David Dayen
After hours at the DNC in Chicago
CHICAGO – A lot of the grumbling from the reporter class about this year’s DNC has to do not with the security lines (which were a breeze yesterday) or the lack of writing space (which is a real problem) but the presence of credentialed “content creators,” who have arguably better access. There’s a “blue carpet” on the first floor of the convention hall, where elected officials who don’t want to answer anything beyond what they had for breakfast are strutting for the ’Gram.
Campaigns, often made up of young people, gravitate to the new new thing. I must concede that I was once a beneficiary of this. At the 2008 DNC, bloggers who focused on a particular state were given a seat inside that state’s delegation to report. I went with my fellow bloggers at the dearly departed Calitics, and got to sit for one night with the pass in the California delegation. The wired internet (grab a chair, kids, and I will tell you about ethernet cables) was attached to the podium, and during the state roll call, which was my designated day, the bloggers were all on camera. (I sat that night just across from a local district attorney named Kamala Harris, who called me “Hey blogger” all night long.)
So I get fully the need to penetrate a young market that me and my parents know not a thing about. I didn’t get it entirely until after the convention speeches Tuesday night, when my Prospect colleagues and I made our way out to the Hotties for Harris party.
Influencers entered a rented warehouse just across the train tracks, done up with projected graphics and memes. A wood-paneled living room contained a life-sized statue of J.D. Vance, “The Most Awkward Man in America,” next to, well, a couch, and posters of the parade of horribles, mostly on social issues, that would befall the world if Vance and Donald Trump were leaders of the free world. On the opposite side was a wheel, which you could spin to win prizes like a blindfold and, yes, condoms. (Safe sex and reproductive justice was a theme.)
Another room had Skee-Ball, a “test your strength” punching bag, and one of those carnival machines where you grab a prize. A creator from La Crosse, Wisconsin, who posts about motorcycles showed me the bunny she won; I wasn’t aware you could win anything at that game.
Maybe the rigged (to win) machine was a testament to just how much money was dropped on this party. Beers, cocktails, and drinks in hollowed-out coconuts (of course) were flowing; there was a food truck with an entire gold-tiled pizza oven inside dishing out whole pies, and a different truck offering empanadas. None of us could figure out who paid for this; one creator I talked to said it came from “a PAC.”
UPDATE: In true milkshake duck fashion, a press release sent out before the Hotties for Harris event that was forwarded to me states that the event was funded by something called “Investing in US,” which, according to a helpful link to Influence Watch that the press release supplied, is “a for-profit investment fund founded by billionaire LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and former Progressive Policy Institute senior fellow Dmitri Mehlhorn.” Yes, that Reid Hoffman.
David Dayen
Prospect colleagues and the horrors of J.D. Vance
I’m guessing the return on investment was solid. Microtargeting is nothing new in politics, but this is micro-microtargeting, getting TikTok and Instagram posters excited about telling their followers, many of whom may have no connection whatsoever to politics, about the brat and the coach and the election. The creators I talked to were bright and enthusiastic—one told me she was about to start law school, and another woman with a disability spoke with pride about what Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) had done for Illinois. In general, these were normie Democrats with cultural affinity toward the left who were happy to be invited and motivated to use the most powerful campaign tool, word of mouth, for a constituency that probably won’t otherwise be reached.
One thing that VP Harris has shown in her initial weeks as a presidential candidate is that politics is allowed to be fun. It would be easy to be cynical about Hotties for Harris as a generic return to the woke neoliberalism (someone else’s term, not mine) of the Hillary Clinton campaign. But people respond differently to different messages and motivations. I’m here for the content.
