Amid the endless, inevitable recriminations following the Democrats’ decisive loss Tuesday, one cut through the din: The Harris campaign failed miserably in engaging with the “new media,” the archipelago of podcasts, social media influencers and streamers that for many voters simply are the media. Trump and his surrogates blitzed digital media, including long sit-downs with Joe Rogan, Lex Fridman, Tim Dillon, and a host of other not-explicitly-political venues that reach younger Amercians who might not see TV ads or read mainstream news sites. “It’s a young world,” president-elect Donald Trump observed on Barstool Sports’ “Bussin’ With the Boys” podcast in October — a video podcast where he spent nearly an hour sitting in a room full of pumpkins and spiderwebs talking loosely about football, combat sports, social media and his approach to the campaign. He was duly rewarded by improving by seven points with voters 18-29, according to NBC News exit polls, with an especially pronounced boost among young men. Democrats’ dismay at losing touch with digital media quickly spun into laments about not having their “own Joe Rogan. “ But Trump’s casual dominance of the new media ecosystem went way beyond any one figure. It demonstrated his understanding of a core truth about the future (and present) of American life that institutional Democrats have failed, or are loath to, acknowledge — but is radically reshaping not only politics, but American business and social life. When it comes to the “political associations” that have historically shaped how Americans connect to each other — churches, volunteer and school groups, recreational clubs — those associations are now largely not in a rec center, den, or basement. For many people they’re now solely online, crossing geographic boundaries and making them increasingly irrelevant. “The Harris campaign had all the traditional stuff, she had the endorsements, she had the ground game and she had the professional political operatives, and it didn’t matter, because Trump won online, he won podcasts, and he won Twitter,” Jeremiah Johnson, co-founder of the Center for New Liberalism and author of the Infinite Scroll Substack focused on online culture, told DFD. Harris (and President Joe Biden, before he dropped out of the race) did make an effort to engage with this ecosystem. Harris appeared on the otherwise non-political “Call Her Daddy” podcast, and the Biden campaign sought a “seasoned meme lord” to beef up its digital media strategy and relationships with influencers. But these efforts were clearly an adjunct to their more traditional campaign strategy, and not at its beating heart like they were for Trump. In an election postmortem headlined “The Internet is More Real than Real Life,” Johnson wrote: “I can’t help but think back to the 2000s and 2010s when people would dismissively say things like ‘The internet is not real life. Twitter is not real life. You need to log off and talk to real people.’ … It’s almost more correct to say that people knocking on doors need to get off the street and get back on the internet. To compete in modern politics you *must* be fighting in online spaces.” There were plenty of factors at work in this election. Voters have repeatedly and consistently voiced their displeasure with the Biden-Harris administration’s policies and the state of the economy, and a global anti-incumbent trend has swept nearly every ruling party out of office over the past year. But many voters also just don’t live in the same world as establishment politicians (or media) anymore, which is one reason why Trump’s digital-first, -second and -third campaign beat Harris’ comparatively old-school one. Andrew Egger wrote for The Bulwark in 2019 , with Twitter at the white-hot center of American life under the first Trump presidency: “Many Americans are doing less and less of their communicating and thinking and living in the ‘real world,’ and more and more of it through the mediating lens of the internet, where the rapid advance of technology has far outstripped the development of any sort of corresponding social mores.” This also isn’t to say that real life, in-person campaigning doesn’t matter at all . In fact the swing states where Harris campaigned heavily, like Michigan, Georgia and Pennsylvania, swung less rightward than the rest of the nation. But those who would arch their eyebrow at Trump’s outlandish bromance with the Nelk Boys, with whom he’s played golf and riffed about UFOs, in favor of a more brass-tacks, economy-focused style of campaigning, miss something crucial. When one of the Nelk Boys pleads to Trump that “we need you back right now,” he’s channeling a widespread nostalgia for the pre-pandemic economy through a media ecosystem that millions of Americans trust and interact with far more than traditional media outlets. That ecosystem, much to Democrats’ chagrin, can often be quite right-wing in its presuppositions. Despite Rogan’s constant protests that he’s not particularly ideological — he said he would vote for Sen. Bernie Sanders in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary — his program has taken an obvious turn to the right since his move to Austin, Texas. This year his political guest list was dominated by right-wing gadflies like author and former California gubernatorial candidate Michael Shellenberger or documentarian Matt Walsh, and he ultimately endorsed Trump on the eve of the election. In an article exploring the right turn of Gen Z men, Vox’s Rebecca Jennings wrote that “[p]art of the issue for Democrats is that the most popular content on the internet is either entirely nonpolitical … or is right-leaning and geared toward men. While plenty of podcasters and influencers espouse leftist and liberal views, they don’t command nearly as much influence as those on the right.” But setting aside the influence of the “manosphere” — and the folly of blaming Democrats’ loss on white “bros,” given the society-wide, multiracial bump in support for Trump — digital-first social allegiances have been on display for those who can see long before the former president used his flawless media instincts to seize on them and win back the White House. Think of Jack Teixiera, the Massachusetts Air National Guard member who leaked a trove of classified documents to win credibility with his Discord server, “Thug Shaker Central.” In the most literal form possible, his online contacts and sense of community outweighed his sworn allegiance to the United States government. Or Riley June Williams, the Aubrey Plaza lookalike who quarterbacked the Jan. 6 rioters to Nancy Pelosi’s office in the throes of an obsession with white supremacist influencer Nick Fuentes. Or Costin Alamariu, the Yale political scientist who reinvented himself as the pseudonymous “Bronze Age Pervert” and inspired a new generation of far-right politics. These are extreme examples. But they point to the truth Trump understood in clawing his way back to the White House, after the very real institution of the American court system announced its own verdict on him : Americans’ hearts, minds, and identities, and perhaps the future of American life, are online. After Democrats’ brutal loss Tuesday, their inevitable talk of “meeting voters where they are” might have to start there.
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