We have now learned, belatedly, that billionaire Elon Musk spent at least $250 million to help billionaire Donald Trump win the White House. One key part of that spending came in the form of the $20 million Musk dumped into a brazen pro-Trump propaganda campaign. The move highlights with new urgency what you might call the “information gap”—the deficit Democrats face in the info wars, which the next Democratic National Committee chair must have a comprehensive plan to address.
Musk lavished that $20 million on a shadowy outfit called the RBG PAC, named after the late liberal Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The PAC’s mission was to soften Trump’s position on abortion by absurdly suggesting it’s akin to RBG’s. How many low-information voters this reached is unknown. But it’s another sign that Musk—who also transformed X/Twitter into a sprawling right-wing disinformation machine—and the pro-Trump forces have found potent new ways to swamp the system with propaganda and communicate compellingly with politically unengaged Americans, helping cost Democrats the election and leaving them badly disarmed going forward.
So what do the candidates for DNC chair have to say about this disastrous situation? I put the question to three leading hopefuls: Wisconsin state party Chair Ben Wikler, Minnesota state Chair Ken Martin, and former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley.
For Wikler, the party’s central problem became visible back in April, when a little-noticed NBC News poll showed Trump with the support of 53 percent of people who don’t follow news at all and 55 percent of those who get news from YouTube and Google. By contrast, President Biden (who hadn’t yet left the race) earned 55 percent from those who follow network news and 70 percent from those who read newspapers.
This disparity was then exacerbated by the vastly greater presence that Trump and his surrogates have achieved in other cultural spaces not aligned with liberals or the left, like “bro” podcasts and other nonpolitical mediums followed by young men and non-engaged voters. As a result, Democrats are not communicating at all with countless people, Wikler notes.
“There are millions of voters who get their news about Democrats from Republicans,” he tells me, and “only hear from the right.”
Wikler says Democrats must appear far more on right-leaning political shows—not just Fox News but also podcasts and YouTubes and streamed interviews and the like—especially in nonpolitical spaces. Democrats must “disrupt the right-wing narrative about Democrats,” Wikler says, especially in mediums “that are not particularly political.”
Wikler says he’d invest substantial resources in training armies of surrogates to carry out that mission in all these mediums. Wikler would launch research designed to “build a deep, shared understanding” of how these mediums function and who is getting information from them, and how, and then “train, support, and deploy more communicators” to appear in these places.
Perhaps most interestingly, Wikler says the party must invest much more in building an “independent, progressive media ecosystem.” That idea is often bandied about, but critically, Wikler says the Democratic Party should actively “accelerate the success” of that ecosystem, by breaking news via those outlets and doing high-profile interviews there, with the express goal of elevating and empowering it, something the GOP does with Fox News. Also essential: marketing these outlets to voters who don’t follow political news at all.
“It’s the people least likely to seek out information about either party who we lost in this election,” Wikler said. “They’re generally younger, more working-class.” For the party, he said, “solving the information problem has to be a core focus,” requiring a “constant effort to get out of our heads and into the minds of the extraordinarily diverse electorate that is getting information from a dizzying array of places.”
Martin, the Minnesota state chair, says the party must invest “significant resources” in a comprehensive, granular mapping out of how different political demographics get electoral information, including via non-news sources. Martin also sees the information problem as directly linked to a Democratic brand problem, in which “the majority of Americans now believe the Republican Party best represents the interests of the working class and the poor.” As Martin notes, Republicans have been allowed to keep up a “constant drumbeat hammering away at our brand.”
“Because we’re not in these information spaces, we’ve allowed the Republican Party to define us,” Martin said. “We’re not defining them. We have to be present in every channel.” Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg has aptly termed this the “loudness gap.”
To counter it, Democrats must enlist an army of “trusted messengers and validators” in those spaces, Martin said, to “remind people who we are and what we’re fighting for.” Martin noted that during the campaign, Trump reached deep into various nonpolitical markets (as Ilyse Hogue details, Trump worked male-heavy audiences particularly hard). Democrats must find their own large niche audiences as a means to giving “people a sense that you’re one of them,” Martin said, adding: “It can’t be inauthentic.”
Importantly, Martin argues that the Democratic consultant class still remains too wedded to traditional paid advertising. During the campaign, some Democrats criticized the leading Super PAC, Future Forward, for spending too much on overly tested ads on network television. Martin declined to fault the group directly but said the party must reorient generally away from broadcast ads made by Democratic admakers.
“Part of what’s driven this in D.C. is the profit incentive for folks to steer everything to traditional media because that’s where they make their money,” Martin said. He vowed to break the control of the D.C. consultant class on such communications, by preventing consultants driven by “profit” from driving excessive spending into “paid broadcast TV.”
Meanwhile, a third candidate for DNC chair—former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley—notes that Democrats have allowed Republicans to communicate with voters during electoral off-years largely unchallenged. O’Malley says he’d ensure that the party puts more emphasis on what he called “the longer arc of engagement and connection” with both base and swing voters. He’d invest substantial resources in reforming how the party communicates with voters—including during those down periods—and create an entity within the party that specializes in advising campaigns on how to do this, including for races all the way down the ballot everywhere.
What’s sobering for Democrats is that Musk’s massive expenditure on pro-Trump propaganda is part of a larger set of honed tactics the pro-Trump forces used to reach the undecided voters who swung the election. The New York Times reports that this included hypertargeted ads directed at precisely located swayable voters who are more reachable via streaming services than other channels, catching Democrats napping.
Learning from that fiasco will obviously be critical for Democrats. But a full overhaul of the party’s approach to information should also be contingent on an acknowledgment of some larger truths. For one thing, as Brian Beutler noted on my Daily Blast podcast, the GOP’s ability to communicate with the electorate in a more sustained way—by making more noise and generating more controversy than Democrats do during the electoral offseason—has clearly primed voters to be more receptive to GOP appeals once campaigning starts.
For another, while winning back working-class voters probably requires more populist policies and a real reckoning with some of the party’s potentially alienating cultural stances, anyone who tells you that’s remotely the whole story is deceiving you. The problem is also informational. Democrats have ceded a lot of spaces where Republicans and the right are left unchallenged to form cultural bonds with working-class voters of all backgrounds. Democrats must find ways to intervene in that arrangement, including with new language of their own. That deficit is compounded by a dynamic detailed by TNR’s Michael Tomasky: The right-wing media simply does exert great gravitational pull on mainstream news sources, no matter how loudly newsroom leaders insist otherwise.
Finally, Democrats must treat the current state of the information ecosystem as a matter of urgency. The ideas offered by these candidates for DNC chair suggest this process has begun. It can’t be allowed to drop. A key test for any aspiring chair should be whether each is offering a comprehensive agenda illustrating a deep understanding of the information gap—and what to do about it.
