One of the great miscalculations of this election is that Republicans were not adept at using technology and navigating the media. What this election showed is that when it comes to the media that matters, Republicans are in the ascendancy. One of the big winners of this election were the influencers of the manosphere, such as Joe Rogan, and Adin Ross. Compared to them, Democrats have no rival. The Democratic Party is the party of the old media, Republicans have embraced platforms such as YouTube, Spotify, and TikTok, and dominated them, spread falsehoods, and indoctrinated a generation of young people.
This argument can be made very simply: on YouTube, the main clip from Vice President Kamala Harris’ on the podcast, “Call Her Daddy”, has been streamed just 843,000 times, while Donald Trump’s appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience, has been viewed 48 million times. J.D. Vance’s appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience has already been viewed over 16 million times since it aired 10 days ago. There is no comparable figure to Joe Rogan on the Democratic side. Nobody can get those kinds of numbers. Look at the biggest news channels on YouTube, and conservative podcaster Megyn Kelly has 30 million more YouTube views than CBS or NBC and even more on Instagram where she has used Blastup to improve her views. Again, no Democrat can match her. She is so big she is competing with entire news organizations, not with individual Democratic podcasters. It isn’t a surprise that Trump invited her to speak at his final event, so she could make a pitch to women over why they should vote for Trump. Quite simply, conservatives are winning the social media war.
The New York Post giddily wrote a piece titled, “How Kamala Harris killed the celebrity endorsement”, describing how Taylor Swift, Beyonce, Megan Thee Stallion, JLo and many others couldn’t move the needle for Harris. The endorsements that mattered in this election, came from the podcast world, from social media. Traditional celebrities? Nobody cared. In fact, not even Oprah and the Obamas moved the needle, and Obama is the greatest politician of my lifetime. The Post is right, the celebrity endorsement is dead.
The trouble for Democrats is, if nobody is listening to the people we rely on to be surrogates for our candidates, how can we win an election? If the media that ordinary people listen to -and there’s strong evidence that Trump’s astonishing success with young men was due to his presence on podcasts, the podcasts that matter- is a media that Democrats are struggling in, what is our strategy going forward? These questions are being asked everywhere. Should Harris have gone on Joe Rogan?
There is also talk that we need to police these spaces better, because conservatives have spread disinformation. The trouble is, for the next 2 years, there’s a very strong chance that Republicans will control the Supreme Court, Congress and the White House, so that talk is a pipe dream. Charlie Kirk, who helped run Trump’s outsourced ground game, told Megyn Kelly in her last podcast, that he “wouldn’t be surprised” if Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito stepped down from the Supreme Court to make way for a 40-something year old justice to cement the conservative supermajority for a generation. If that’s true, I think any attempt to reign in social media platforms will be killed by SCOTUS. What we have to do is fight for a bigger share of the social media world.
