Democrats Lost the Propaganda War: The party used up about $5 billion on political ads in 2024. There's a better way.

[Celerity]

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-12-12-democrats-lost-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. I have my own thoughts on messaging topics. But all this is putting the cart before the horse. 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. An obvious place to start would be to build up straightforward reporting operations in news deserts in critical states, and to stop making traditional election broadcast ads the core focus of campaign spending.

If advocates of “popularism” like Yglesias are correct, how did Donald Trump win with such wildly unpopular proposals and behaviors? He said he wants to deport 15 to 20 million people (which is unpopular if the question is asked forthrightly); his nominees to the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade; he has been held legally liable for rape; he has been convicted of 34 felonies; and his business empire turned out to be a vast fraud scheme. Trump’s de facto campaign platform, Project 2025, is hugely unpopular. I believe two things happened here. First and most importantly, there is a vast and exceptionally well-funded right-wing propaganda machine that pipes Republican messaging directly into tens of millions of homes, day in and day out, influencing people both directly and through conversations with families and neighbors.

Second, the mainstream media, for a variety of sociological and political reasons—including outright meddling from Trump-supporting billionaire owners—refused to give Trump the full-blown scandal treatment, with many consecutive days of inflammatory headlines and articles, no matter what he did. Democrats have relied on the MSM to do their messaging for them, but they did not and will not do it. As Josh Marshall writes, “Democrats need to organize their future politics around the simple reality that the establishment media is structurally hostile to the Democratic Party.” As a result, most swing voters simply did not hear about Trump’s platform, or did not believe it if they did. This more or less must be the case given the millions of people who voted for state-level abortion protections while also for the guy who ended Roe and will probably try to pass a national ban, overriding any state-level laws. 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.



IN SHORT, DEMOCRATS LOST THE PROPAGANDA WAR, which brings me back to local news. A poll back in April, before Biden dropped out, found that he was winning voters who get their news from newspapers by 49 percentage points, while Trump was winning those who don’t follow political news at all by 26 points. No doubt that is partly demographics, but also partly due to opportunity: In a large chunk of the country, there is no local paper even available, and in a much larger chunk the few papers that remain are private equity–gutted carcasses with little aside from Associated Press reprints. 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. Notably, several of these are heavily Latino counties on the southern Texas border, which saw enormous swings toward Trump.

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[Vogon_Glory]

1. All good points. We Democrats need a news structure of our own

This last election showed just how useless the media has become in keeping potential dictators in check and that the mainstream corporate media is not only hostile to Democrats but have become servile lickspittles to both the Republican Party and the so-called “Conservative” movement.

[JI7]

2. Social media is full of right wing shit. A lot of it is just so stupid also

you might think there is no way people will fall for this but with things already being close even a small percentage can make a difference.

But I think racism and misogyny is still a thing and if Biden had been able to campaign like Harris we would have won.