Digital Politics Quick Hits: March 8, 2025
Don't miss these good stories related to digital politics & advocacy from the past week
My upcoming trainings on ethical/effective list-building and digital advertising for politics and advocacy are coming fast! The first is 3/13 at 3ET.
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Digital Politics Quick Hits: March 8, 2025
A torrent of good stories related — at least somehow — to digital politics.
Inside the White House’s new media strategy to promote Trump as ‘KING’ “The Trump administration has transformed its traditional press shop into a rapid-response influencer operation, and ‘they’re all offense, all the time.'” A fast-moving digital communications machine, with no Dem equivalent: “Half of the White House’s Instagram views have come from non-followers, Dorr said, a sign that the team’s messages are gaining traction beyond Trump’s base.” [WaPo]
How an Arizona DJ and karate instructor won Trump’s ear on Ukraine [WaPo]
AOC Writes to DOJ to Find Out if She’s Actually Under Investigation. “Meanwhile, Ocasio-Cortez has taken a different approach. She’s been leveraging her social media prowess and communicating about what the president’s administration is doing and what it means for her constituents across Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. Now the Democratic firebrand has shown she’s also not afraid to engage in a public showdown with the president and his cronies. Her party should be taking notes.” [Slate] C.f. Chris Murphy’s Master Class in Modern Digital Communications
The Democrats’ young man problem is real. When the messengers, and staffers, running campaigns and formulating the pitches to young voters look less like the people they are trying to reach, “you have just fewer people who are immersed in culturally conversant in ways that can help you craft a winning and effective political message” [Vox]
The story behind the rightward shift of young men. “The idea that MAGA-enthused bros swung the young male vote doesn’t really capture what happened” [WaPo]
Let’s Create “Town Hall Night in America”. The upshot: Democrats should hold monthly town halls in every congressional district. Not a bad idea at all, and a great way to get the grassroots self-organizing. C.f. Veterans, farm groups slam Trump cuts at Democrat-run Arizona town hall. [Old Goats, Reuters]
I am baffled why we don’t already have something like a messaging war room already running. Rapid response now happens in seconds. Democrats Need A Battle Plan — And A War Room [Off Message]
ActBlue, the Democratic Fund-Raising Powerhouse, Faces Internal Chaos. Democrats are NOT HAPPY about this development. [NYT]
Inside the Democratic Disaster That Didn’t Happen in November. Big problems at NGP VAN? Another single point of failure for Democratic tech [NYT]
Entirely predictable: US intel shows Russia and China are attempting to recruit disgruntled federal employees, sources say [CNN]
Despite Musk, progressives are winning the ad war in Wisconsin. And since more of the Dem spending is coming directly from Crawford’s campaign, they’re getting cheaper TV ad rates than outside conservative groups. [The Downballot]
DOGE Has Deployed Its GSAi Custom Chatbot for 1,500 Federal Workers. Not surprisingly, since it’s a chatbot: ‘”It’s about as good as an intern,” says one employee who has used the product. “Generic and guessable answers.”‘ [Wired]
Democrats, Stop Being So Cringe. “But instead of addressing this reality head on, leveling with constituents and listening to their concerns, Democrats are opting to use their time to create social media memes that fail to address the gravity of the situation many Americans feel they face…If you want to reach young people or people at all you need to be authentic. That means posting non-scripted content and certainly not using a blanket template meant for copy and paste. It means literally going face-to-camera (yes, hold the phone yourself) and being yourself.”
A Vance meme explosion: “The Vance edits are a vice presidential body horror, a dysmorphic smattering of ridicule seemingly from all sides of the Vance-loathing political spectrum.”
Organizing How-Tos (and How Not-Tos) in this Whirlwind Moment [The Connector]
Also note the excellent advice on the current media environment from 2024 Dem digital staffers: Dan Bongino apparently sh*tposted his way to the top of the FBI. C.f. He Was a Conspiracy Theorist Podcaster. Trump Loved Him. Now He’s the FBI’s Deputy Director. [FWIW, Slate]
‘Tech bro Maoists’ are torching the country that made them rich [WaPo]
Memes are a key tool for extremist communities and conspiracy theories. Not just for them, though – memes can be a powerful tool for people pushing back against Trump, too. Their familiarity helps people understand them at a glance. [El Pais]
HHS grants DOGE access to child support database, overriding objections [WaPo]
‘Putin is on the inside now’. “Recent incidents indicate US is no longer characterizing Russia as a cybersecurity threat, marking a radical departure”. Meanwhile, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth orders a halt to offensive cyber operations against Russia [Guardian, NBC]
U.S. digital disarmament gives Russia free rein in cyberspace. Bad idea. [WaPo]
How 443 federal properties were targeted for sale, then suddenly weren’t [WaPo]
The Pentagon’s DEI Panic [The Atlantic]. The DoD is marking thousands of photos for deletion, including ones of the Enola Gay. Because, you know, gay. C.f. Army Deleting Online Content Related to Women, Minorities Using Key Words Like ‘Respect’ and ‘Dignity’ [Military.com]
Deletion of government data is its own form of propaganda: “1984 is fiction, yes, but the novel’s insight is not. When history is written by the victors, it can be erased by them too.” [The Atlantic]
Trump’s opponents see a sweeping crackdown on free speech [WaPo]
How to lose the 21st century, in three easy steps “Trump is throwing away what could have been the next great American century.” [WaPo]
Email shows Trump officials are lying to federal court, directing CFPB staff to ignore law [Popular Info]
The Republican Rip Off. Dems launch a site to let you look up the effects of budget cuts on your district
After explosive town halls, Republicans rethink how to reach voters [WaPo]
The Secret Campaign in China to Save a Woman Chained by the Neck, driven underground by police and censors [NYT]
A crypto reserve would be a government-backed grift — one that makes the government itself the easy mark. [The Atlantic]
Can Elon Musk find any fraud before Trump’s base notices the con? “In 2009, Harvard Law School professor Lawrence Lessig warned that making public information broadly available would make it trivial for bad-faith and/or underinformed actors to pick through reams of information to construct misleading or dishonest claims about what the government was doing. The advent of social media sped that process up significantly. Now, random social media users can direct Musk’s attention to programs by cobbling together narratives from searches of public databases.” [WaPo]
The truth about DOGE’s AI plans: The tech can’t do that. “Identify ‘mission-critical’ jobs? Spot dead people on Social Security rolls? Government needs AI -— but what DOGE appears to be doing doesn’t add up.” [WaPo]
This is not efficiency: “Late Friday night, the Trump administration, as part of its push to modernize the government with software, laid off roughly 90 people from the General Services Administration — all federal technologists whose role was to modernize the government with software” [The Atlantic]
DOGE presses to check federal benefits payments against IRS tax records, giving them the chance to feed all of our tax data into an AI [WaPo]
So much for soft power: Trump administration says it’s cutting 90% of USAID foreign aid contracts [AP]
A soupçon of good news? Finally, something is puncturing conspiracy theories. “Researchers found an AI bot is pretty good at helping people rethink false beliefs”, perhaps in part b/c it doesn’t trigger the same emotional response that a human challenging us does [WaPo]
And finally, I think we can all use some cats squeezing into ridiculously tight spaces
– cpd
Photo via Pixabay
I wish winning the ad war won elections. But it won't.