Democrats don’t just have a message problem, they have a medium problem
Trump would have won by more. Here’s a major reason why.
Countless reasons have been offered as to why Democrats lost 2024, all with varying degrees of merit.
“The Democratic Party has lost touch with the working class.” Yes.
“Elitism lost the election.” Totally.
“It was sexism and racism.” 100%.
The Democratic Party (and its college-educated demographic) is not short on smart people—or people acting like smart people. At department meetings on university campuses, at cocktail hours in hip urban centers, at conferences and holiday parties, “What’s wrong with Democrats?” has been the Hot Take Du Jour… for the past year.
And there’s a lot wrong. Multiple studies, by both the DNC and nonpartisan groups, show Trump would have won by more if every registered voter in the U.S. had cast a ballot.
Moreover, Democrats have seen their registration numbers crater. In the past ten years, Democrats watched Florida swing from a purple state (that went twice for Obama) to a deep red state. Republicans now hold a 1 million-person advantage among registered voters in the Sunshine State, an electoral hole that has proven too difficult to overcome in statewide contests.
That trend is repeating nationally. In the past four years, 4.5 million voters have swung to Republicans—in blue states, red states, swing states. Democratic registrations have hit a record low.
Meanwhile, the GOP has become the working-class party—a shocking and historic realignment. Support for the Democratic Party from Black men has eroded. Support from women has eroded, while men have cratered. Support from Latinos, Asians, and immigrants has cratered. Even Black women and college-educated white voters slipped in 2024, according to Pew Research.
Source: Pew Research
Much of this has to do with voter suppression tactics as well as the Democratic Party’s messaging, values, and perseverance—or lack thereof.
But here’s the problem: Nearly every hot take on Democratic downfalls ignores the elephant in the room. Each one takes a set of criticisms against Kamala or the party, lays them out eloquently, and then fails to explain why the same rules don’t apply to Republicans.
‘The Democratic Party has lost touch with Latino voters’... Yes, but Latinos voted for a candidate who vowed to deport them, who has time and again insulted Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Mexicans, and Central Americans, and who accused immigrants of “eating the dogs” on national television. What accounts for that?
‘This election was about inflation and high prices’... Yes, but voters chose a guy whose economic message was 20% tariffs across the board. Why?
‘It was sexism.’... Of course, yet more women voted for Trump this time than in 2020 and 2016, even post-Roe. Why?
‘The Democratic Party doesn’t know how to speak with working-class voters’… True. But the working class just voted for a billionaire who did a podcast with another billionaire where they openly bragged about breaking unions, not paying for overtime, and just firing contractors without compensation. How is that possible?
What if Kamala did that? What if Democrats did any of those things?
“Kamala Harris and Donald Trump aren’t taking the same exam. He gets to be lawless. She has to be flawless.” — CNN’s Van Jones.
Any ‘nuanced take’ can’t be predicated on ignoring the blunt force trauma that was the Trump campaign.
I’m sorry.
That dog don’t hunt.
These examples, while holding grains of truth, are sandcastles on the beach compared to the tsunami that is our new media landscape—the internet and AI.
It’s a new information age, and we're not invited
We are losing the media arms race.
What is happening now can only be compared to the invention of the printing press—if the printing press was owned by fascists.
Democrats are three generations behind. They lost FM and AM to the right-wing talk radio and Christian evangelical stations. They lost TV to the cable news powers of Fox, Newsmax, OAAN, and RT. And, most importantly, they lost the internet.
“All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered.” —Marshall McLuhan
Democrats, academia, U.S. institutions, and even corporate media have all failed to understand the magnitude of what the new digital age has done to the American mind.1
YouTube rabbit holes, TikTok doom scrolling, Twitter/X, Reddit threads, Telegraph, and a countless number of right-wing deep web hangouts that we haven’t heard of have destroyed the infrastructure of our information.
Very little “content” is meant to inform. When you go online today, confirmation bias is the starting point. Total indoctrination is the goal.
During the Bush and Obama administrations, we used to say people were no longer arguing with shared facts. Today, people no longer share the same world.
This is Plato’s allegory of the smartphone.
Your perceived experience becomes your reality and, eventually, your identity. We cannot help it.
We humans are creatures of story. We are the stories we tell ourselves; we are the stories others tell us; we are the stories we read in books, that teachers show us, that the official record reflects. We can’t help but be affected—sometimes infected—by it. We are shaped by narrative—indeed, we are a narrative. At a certain point, it’s exceedingly difficult to break free. Previous education and training can slow indoctrination, but it cannot prevent it.
You are what you eat.
You are the media you consume—and, even more so, the mediums you consume.
Algorithms, social media, short videos, likes, comments are not just feeding you content; they are feeding you cognitive structures. They are rewiring your brain. Big Tech is the new Big Tobacco, and the algorithms are their nicotine. Studies show these addictive platforms change your neural pathways. They dull nuance, shorten attention span², decrease memory and performance³, increase impatience and short-circuit empathy, train your brain on where to find its next dopamine hit, and more.
You aren’t just doom-scrolling more frequently; you are becoming the doom scroll.
‘We become what we behold’ is part of what philosopher and media theorist Marshall McLuhan discussed in our previous media revolution—the advent of television. An apt paraphrasing by his colleague feels poignant in this moment: ‘We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.’4
We made fun of QAnon in the 2020 election; 2024 was QAnon metastasized.
This new digital world is a typhoon. Legacy medias—television and newspapers—are beach buckets sitting helplessly on the shore.
I am at a loss for metaphors for what AI will be…
The scale is dizzying, and the consequences frightening
Multiple online personalities have more reach than ABC, NBC, CBS, and CNN combined.
The top 100 YouTubers all have a circulation of just under 50 million or more—the top spot is nearing half a billion. A single online video will frequently have more reach than a story on the entire NPR Network and New York Times—again, combined.
Joe Rogan’s three-hour interview with Trump received more views than every television broadcast in 2024 except the Super Bowl—the one where Travis and Taylor went to overtime against some other team.
Meanwhile, one study claims 30% of the internet is already slop (AI-generated nonsense); others have it at more than half. The Europol Innovation Lab predicts 90% of online content could be AI-generated by 2026.
The results?
We have more flat-earthers now than before the moon landing.
Is that because flat-earthers are more empathetic toward the working class? Is it because flat-earthers have a secret plan to fight inflation?
Nah.
It’s because a bored or curious person finds one video that leads to another and then another and another, and eight hours later they’ve been inundated with addictive content and have found a chatroom of other people hooked on the same drug, and they’ve stumbled on a false sense of community, like being in on a little cult secret all those other suckers don’t know.
The next day the cycle repeats.
Curiosity moves to “I don’t know, man,” then slips into “I’m just saying,” until they’ve arrived at full-fledged indoctrination. For most, the brainwashing affects how they vote and how Thanksgiving dinners go. For some, they end up buying a plane ticket to Iraq to join ISIS, to Washington to storm the Capitol, or to Ukraine to fight for Russia. They attack the CDC or a county voting center or a pizza parlor. Parents and siblings are stunned, caught as surprised as anyone else.
Radicalization was once the exception; it has become the norm.
We have more anti-vaxxers than ever before.
We have more people that believe in chemtrails than ever before.
Is all this because Kamala and the Democratic Party didn’t thread the needle just, exactly, perfectly right? I wish that was the case, but it’s not realistic.
This might sound like an elaborate “We need a Joe Rogan of the left” argument. It’s not
That’s still arguing about the water in the pipes. I’m saying Republicans own the pipes.
And I mean that (almost) literally.
Elon Musk didn’t buy one of the largest social media companies in the world for $44 billion right before a major presidential election as a vanity project.
Trump didn’t create his own right-wing social media company just for fun.
MAGA didn’t defund 1,500 public radio and TV stations because they hate Elmo.
The White House didn’t make CBS cancel Colbert out of spite.
This administration isn’t suing universities and newsrooms because they like legal fees.
Trump isn’t censoring the Kennedy Center and the Smithsonian because he has peculiar taste in art.
They did it because they want to control all the information, everywhere, all at once—by any means necessary.
Not just what we see, but how we see it.
They’re doing this because they know what Democrats don’t want to admit: You don’t win at cards by stacking the deck, you win by owning the casino.
Part II: How we start to fix it. (Coming soon.)
Footnotes:
According to McLean Hospital, Harvard’s largest psychiatric facility, social media use is connected to poor sleep, memory issues, and academic struggles. Adolescents who spend more than three hours a day on social media face double the risk of anxiety and depression symptoms. The average daily use in 2023 was 4.8 hours.
In 2004, psychologists found our average attention span was two and a half minutes on one screen. By 2012 it was 75 seconds.
“Simply hearing a notification "ding" made participants of another study perform far worse on a task – almost as badly as participants who were speaking or texting on the phone during the task.” — The BBC.
This paraphrasing of McLuhan is credited to Jesuit John Culkin, a friend of McLuhan and a professor at Fordham University.
Everything we read is a question of reliability