Democrats, influencers huddle for a new new media strategy

Yahoo

17-02-2025

After months of licking their wounds and reflecting on how they lost the internet, Democratic strategists and politically-aligned digital creators are privately planning their next steps.
Last week, Democratic operatives gathered at the Wharf in Washington, DC, at the offices of Laurene Powell Jobs' investment company, Emerson Collective. According to three people with knowledge of the event, the activists and left-leaning media members were in town for a private meeting to discuss how the left's well-funded digital media ecosystem failed in the 2024 election. The conference featured hourlong seminars on how to improve short and long form video, which included briefings from Courier Newsroom's Tara McGowan and executives at Crooked Media, and how to better collaborate with influencers to push progressive messages out.
The summit was also an opportunity to connect several of the party's prominent financial supporters with some of the liberal media organizations that are positioning themselves as vessels to help liberals regain digital ground they've lost to the right in recent years.
In the room were Ben Wessel, the director of State and Local Political Affairs for Emerson Collective and Laura Quinn, an executive with the liberal firm Catalist who often advises liberal donors on how to spend their money in progressive media. Michael Del Nin, Soros Fund Management's leading investor, was also in attendance to talk about strategies around acquiring media companies. Peter Murray also spoke to the group about strategic media opportunities; his organization, Accelerate Change, bought Now This from Vox in 2023, and pivoted it into a more explicitly partisan influencer-driven short-form video company.
In the wake of their second loss to Donald Trump and the more explicit alignment between the president and the most popular podcasts in the country, Democrats have been on a monthslong party-wide effort to figure out how to regain credibility in digital, or at least develop their own network of friendly pundits and creators outside legacy media who can effectively deliver their message.
The private event at the Wharf was one of several efforts in recent days to shore up Democrats' digital strategies post-inauguration. Earlier this week, dozens of lawmakers from the House and Senate Democratic caucuses participated in private briefings with Brian Tyler Cohen, a political influencer and the co-founder of Chorus, a Democratic digital group. The briefings laid out what Cohen described to Semafor as tips to help Democratic members better get their messages out on new media platforms. He presented the members with do's and don'ts for short-form video and text, encouraging them to vastly increase the frequency of their posts and not overly workshop their online content. To make his point, Cohen noted that Elon Musk had posted or retweeted hundreds of posts that week alone. Cohen pointed to positive examples of congressional Democratic content that had performed well and resonated, such as a recent post in which Sen. Tim Kaine pushed back on Trump's claims about how diversity efforts impacted air traffic safety. He also recommended a particular type of small microphone popular with online content creators that members and their staff should have for whenever they decide to post.
In the months since the election, Cohen's group, Chorus, has repositioned itself and set up a digital quasi-assignment desk, where lawmakers on Capitol Hill and prominent Democrats elsewhere can connect directly on the backend with creators to facilitate one-on-one interviews or otherwise get their message out. Cohen told Semafor that after his briefing with Senate Democrats, several members, including Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly, created new accounts on Threads and Bluesky and began connecting directly with nontraditional digital creators for livestreams and interviews intended to be cut into short-form video.
'A lot of these members of Congress understand the moment that we're in,' Cohen told Semafor. 'They're recognizing where we are and are very quick to embrace the fact that you have a solution to fixing it. We've had a number of electeds meet with creators. That's to their credit — they're kind of learning the lessons that this election cycle taught us.'
In the months since the election, Democrats have been beating themselves up over how they went from online dominance in the Obama era to playing catch-up; the online right is resurgent, especially in the podcast space, where many Americans now get their information and news.
The initial shock of the presidential loss has been heightened by other frustrations among Democrats at their party's superficially slow and unsatisfying response to Trump and Musk's shock-and awe-changes to the federal government. Embarrassing visuals of older lawmakers who seem unable to effectively take the fight to the new administration online have gone viral and prompted dismay from prominent members of the party.
Rising cable television ratings on MSNBC — and increasing online web traffic and subscriber numbers among explicitly anti-Trump outlets — show there is clearly a growing interest in oppositional media. But it remains to be seen whether efforts by Democratic online partisans will be able to alter the playing field in a meaningful way. As Red Seat Ventures co-founder Chris Balfe told me in an interview this week, the online conservative media ecosystem is strong because it spent years developing an anti-establishment model sustained by strong audience interest, not propped up by one party as its political messaging arm.
Some of the Democratic political operatives gathered at the Wharf are the same players who operated with large budgets to spend on digital newsrooms and creators during recent election cycles — without much clear return on their donors' big dollar investments. And the concepts the meeting addressed aren't necessarily new: Democrats explicitly reached out to influencers and creators as part of their 2024 strategy, at times to the frustration of legacy media. But if these efforts moved the needle, it clearly was not at the presidential level.
Still, some national Democrats clearly understand that even if helping to prop up a media ecosystem like the one on the right will take time, they need to update their own communication styles in the meantime. In recent weeks, Democratic senators and prominent members of Congress have begun appearing on random niche Twitch gaming streams to criticize Musk and have been churning out multiple TikTok-friendly front-facing vertical videos a week about the new administration. The Democratic National Committee chair race included pledges from the various candidates about supporting explicitly Democratic partisan media, and included a candidate forum moderated by influencers at Chorus.
Kamala Harris' former digital chief to Semafor last year that online messaging issues were symptomatic of a deeper cultural deficit that Democrats accrued in recent years.