Jeremy Hogan/SOPA Images/Sipa USA via AP
A Fox News ad is displayed outside the Fiserv Forum on the eve of the Republican National Convention, July 14, 2024, in Milwaukee.
The intra-Democratic argument over what should be done following their loss in 2024 goes on. Bernie Sanders is arguing for working-class populism. Matt Yglesias has been flogging a “Common Sense Manifesto” arguing for Bill Clinton–style triangulation.
I have my own thoughts on messaging topics. But all this is putting the cart before the horse. Democrats are missing something that is arguably a prerequisite for ideological messaging to have any effect whatsoever: a media apparatus that can get these messages in front of swing voters. The content of the message doesn’t matter if voters never hear it. An obvious place to start would be to build up straightforward reporting operations in news deserts in critical states, and to stop making traditional election broadcast ads the core focus of campaign spending.
If advocates of “popularism” like Yglesias are correct, how did Donald Trump win with such wildly unpopular proposals and behaviors? He said he wants to deport 15 to 20 million people (which is unpopular if the question is asked forthrightly); his nominees to the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade; he has been held legally liable for rape; he has been convicted of 34 felonies; and his business empire turned out to be a vast fraud scheme. Trump’s de facto campaign platform, Project 2025, is hugely unpopular.
I believe two things happened here. First and most importantly, there is a vast and exceptionally well-funded right-wing propaganda machine that pipes Republican messaging directly into tens of millions of homes, day in and day out, influencing people both directly and through conversations with families and neighbors.
Second, the mainstream media, for a variety of sociological and political reasons—including outright meddling from Trump-supporting billionaire owners—refused to give Trump the full-blown scandal treatment, with many consecutive days of inflammatory headlines and articles, no matter what he did. Democrats have relied on the MSM to do their messaging for them, but they did not and will not do it. As Josh Marshall writes, “Democrats need to organize their future politics around the simple reality that the establishment media is structurally hostile to the Democratic Party.”
As a result, most swing voters simply did not hear about Trump’s platform, or did not believe it if they did. This more or less must be the case given the millions of people who voted for state-level abortion protections while also for the guy who ended Roe and will probably try to pass a national ban, overriding any state-level laws. Interviews of swing voters who went Trump also confirm utterly delusional beliefs. “I think it’s really cool that he’s going to take on fighting the big health care corporations that are charging insane amounts and hopefully get that under control,” one told The New York Times recently.
IN SHORT, DEMOCRATS LOST THE PROPAGANDA WAR, which brings me back to local news. A poll back in April, before Biden dropped out, found that he was winning voters who get their news from newspapers by 49 percentage points, while Trump was winning those who don’t follow political news at all by 26 points. No doubt that is partly demographics, but also partly due to opportunity: In a large chunk of the country, there is no local paper even available, and in a much larger chunk the few papers that remain are private equity–gutted carcasses with little aside from Associated Press reprints.
A recent study by Paul Farhi and John Volk at Northwestern found an even more stark gap in the worst-off counties. Trump won 91 percent of “news desert” counties—where there is no local coverage of any kind—by an average of 54 percentage points. Notably, several of these are heavily Latino counties on the southern Texas border, which saw enormous swings toward Trump.
As local news is steadily strangled to death by the Facebook/Google advertising duopoly, the resulting gap is being filled with right-wing propaganda and reactionary voices on social media, who flood the information space with hysterical lies about national culture-war topics, and salient local information falls by the wayside. Nobody hears about the infrastructure or manufacturing projects the Biden administration is standing up nearby. This is how Latinos in heavily mixed-status families in South Texas were convinced to vote for the “deport all unauthorized immigrants along with their citizen children” candidate.
Most swing voters simply did not hear about Trump’s platform, or did not believe it if they did.
Absent any action, Trump is likely to make this worse. His antitrust authorities are going to be far more lenient than their predecessors in the Biden administration. That ensures significant media consolidation, which if history is any guide will deprive large parts of the country even further of real news and information, in favor of hot takes and ideological scandalmongering.
This all suggests an obvious opportunity: Democratic funders could set up new local papers in strategic counties, or buy up some of the remaining husks and staff them up. I would just put together a bog-standard paper with some liberal editorials, but one could make it tabloid-y or explicitly partisan to taste. Lord knows there are plenty of unemployed journalists willing to work. Sample subscriptions could be handed out en masse, and revenue bolstered by directing liberal advertisements their way. A dozen such papers could be run for half a decade with maybe a tenth of what liberals spent on 2024 election ads.
I also think it would be worth trying a traditional daily print paper model, without any content online. This might sound naïvely old-fashioned. But I strongly suspect that as the experience of using a smartphone steadily decays, with big social platforms flooded with AI slop and news websites either paywalled or clogged with glitchy, obnoxious advertisements that make it very difficult to read anything, a genuine full-fat daily newspaper will seem like a breath of fresh air. In most of the country, nobody born after about 1998 has even seen such a thing. “You mean I get a curated selection of news, commentary, sports, and comics delivered to my door every day, and I don’t even have to click X to get rid of the crypto ad?” a Zoomer reader might say. Furthermore, such a model would force people who want that news to put down their phones, with all the endless brain-melting distractions a swipe away, in order to read it.
This isn’t exactly a novel observation. As Duncan Black points out, for more than 20 years now various liberal commentators have pointed out that Democrats badly need something to counteract the right-wing propaganda machine. They even used to have a de facto party publication in the form of ThinkProgress, a progressive news site housed at the Center for American Progress, which for a while was the Democrats’ in-house think tank. This was not remotely large enough to counter Fox News, but it did make a difference, and numerous working reporters got their start there.
Alas, ThinkProgress was shut down in 2019 because the leaders of CAP got sick and tired of progressive reporters annoying Democratic elites. There had always been tension—in 2008, future CAP head Neera Tanden reportedly punched editor in chief Faiz Shakir for asking Hillary Clinton about why she voted for the Iraq invasion—but after years of quarrels over Israel and other topics, CAP brass got rid of it. They claimed this was because it didn’t make money, but that was a pretext. ThinkProgress never made money and was never supposed to. Practically everything at CAP was and is donor-supported—that’s what a think tank is for.
It was exceptionally foolish to get rid of ThinkProgress because it occasionally strayed from the party line. Republicans understand that even when right-wing media says inconvenient things, the broader political benefit of that media complex is immense. But even worse is that CAP didn’t replace ThinkProgress with anything. If vulgar party propaganda is all they can stand, better that than nothing, and better late than never.
A RELATED PROBLEM IS HOW DEMOCRATS SPEND their advertising dollars. Overwhelmingly, the money goes to traditional broadcast advertisements and print mailers, and most of that in the last few months of an election.
There are two problems with this: First, it means people aren’t hearing anything from the Democrats for long stretches when no campaign is happening. (The right-wing media, of course, is happy to fill in the gap.) The first rule of political messaging is repetition. As Republican political strategist Frank Luntz once said: “You say it again, and you say it again, and you say it again, and you say it again, and you say it again, and then again and again and again and again, and about the time that you’re absolutely sick of saying it is about the time that your target audience has heard it for the first time.”
Second, because the advertising comes in temporary massive glugs, a large fraction of the money disappears into bidding up the price of ad spots. TV stations can’t raise prices on normal campaigns in the 60 days before an election, but they can on super PACs, which pay up to ten times as much as campaigns for prime broadcast spots.
Indeed, the Trump campaign was so badly overmatched money-wise that they found a clever technique to maximize their ad spending. There is no price regulation for political ads on streaming services, so super PACs pay the same as campaigns. Streamers, particularly the free ones like Tubi, are also disproportionately used by the working-class, less-white swing demographics, and unlike broadcast or cable, ads can also be microtargeted using the surveillance data the platforms collect. The Trump campaign went hard on this approach, and claims it was dramatically more efficient than Harris’s tsunami of spending. It’s hard to argue with the results.
Once again, Trump’s governing approach will benefit his political project. Hollywood can’t wait to consolidate the space, reducing the number of streaming channels and magnifying the data each of the remaining ones has access to. Without congressional legislation—a good bet—the streaming loophole will make super PACs even more powerful, and conservative billionaires are eager to capitalize.
Putting this all together: The typical Democratic approach of funneling billions through sporadic ad campaigns on traditional television channels is plainly not working. There are cheaper and more reliable ways to get the party’s messaging in front of persuadable voters, consistently. This would probably require at least partly cracking up the cartel of well-connected party consultants who cream off a large chunk of the spending, as Minnesota Democratic Party chair Ken Martin argues in a case for why he should be chair of the Democratic National Committee.
In any case, business makes for an instructive comparison. Does Ford try to convince drivers that it makes trucks for rugged manly men in the American heartland for only a few months every four years? Of course not. They are doing that every minute of every day, on every conceivable communications medium. It’s a big reason why the Ford F-series has been the best-selling line of personal vehicles in this country for the last 47 years straight.
The Democrats, by contrast, have not had the same consistency. It’s time to rethink things.
