By all accounts, the Democratic Party should be riding high right now.
Its political enemy, the Trump administration, has ushered in an era of dysfunction and corruption at the federal level that is unparalleled in the modern era. Under the guise of downsizing and modernizing the federal government, Trump and his cronies have rolled out a string of bizarre policies and initiatives that are deeply unpopular with a majority of the American people—whether that’s screwing with social benefit programs like Social Security and Medicare, instituting a tariff regime that is clocking small businesses, or threatening to ruin America’s health agency.
For any oppositional party, such a floundering, faux-pas-laden agenda would seem to present a political opportunity that is just begging to be exploited.
And yet, somehow, the Democrats have never been more unpopular. A slew of recent polls have consistently found that Democrats are increasingly viewed as weak, ineffectual, and “lost” by their own voters. At the same time, the party is suffering a registration crisis, as large numbers of voters seem to be fleeing the party. The consensus seems to be that the Democrats stand for nothing, can get nothing done, and are incapable of standing up to Trump.
The apparent crisis of faith plaguing the party’s base would explain this week’s story from Wired, which revealed an alleged secretive arrangement between a group of social media influencers and a Democrat-aligned dark money group. The influencers, many of whom have substantial followings on sites like TikTok and Instagram, were apparently offered $8k a month to amplify “Democratic messaging on the internet,” the report claims. Wired writes:
Democrats hope that the secretive Chorus Creator Incubator Program, funded by a powerful liberal dark money group called The Sixteen Thirty Fund, might tip the scales. The program kicked off last month, and creators involved were told by Chorus that over 90 influencers were set to take part. Creators told WIRED that the contract stipulated they’d be kicked out and essentially cut off financially if they even so much as acknowledged that they were part of the program. Some creators also raised concerns about a slew of restrictive clauses in the contract.
…According to copies of the contract viewed by WIRED that creators signed, the influencers are not allowed to disclose their relationship with Chorus or The Sixteen Thirty Fund—or functionally, that they’re being paid at all.
STF has since disputed parts of the report, if not the part about a left-leaning influencer operation. When reached for comment, an STF spokesperson said that Chorus was doing “crucial work to spread a pro-democracy message to Americans” and seemed to deny parts of the Wired report, specifically claiming that creators had “always been encouraged to talk about their involvement in the program.” Whatever the exact stipulations of the contract, and despite the fact that the report doesn’t mention any direct ties between the operation and the DNC, it doesn’t take much to see this sort of quiet web marketing as the future of the Dems’ online campaign strategy.
Oh, how the mighty have fallen. At one point, the Democrats were seen as the frontrunners in the political race to dominate the internet. Indeed, Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign is classically thought of as a masterclass in digital marketing—one that leveraged social media and other online tools not merely as a fundraising method, but also as a way to recruit and retain canvassers in ways that had never been demonstrated before.
Of course, Obama’s breakout campaign took place when Facebook was only four years old and Twitter (which was still called Twitter back then) had barely been born. A lot has changed since then, and, in the interim, conservatives have fought hard to close the digital skills gap. In the immediate aftermath of Obama’s election, the GOP scrambled to figure out what it had done wrong. “The left was far ahead of us,” said Erik Telford, a strategist for the conservative Americans for Prosperity group, in 2009. “The efforts that Obama put into internet campaigning and what he accomplished were extraordinary,” the rightwing operative admitted.
Since then, the GOP and its allies have proven increasingly adept at leveraging digital platforms to their advantage. It has benefited from a constellation of politicos and private sector actors who are simpatico with its agenda. Steve Bannon, the mastermind behind Trump’s 2016 presidential victory, notoriously leveraged a psychological warfare contractor (Cambridge Analytica) to target potential voters with politicized messaging. Similarly, during this past election, Trump enjoyed the endorsement of Elon Musk, who owns X, a platform that was roiled by unhinged MAGA propaganda in the lead-up to last year’s election.
Now, it can easily be said that MAGA or MAGA-adjacent forces control large portions of the online information ecosystem in which most Americans “live.” Whether it’s the male-oriented podcast circuit that helped Trump get elected (thanks Joe Rogan!), an ecosystem of unhinged alternative media sites (sites like Rumble and Kick that basically act as the web equivalent of AM radio), Fox News, or several social media platforms that act as vectors for rightwing messaging (e.g., X, Truth Social, Parler), it’s clear that conservative forces have an advantage.
By contrast, what novel digital communications strategy have the Democrats come up with since 2008? You would be hard-pressed to think of an answer. Thus, the recent foray into murky influencer marketing—a strategy that, for all intents and purposes, seems bereft of imagination or ingenuity. Yet to focus too much on the means by which Democrats get their message across is to distract from the real problem the party actually faces: they have no message.
Or, at the very least, the message that the party has doesn’t seem to be one that its voters want to hear. Case in point: Critics have lately claimed that all Democrats need to beat their conservative foes is “their own Joe Rogan.” Yet a recent interview conducted by comedian podcaster Adam Friedland, who has sometimes been dubbed the “Joe Rogan of the left,” didn’t offer much hope on that front.
The interview was with Richie Torres, who, in happier times, was championed as the future face of the broadly geriatric political party. Lately, however, there’s been significant daylight between Torres’ ideals and those of the party’s base. A report this week found that Torres, a self-described “pro-Israel” democrat, was urging the White House to “speed up bomb deliveries to Israel” at the very same time that he was “adding defense contractors like Lockheed and Northrop to his portfolio” (the companies that, you know, make most of those bombs). During this week’s interview, Friedland pelted Torres with questions about the death toll in Gaza, to which Torres, sounding really bored, just kept saying “war is a tragedy” with about the same emotional register you’d use to order a sandwich at Subway. Unlike Democrats’ alleged efforts to astroturf TikTok with glowing support, the Friedland interview went viral.
In short, even when the “Joe Rogan of the left” gets involved, Democrats crumble when asked to defend their policies. If you can’t convincingly answer a simple question like, “Is killing innocent civilians a bad thing?” there isn’t much hope for your success in long-form interviews.
Democrats have struggled to answer basic questions about their policies because to do so would expose the fact that the party is deeply out of step with its base. Indeed, the Democratic Party line continues to be unequivocal support for Israel, despite the fact that a recent Quinnipiac University poll found that a whopping 77 percent of Democrats believe it is committing genocide in Gaza. The Democrats also still seem deeply uncomfortable criticizing America’s billionaire class, despite the fact that another recent poll found that 54 percent of liberal Democrats don’t believe billionaires should even exist. A recent poll of registered Dems found that a vast majority view Bernie Sanders favorably (he is more popular than AOC, Chuck Schumer, and Gavin Newsom and, according to another poll, second only to the Pope and Volodymyr Zelenskyy in national popularity) but, as far as can be discerned, the Democratic Party leadership views him as a meddlesome pariah to be diverted and quashed at every turn.
Whether they’re using an MSNBC segment, a bullhorn, a TikTok influencer, or simply standing on a street corner shouting, it’s going to be incredibly difficult for Democrats to get voters to accept messages that they fundamentally disagree with.
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