In July 2023, a year before Harris became the nominee, while the Republican primary campaign was underway, I spoke with Flaherty, who was then in charge of digital strategy at the White House.
There, he helped develop the White House’s alternative media strategy, supporting the White House’s network of loyalists and providing exclusive information to alternative liberal media outlets. Part of the first interview after Biden nominated then-Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court last month was with popular Substack author and professor Heather Cox Richardson and left-wing news YouTuber Brian. -Conducted by Tyler Cohen.
Flaherty also paid close attention to how the race was going on the Republican side. Donald Trump is leaning into a new podcast, and his opponents are tapping into a large network of right-wing and conservative figures to amplify their message.
He acknowledged that Republicans have done a better job of building an alternative digital media ecosystem with podcasters, YouTube streamers and friendly commentators. But he argued at the time that the Biden campaign could overcome these obstacles by mastering the “personalized internet.” This allows sophisticated algorithms to provide highly specific information tailored to Americans’ preferences and online behavior.
When speaking to me again last week, Flaherty said that remains their theory on the case. From the beginning, campaigns believed that the race would be contested by voters who don’t pay attention to politics or mainstream news, and who get their information from YouTube, their friends’ Instagram stories, or links and memes dropped in groups. I knew it. chat.
Firstly, this meant moving from previous campaigns to paid advertising. In addition to covering the airwaves in battleground states, the campaign also invested heavily in advertising on YouTube in recognition of streaming’s rapid growth. Many of Harris’ key voters spent time there, according to campaign data.
More importantly, this meant building a strategy that focused more on podcast appearances and interviews with influencers than traditional media. Flaherty said Harris’ time is so limited and polling data showing viewers already overwhelmingly support her that the campaign has lost ground to major traditional news outlets. He said he skipped the opportunity to speak.
“As for my colleagues in the mainstream news media, there’s no value in speaking to the New York Times or the Washington Post in the general election because they (their readers) are already with us,” Flaherty said. said.
Flaherty isn’t rejecting television or other legacy media. “One of the most important moments of the campaign for the vice president was the interview with Bret Bayer. It was a huge fundraising moment. It was a huge social moment,” he said. spoke.
“What President Trump did with McDonald’s was smart because it obviously drove TV coverage, but it also drove social media engagement,” he said. “And those things often happen in parallel, but they don’t always happen, so that was the sweet spot. It propelled traditional reporting and non-traditional media. It’s not like TV is dead. I don’t think so. That’s probably the most important thing, but it’s the literal television and what’s on it that matters.”
But as the campaign progressed, Flaherty said he realized the lack of support in some parts of the media reflected a deeper problem. That issue remained unresolved when Ms. Harris campaigned on Mr. Biden’s behalf. Harris’ campaign represented what many voters saw as the embodiment of the status quo, going against media trends as well as ideological distrust of establishment figures. The media successes of 2024 were independent, non-traditional online personalities who were themselves the embodiment of reward against the establishment.
“The reason people are seeking alternative media sources and turning away from political news is because they don’t trust our institutions. They don’t trust the elites, they don’t trust the media. They don’t trust all of this. So the elite and organized parties are going to have a hard time selling to people in these places,” Flaherty said.
“It’s not as simple as, ‘Go up to Joe Rogan and tell him how great our democracy is and how important it is to maintain the independence of the Justice Department.’ And I think there’s a lot of cultural touchpoints as well. I mean, Joe Rogan, at least these days. He was a supporter of IKEA for All. Theo Fung is really against money in politics and the way pharmaceutical companies flood our communities with opioids. These are all things Democrats want to say. But as long as we look like the party of the establishment, people looking for anti-establishment, anti-establishment media, it will be difficult to connect with them.”
Nowhere was this more evident than in the “manosphere” of podcasters and content creators like Rogan and Von. For them, Trump has become less harmful and more based, giving his supporters access. Flaherty said that while the Trump campaign was successful in using new media to reshape culture, Democrats realized that the mass media institutions that had been their primary support for years were weaker than these new cultural drivers. Ta.
“It’s not just young people. It’s the broader ecosystem,” he said. “Democrats have historically had very close relationships with institutional media, institutional culture, including Hollywood and traditional news outlets. There’s a whole cultural ecosystem that the Trump campaign has cultivated really well over a long period of time. exist.”
Flaherty also acknowledged that Elon Musk’s acquisition of X (née Twitter) played a major role in the campaign, further tilting the scale of online culture and information toward Trump.
“Its importance was twofold. One, it was a place to communicate with elites and highly informed people. But second, it was also a place where politics blended into culture. So even if it wasn’t the farthest reaching platform, it was a very important central node,” he said. “It wasn’t good that that node was essentially fundamentally controlled by an arm of the Trump campaign. It’s a real problem. And Elon clearly achieved his goal there. Center-left and left-wing content It was clearly suppressed compared to right-wing content.”
But while the campaign came to believe it was fighting an uphill battle against the culture, it also made some strategic mistakes of its own based on faulty assumptions.
Flaherty said underestimating the Trump campaign was a central part of the former president’s digital strategy. The Harris campaign believed that the Trump team’s decision to continue talking to the manosphere simply meant reaching the same audience over and over again. But Flaherty said the “incredible frequency” of these appearances helped give the former president credibility among audiences, which exuded.
He also said the Harris campaign never fully understood one of its early strategies, which was to organically incorporate messages into family group chats and private media; The reason for this was that it was not possible to accurately determine how the content would be spread in that way.
“I think in the end it was a much more difficult thing to do,” he said.
Many of the professional Democrats I’ve talked to in recent weeks feel they’ve done a good job of identifying their problems. But the next steps in the Democratic Party’s media strategy are unclear. When I met Flaherty in New York this week, he talked about his professional future and his role in developing the party’s media strategy for the next four years and finding a way to regain its dominance online. I was pondering what it would look like (if anything). .
For Flaherty, part of that starts with a serious effort to create an independent media ecosystem for the left and center left, separate from the nonpartisan media that has historically catered to Democratic Party appetites. Flaherty said the only silver lining from this election is that many hardcore Democrats are starting to waver from their complacency with traditional media.
“They’ll never distrust the New York Times, and they’ll never distrust the Washington Post,” he said. “But I think in the Trump era, I think we’re going to see dissatisfaction with the mainstream media start to boil over, and I think we’re going to see more smart people trying to fill that gap, creating content with left-wing and center-left messaging. Masu.”
To counter the pro-Trump right wing that is proliferating online, Flaherty said, Democrats will seek out independent partisan friends online and those who are not explicitly political but may reflect liberal and progressive values. He said there is a need to invest in supporting content creators and media workers.
“We need a whole ecosystem that thrives. It’s not just Pod Save America, but I think we should have more of it. It’s not just Hasan Piker. We need more Hasan Piker. We also need a culture “It’s a group of people who influence the creators of, a nonpartisan audience. All of these things need to happen at the same time,” he said. “And the reality is, it’s not going to be a big media organization. It’s going to be a network and a collection of individual personalities because that’s how people get their information.”
Flaherty said he believes “the ecosystem needs to grow to simulate demand.” All of this is happening in a kind of synchronicity, because as people flee cable TV, the center-left begins to distrust mainstream media, and mainstream media becomes more dependent on primarily center-left subscribers. Dew. ”
