’re not.”
After the election, Ocasio-Cortez solicited responses from voters who chose both her and Trump on November 5, telling them she wasn’t going to criticize them, saying “I actually want to learn from you.” What she found was that many of her voters believed Trump—like her—was fighting for them, and is authentic.
Rep. Ruben Gallego knew that to win his Arizona senate race, he had to fend off GOP attacks that portrayed him as a liberal on the border and crime in a state that was trending back to Trump. And he knew that he was vulnerable among those voters who were mostly tuning the campaign out.
For example, ads for one super PAC said Gallego voted for “Hyper-inflation, border catastrophe, gender craziness, destroying women’s sports, men in women’s locker rooms, denying parental rights, and weakening the military.”
George Landright, the head of that super PAC, Frontiers for Freedom Action PAC, said Gallego “has a voting record no different from Ocasio-Cortez and the ‘Gang of Five’ radicals in Congress.”
Gallego won his Senate race with 90,000 more votes in Arizona than Harris, who lost the state. His margin with Latino men over Harris was nine points, and was critical to his victory. He told the Washington Post, “those men are not politically engaged. They do not watch TV. They don’t read the newspaper. They hardly listen to any politics.” And he described the highly specific outreach his campaign deployed to target them that included a rodeo, lowrider car shows, watch parties for boxing matches, a tamale festival at which Gallego was a judge, and catering tacos for plant workers getting off overnight shifts in order to talk to them as they ate before they went home.
Both Gallego and Ocasio-Cortez are young, Spanish-speaking, and working-class, and therefore are going to have more purchase with the kind of former Democrats who are now flocking to Trump. But their success shows that direct engagement—through live contact on social media or in person—is more valuable to swing voters than moderate policy positions or glitzy campaign events.
Maybe the Democratic National Committee should talk one of them into hosting a podcast.
With Trump returning to the White House, and all the platforms in place to amplify his rhetoric, Democrats will need to devote significant resources to regain their footing.
The New York Times reported last weekend about “an entirely new anti-Trump battle plan” Democrats are preparing that mostly involves litigation. On the communications front, there is a plan to “target the hidden sources of disinformation and expose them for what they are,” by employing opposition research on conservative media figures like Musk and the Murdoch family.
While disinformation is an urgent political problem for Democrats, and mitigating it is necessary, breaking through with tuned-out Americans will require new ideas communicated through new platforms. Hit pieces on Rupert Murdoch won’t accomplish that. It’s not enough to tell people that the story Republicans are telling is wrong; Democrats have to tell a better story.
Trump, and then abortion, are all that have united Democrats for nearly a decade. In 2024, they campaigned on both and lost. What they can unite around now is an information battle plan. They might want to start searching for the ideal big sloppy dude to transmit some big sloppy notions. Wasting time and money on other objectives is just putting off the inevitable.