The American Prospect: Democrats Lost the Propaganda War [View all]

[Dennis Donovan]

The American Prospect - Democrats Lost the Propaganda War

The party used up about $5 billion on political ads in 2024. There’s a better way.

by Ryan Cooper
December 12, 2024

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.”

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