How Democrats Ended Up in the Digital Media Ditch
Plus, The Week The High Ground Shifted?
Follow Epolitics on Substack, Bluesky, Threads, or Twitter/X. This post was also published on Epolitics.com
Happy Easter weekend! Let’s start tonight with a quick acknowledgement of a shift in the way elite voices are responding to Trump’s power grabs. Then, we’ll look at how Democrats missed the evolution of digital media over the last decade and helped to land us in this lovely situation. More goodies:
Join my next training webinar Thursday at 3 Eastern: Digital Advertising in Politics, Part II: Political Campaigns
Watch the five(!) earlier installments of my spring series on YouTube. Come for the lessons, stay for the coordinated troll invasion in the rapid response training. Good times all around.
The Week the High Ground Shifted?
Let’s highlight good news for once. This week, it did seem as though something had shifted: people in positions of prominence or authority suddenly seem to have noticed the downsides of Donald Trump’s intention to rule as a king.
Harvard University, prominent law firms, and even New York Times columnists joined the financial markets in recoiling from the sight of Trump’s whims expressed through executive orders and tariff announcements. Perhaps they could finally picture their own faces in the leopard’s mouth? Whether you’re joining out of self-interest, the national interest or old-fashioned idealism, welcome to the fight, y’all. We’ll need all the help we can get to preserve democracy, David Brooks included.
Even the Supreme Court, which had seemed wary of directly confronting Trump’s affronts to the rule of law, acted decisively early Saturday morning to establish that immigrants (and the rest of us) do actually enjoy the protections of the rule of law. We’ll see how far they’re prepared to go, but at least seven of the nine justices didn’t seem to welcome having the Constitution lit on fire in front of their eyes. Not today, anyway.
Though as my friend Melissa Ryan wrote on Friday, the rest of us had to open the door these well placed actors are now walking through:
“This week, the dam broke, and I suspect next week, more elites will find their courage, speak truth to power, and join the fight…
But the win doesn’t belong to the elites. It belongs to everyone who has put pressure on them, from calls to Congress and town meetings to protests, rallies, economic boycotts, and other forms of direct action. You created the space for all of this to happen. You’ve let them know that you are a force to be reckoned with. You’ve inspired people who previously thought they could probably ride out another four years of Trump to change course and fight. Keep going.”
Testify, sister. We’re all in this together, even the folks who’ll need to see the leopards slavering before they’ll wake up to reality.
How Democrats Ended Up in the Digital Media Ditch
Also in the past week, Substack welcomed Will Robinson to its pages. Will’s a friend and a longtime Democratic digital consultant and media buyer, and he’s launched his newsletter with a thoughtful series examining how Democrats ceded so much of the online conversation to conservatives.
The first two installments are live and I encourage you to read both of them. Part one looks at how the media environment has changed over the past decade, including the slow death of local news outlets and the information void that followed:
America didn’t just wake up one day flooded with memes, conspiracy theories, and cable pundits shouting in bad faith. The rise of the right-wing media machine didn’t happen in a vacuum. It grew in the cracks left by the slow collapse of mainstream media — especially local journalism.
The political right already had every incentive to build an alternative media system, since they’d felt frozen out by the mainstream media for years. To get their messages out unfiltered, they learned that they had to build their own media ecosystem.
Note that we have seen this dynamic before! Democrats dominated the digital landscape twenty years ago in part because progressives felt frozen out by TV and print outlets when it came to the Iraq War. DailyKos, now a huge online community and a media outlet of its own, rose to prominence as founder Markos Moulitsas (a former artilleryman) said what millions of Americans wanted and needed to hear: that invading Iraq was a terrible idea. Back in the Storming the Gates days, Democrats and progressives were the ones circumventing established media to speak directly to the public.
Perhaps we rested too much on Obama’s people-powered laurels, or perhaps Democratic political media professionals just got lazy, but the left largely missed out on the podcast/YouTube/TikTok explosion of the past few years. Instead, as Will puts it,
And yet, much of Democratic campaign strategy is still built around a 2008 media world: broadcast buys, print op-eds, and “earned media” from institutions that no longer have cultural reach. Meanwhile, the right is flooding TikTok, Facebook, Telegram, YouTube Shorts, Podcasts, and text chains with content that speaks to people in the tone they trust.
And as the second part of his series explores, the Republican communications machine has grown up sophisticated and powerful. In part, that’s because:
MAGA Media Is Built to Amplify. From Fox News to Truth Social to Elon Musk to podcasts, meme accounts, Telegram channels, and pseudo-news outlets like Gateway Pundit — each plays a role in amplifying and re-amplifying the message. It’s a decentralized swarm. If one message flops, another one rises. There’s no hierarchy — just velocity.
Emotional Content Dominates. MAGA content isn’t fact-checked — it’s felt. It hits themes of betrayal, victimhood, pride, and righteous anger. A meme about gas prices or trans kids or Biden’s “mental decline” spreads not because it’s factual — but because it feels true to the target audience….
Participation Over Production. The MAGA firehose is co-created. It’s not just Fox or Trump’s account — it’s every person posting on Facebook, resharing a meme, or yelling into a camera on TikTok. That participatory dynamic makes the lies feel local and personal. When your cousin shares it, it hits harder than when a pundit says it on MSNBC.
Of course, the pendulum can and may swing back. The left may yet find its footing through tactics like supporting influencers, encouraging grassroots voices, creating relevant content optimized for individual channels, and amplifying the hell out of all of it.
Will’s third piece will take on that proposition, as will a whole lot of content in the works here at Epolitics. Democracy’s not going to save itself, and we have a whole lot of persuading to do. More to come.
– cpd
Your are absolutely right! The most important thing any one of us can do right now is talk to everyone we know about what's going on. If they don't pay attention to the news, maybe they'll pay attention to a friend.
We're trying to be more connected. I've started following groups like you and podcasters. There are many out there so we need to share and connect as much as possible. We cannot be silent!