As always happens after a bad election loss — and is compounded when that loss is sweeping, and to the man who launched a coup against the country — the losing side is in full panic mode. I’ve seen people musing about tossing out Democratic party leadership, overhauling the language, the policies, the messaging. I’ve seen recriminations laid at the feet of VP Kamala Harris and of President Joe Biden. I’ve seen mockery about Harris’ embrace of never Trumpers and told-you-sos from progressives irate about Gaza and Democratic indifference to the working man’s plight. I’ve seen despair about erosion with Latino men, angst that Democrats have become solely the party of the college educated, who only comprise about 37 percent of the electorate.
I’m not dismissing these worries, and I think parties should do autopsies when they lose this badly.
Of course, there was structural stuff afoot too: global despising of incumbents, persistent grouchiness about certain parts of the economy.
But to me, there’s one leading factor that Democrats absolutely need to respond to as quickly as possible to avert this kind of electoral disaster in the future: the media environment unequivocally favors Republicans.
We don’t have a ton of data yet, and much of it is partial. But we can already tell that Harris performed best — that is, underperformed least — in the battleground states. In the places where her campaign flooded the airwaves with her messaging, put her on TV shows and radio stations and in local newspapers, scattered driveways with informational flyers, positioned her beside local celebrities, she did better than in most uncompetitive states, red and blue, that saw no campaigning at all. In other words: In the states where she set up a temporary but pervasive media apparatus, she negated some of the nationwide drag.
That speaks to the reality that most of the country is awash in right-wing propaganda all the time. For the olds, it’s Fox News, conservative radio and Sinclair-owned local news; for the youths, it’s the right-wing manosphere podcasts and streams that Trump so assiduously courted all campaign long (plus soothing TikToks promoting retrograde gender roles, evangelical values and distrust of government regulation — think the trad wives and crunchy so-far-left-they’ve-looped-around-to-the-right content — aimed specifically at women).
It helps explain Biden’s prodigious unpopularity, despite passing a ton of legislation that not only polls well, but has meaningfully improved people’s lives. It helps elucidate the consistent claims that people don’t know what Harris stood for, before and after she released her policy proposals.
It’s a playing field that Republicans not only dominate; Democrats don’t even compete. They still depend heavily on traditional media sources that simply don’t operate the same way these right-wing PR arms do. And we know that these forms of media are powerful; they reach tons of people, and are seen as useful enough pawns that Russia has invested in some of them.
This isn’t a novel observation. The Obama alums who started Pod Save America and the greater Crooked Media family did so after Trump won in 2016 specifically to try to build up a Fox News of the left.
There are structural problems with mimicking this right-wing content beat-for-beat. The Pod Save guys, while open about their political allegiances, often criticize the party and its politicians. It would be much more difficult to recreate the fawning adoration of Donald Trump Fox News and those podcasts produce for, say, Joe Biden on the left. The content on the right is often not overtly political, but wraps ideology into more broadly “cultural” fare. Right-wing billionaires are also, at least currently, more willing to fund those efforts and creators — think Elon Musk and Twitter — than their counterparts on the left are.
It’ll require creativity and investment, but I think Democrats and those aligned with them could do it. Voters say over and over that they prefer Democratic policies — even Republicans often vote for them when they’re standalone ballot initiatives. It’ll require a cultivation of talent, a saturation of these spaces, finagling how to wrest back the counter-cultural bad boy persona from those who are espousing a way of life most people consider retrograde, confining, divisive and exhausting, not to mention solely in service of the plutocratic elites that run the party.
Barack Obama was such a revelation because he hijacked technology in a way that was new and exciting for people, and it helped him micro-target low propensity voters. Trump has since taken that mantle. In the two and then four years ahead, Democrats have to find a way to get in people’s eyes and ears, to figure out how to make an affirmative case in these spaces that people would likely respond to if they were exposed to it.
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“They still depend heavily on traditional media sources that simply don’t operate the same way these right-wing PR arms do.”
Many of those sources are owned by people as transactional as Trump is too.
I agree. Fox, X, Trump Media, Sinclair broadcasting, and many more. They dominate, propagandize, and are the only show in most towns. It’s all people hear or see in major portions of the US.
I don’t want to be (more) negative, but isn’t this a little late?
Yes, I think that Democrats need to go where the voters are in the media landscape and that keeps shifting.
That said, we still have a small problem. Voters need to be open to the message. The Republicans have managed to seal off a large swath of voters from that. And sometimes those voters even insist on their own reality, which Republicans and billionaires hawking their sites are willing to cater towards.
This is a tad complicated and I wonder if we might be witnessing a mass breakdown in societal communication? Any machine can be broken, any edifice torn down. If so, can we recover?
This is spot on. And besides covering all of the media modes you mentioned, we need to be sure that our focus is also on whatever the newest media fad is - fighting the last war is always a losing battle. AOC has shown that she’s currently on top of whatever today’s fad is, as well as being able to master the older ones, and we should listen to her to see what we need to master next, while at the same time keeping our eyes open for anything she might have missed.
Given the disinformation industry that nourishes MAGA and poisons the minds of citizens in general, we also should find ways to disable, if not eliminate, that disinformation industry completely. An ill informed electorate will never lead to a well functioning democracy, and trying to fight fire with fire will only be partially successful at best. We need to put the fire out.