Wrong Again, Democrats: Paying "Influencers" Misses the Boat

[Celerity]

Party insiders are spending millions to find the liberal Joe Rogan. How about perfecting the message before conducting a search for the perfect messenger?

https://newrepublic.com/article/195609/democrats-paying-influencers-joe-rogan-left

https://archive.ph/cpFQt


Delegates at the 2024 Democratic National Convention

When I joined the race for Democratic National Committee chair a few months ago, there was one area of consensus among all the candidates—including the eventual victor, Ken Martin. One of the big lessons of the loss from the last election cycle was that we collectively spent too much money on TV and digital ads, driven in large part by decisions of well-placed and well-heeled Democratic consultants.

We’re about to fall into the same trap in 2025. The new flavor of the moment, though, isn’t TV ads; it’s “influencers.” According to reporting in The New York Times, liberal donors are now planning to spend ungodly amounts on creating an “army of left-leaning” digital creators of all stripes and styles. Having realized that we’re outgunned by the right in both reach and scale of conversation online, we’re now doing what Democrats often resort to—spending money to try to solve the problem.

This mindset masks a deeper issue: spending money to create content with no editorial vision or strategy. When we don’t have organic grassroots appeal and we are not sufficiently connected to huge numbers of real Americans, we paper over that problem by trying to pay to reach people in unidirectional ways (paid ads, paid influencers, paid organizers). We need to focus less on the pipes and tactics of contacting people and put more emphasis on the content vision and ideas of what people find authentically and organically engaging.

The inputs into the Democratic Party’s elite have strayed from meaningful conversations that ordinary citizens find interesting. We’re losing in the attention economy, as MSNBC host Chris Hayes has written. I believe a big part of the reason for that is that Democrats aren’t talking about economic justice and class-based issues in compelling and interesting ways, at a time when those class-based problems are dominating the lives of everyday Americans in every possible way. These conversations are more likely to be heard on right-leaning podcasts than on left-leaning ones. But if we engage them, the conversations speak to the broadest ideological spectrum of Americans.

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