(2024-12-12) Democrats Lost The Propaganda War

Democrats Lost the Propaganda War. 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.

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. (distribution)

If advocates of “popularism” like Yglesias are correct, how did Donald Trump win with such wildly unpopular proposals and behaviors?

I believe two things happened here

• First and most importantly, there is a vast and exceptionally well-funded right-wing propaganda machine
• Second, the mainstream media, for a variety of sociological and political reasons—including outright meddling from Donald Trump-supporting billionaire owners—refused to give Trump the full-blown scandal treatment

As a result, most swing voters simply did not hear about Trump’s platform, or did not believe it if they did

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. (health insurance) (you can always find 1 idiot to say the stupidest thing possible, anecdata ain't data)

IN SHORT, DEMOCRATS LOST THE PROPAGANDA WAR, which brings me back to local news

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

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. (ah, "nearby" is the "local news" angle)

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. A dozen such papers could be run for half a decade with maybe a tenth of what liberals spent on 2024 election ads. There are thousands of such counties, picking "6" as "strategic" would leave you just dense-suburbs or something. This is incoherent.

I also think it would be worth trying a traditional daily print newspaper model, without any content online. What a waste of money.

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. 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

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.

CAP didn’t replace ThinkProgress with anything

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

The first rule of political messaging is repetition.

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.

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.