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If you build it, will they come? [1]

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Date: 2025-02-16

A recurring item in the list of failed strategies leading to the November election loss is Democrats’ inability to engage with voters on digital platforms (Biden and then Harris’ campaign manager gave DNC donors regular briefings point to the declining impact of legacy media: newspapers, TV and radio). An article today in POLITICO suggests that the situation hasn’t changed:

The Department of Government Efficiency created its own account on X last November, amassing 4 million followers with a stream of news on contract cancellations and other cuts to the bureaucracy. Elon Musk has posted relentlessly on the social media platform he owns, promoting his own voice on an algorithm he controls. The Democratic National Committee, meanwhile, started a rapid response account in January with about 121,000 followers, a fraction of DOGE’s reach. And Democrats held traditional rallies outside the USAID and Treasury buildings, where Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, was mocked on late-night TV and by even some within his own party after leading a chant of “We will win!”

My political group recently had a discussion with Angelo Carsone, the President of Media Matters, which started out monitoring Fox News and now tracks podcasts, YouTube programs and other digital media platforms. The left/right skew of available programming is startling:

Each dot represents a podcast or YouTube program. The size indicates the audience. Red are conservative or “conservative-adjacent” (important: not every influential show is specifically politics-focused). Blue are liberal or liberal-adjacent. Its clear that conservative messages have many times the number of outlets for dissemination and attract massively larger audiences.

But more importantly, the audiences for conservative message programming echo those messages on their own social media accounts, which in turn encourages other programs to incorporate them as well. Liberal viewers, by comparison, are largely quiet with what they’re hearing.

The challenge then, is two-fold. Build up the number of programs which will appeal not only to Democratic base voters, but also unaffiliated middle-of-the road voters, but also find a way to get them to engage with their own circles of friends, families and digital contacts to echo the Democratic message (whatever that turns out to be). The concern that I have is that liberal audiences haven’t shown the same inclination to tune in to political content. Air America was never a solid competitor to Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, and MSNBC news personalities have never drawn the audiences that Fox News does. so the question is: WHAT content and personalities will draw in an audience and HOW do we engage them to spread the message as well?

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