The conservative journalist Andrew Breitbart observed that politics is downstream from culture — that voters are more influenced by what they watch, listen to and like than by actual politicians. As a Democrat who works on presidential campaigns, I think Mr. Breitbart was spot-on, and I’d torture the metaphor further: Democrats today are rowing upstream against powerful new cultural currents, while Republicans are working relentlessly to dam the river itself. The G.O.P. is focused on achieving long-term cultural change. We’re focused on short-term political gain.
Today’s culture is no longer a creation of executives in New York City and Los Angeles. Thanks to algorithms and an endless set of media choices, what you see, read and hear is a personalized reflection of your own interests. It’s like a city with a lot of different neighborhoods. You might live in the personal fitness neighborhood or the parenting neighborhood, but you’ll never cross over into the equine science neighborhood or, say, the politics neighborhood. So if you don’t care about politics — or more precisely, don’t trust our politics — you don’t have to hear about it at all. A voter can turn on, tune in or opt out.
It was these voters — opt-out voters — who decided the 2024 election. It’s these same voters Democrats are struggling to reach today.
At their core, opt-out voters generally don’t trust politicians or the mainstream media. Many assume the system is rigged, the media is biased and neither party is actually fighting for them.
But opting out of politics doesn’t mean never hearing about it. Opt-out voters aren’t watching CNN or paying for news subscriptions, but they still get a lot of information from social media, friends and family. Politics, for them, tends to show up as cultural drift — bits of stories, values and secondhand outrage shared online by friends, influencers and nonpolitical creators. It’s ambient, not deliberate. It’s culture, not news. A young dad scrolling Instagram for parenting tips stumbles across a clip about “traditional family values.” A small-business owner watching finance videos gets fed posts about why “woke policies” are destroying the economy. A 25-year-old gym enthusiast on TikTok starts seeing content about masculinity, personal responsibility and — soon enough — right-wing politics.
This is the fundamental challenge for Democrats.
If you think the system is broken, we’ve been the ones defending it.
If you don’t trust the mainstream press, we’re not for you — because it’s the only way we know how to reach people.
If you’re looking for fast relief, we’ve got a white paper to explain our phased-in tax credit through the fiscal year 2030. Sorry, am I boring you?
Right now we win opt-in voters: people who read the mainstream press, who see themselves as part of the civic process, who believe the basic institutions of society still work — even if imperfectly. People who are likely well educated and well off, perhaps for whom inflation is less of a concern. People who show up for obscure, off-year elections in swing states. People who read, say, navel-gazing guest essays about the future of the Democratic Party in The New York Times. Hello there.
In style, substance and communication, Democrats have become an opt-in party in an opt-out country.
Now, at this point I should be clear: When I say “Democrats,” I mean me, too.
I was deputy campaign manager on Kamala Harris’s 2024 campaign. I’ve come up through a party that clings to TV ads and news releases, holding onto a media environment that stopped existing a decade ago. A party that thought Barack Obama’s cultural cool would last forever, and that young voters were table stakes. A party fundamentally mismatched with the task at hand. While we prattle on, concerning ourselves with those who already agree with us, the right has built an information machine aimed squarely at opt-out voters — people sick of traditional politics.
Right-wing partisans, much like opt-out voters, don’t trust the mainstream media or Hollywood. They seek out alternatives. This helps generate demand. This demand is met with supply: a network of influencers, personalities, podcasters and TikTokers who both inflame their bases and push messages into nonpolitical subcultures. It’s sustainable and wide-reaching: It’s generally profitable to be conservative online.
It gives them a huge advantage: They present right-wing cultural narratives on every issue set — and push messages into nonpolitical subcultures. They reach opt-out voters directly. They test messages, see what works, and then it all jumps from their online ecosystem into speeches from the president.
Meanwhile, the center-left’s attention and viewership is generally pointed squarely at the traditional press. Opt-in voters are more likely to trust mainstream institutions, after all. This leaves us relying on a news media industry that is neither a partisan ally nor reaches the voters we need. Our online ecosystem can’t sustainably thrive. So we’re stuck: We’ve got opt-in media for an opt-out electorate. At a time when many Americans don’t trust the mainstream press or Hollywood, the left owns where voters used to be. The right owns where voters are going. It leaves Democrats unable to influence the culture that really matters today, which leaves us unable to make our case to the voters we need.
Opt-out voters don’t buy what we’re selling — and even if they did, we’d have a hard time reaching them.
Part of that is, of course, infrastructure. We need to do the work the right has done to build our own ecosystem, but it won’t scale until it’s profitable. It won’t be profitable until the audience moves there, and that audience won’t move until they’ve got somewhere to go. The campaign donors who now flow money to TV ads and an army of press secretaries need to invest in getting this started, and they will need capital to keep it going. There’s plenty of smart creators in this swimming pool already, but they need resources to create, experiment and grow.
It’s also not enough to build our corner of the cultural honeycomb. We need to build pipelines to everyone else. The right has moved beyond the so-called manosphere. It’s targeting parents, runners and health influencers. If the left isn’t contesting these spaces with voices that resonate, we’ll never reach the people we need.
But we just can’t shake our brand problem: None of that infrastructure will matter if we don’t have anything to say when we get there.
Whether we’ll admit it or not, Democrats have mortgaged our support with opt-out America to win a greater share of opt-in America. We’ve got to flip this calculus: Opt-in Republicans who vote with us are with us for a reason. They’re making a nuanced calculation about the state of America’s politics and the protection of our institutions. They’re not with us because they believe everything we believe; they’re with us because Donald Trump was an existential threat to our democracy.
The good news? We have an opening. In this Trump era — where working people foot the bill for Elon Musk and Mr. Trump’s self-dealing while the government gets further into people’s bedrooms — we have a chance to offer something different. Not a return to normal, but a vision for a better future. A government that roots out corruption, checks runaway corporate power and works — for the love of god, works. A country where you don’t go broke when you get sick, where you’ll be left alone if you’re not hurting anyone. We should help people believe in better. If we’re not hope merchants, we’re nothing at all.
If there is any lesson I gleaned from the 2024 campaign, it’s that winning opt-in voters is about facts. (“Inflation is among the lowest in the world!”) Winning opt-out voters is about attention. (“I am taking a shift at McDonald’s because I understand you.”) Success in communicating online most often has less to do with social media trends and tactics and more to do with doing the right thing offline. We watched a few weeks ago as Senator Cory Booker reaped the benefits of this approach: He gave a big, bold 25-hour speech on the Senate floor that captured attention, gave people hope, drove conflict and generated the first bona fide social media moment of this iteration of the resistance.
The supporters of “fight, not flight” defy ideology: Bill Kristol, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, former Representative Conor Lamb, and Senator Bernie Sanders are all pushing for a more aggressive posture toward the administration. It’s a coalition that acknowledges that campaigning through culture is as much about style as it is substance. Mr. Sanders holds big rallies, but he also goes viral at Coachella. It is perhaps the case that leaders who don’t live in this media environment can’t possibly understand it, but it’s no excuse for denying what’s in front of us. One of the deeper political challenges with former President Joe Biden’s age was not the number; it was the fact that voters believed his age meant he couldn’t understand them. We are now seeing a generation of 70-year-olds who called for the departure of an 81-year-old fail to understand how anyone under 60 gets information about their world.
Conflict drives attention. Attention drives reach. Reach drives votes. Call out the corruption, the hypocrisy, the fraud. Take big, countervailing stands. Make it visceral. Make it personal. Make it fun — the kind of thing people want to be a part of. We are just coming off a campaign cycle where failing to do this cost us: On our worst issue — inflation — Democrats from the White House on down never convincingly named a villain. Republicans and then voters happily made the villain us.
The fight shows we care. It shows that maybe, just maybe, we might even deliver on what we say. If we can’t show people we believe in something enough to fight for it, we shouldn’t be surprised when they stop believing in us. It’s the authenticity, stupid.
A winning presidential coalition needs broad swaths of voters who have opted in — and opted out. Until we learn to wield attention and influence culture, we’ll be adrift. While we struggle, the right will be upstream, defeating us before we can even start.
Rob Flaherty was a deputy campaign manager on Kamala Harris’s 2024 presidential campaign and served as assistant to the president and director of digital strategy in the Biden White House.
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