Lesson From 2024 Election: “Democrats get crushed in messaging because there is no viable left-of-center media creating & nurturing narratives to counter the massive right-wing media ecosystems”

Great points (see below) by Oliver Willis, who was one of the pioneers of progressive blogging, all the way back in 2001 (23 years ago; yes, we are getting old! LOL).

Personally, I started blogging (with “Raising Kaine”) in January 2005 – a few years after Oliver Willis got going – in the aftermath of John Kerry’s devastating loss to George W. Bush. So I can definitely attest to the fact that Willis is correct – in the early days of the pro-Democratic blogosphere, “for a brief period the dnc actually did things like buy ads on our sites and invited us to cover events like the convention.” But basically after 2008, “obama won and everyone decided enough with that.”

But before the Democratic Party decided that it didn’t want anything to do with pro-Democratic, progressive, liberal, etc. political blogs, netroots activists, etc., there was something called the “Soapblox Network,” which at its peak (around 2007 or so) had blogs in a slew of states, including:

• Left in Alabama
• AZNetroots (Arizona)
• Calitics (California)
• Square State (Colorado)
• My Left Nutmeg (Connecticut)
• Delaware Liberal
• FLA Politics (Florida)
• Tondee’s Tavern (Georgia)
• Poinography (Hawaii)
• 43rd State Blues (Idaho)
• Prairie State Blue (Illinois)
• Blue Indiana
• Bleeding Heartland (Iowa)
• Daily Kingfish (Louisiana)
• Turn Maine Blue
• Free State Politics (Maryland)
• Blue Mass Group (Massachusetts)
• Michigan Liberal
• Minnesota Campaign Report
• Cottonmouth Blog (Mississippi)
• Fired Up! Missouri
• Left in the West (Montana)
• New Nebraska
• Blue Hampshire (New Hampshire)
• Blue Jersey (New Jersey)
• New Mexico FBIHOP
• The Albany Project (New York)
• Daily Gotham (New York)
• Blue NC (North Carolina)
• North Decoder (North Dakota)
• As Ohio Goes
• Buckeye State Blog (Ohio)
• Blue Oklahoma
• Loaded Orygun (Oregon)
• Keystone Politics (Pennsylvania)
• Rhode Island’s Future
• Clean Cut Kid (South Dakota)
• Knox Views (Tennessee)
• Burnt Orange Report (Texas)
• Texas Kaos
• Wasatch Watcher (Utah)
• Green Mountain Daily (Vermont)
• Raising Kaine (Virginia)
• WashBlog (Washington)
• West Virginia Blue
• Uppity Wisconsin

Today, how many of those blogs are still around? Very, very few – if any (I couldn’t find any that are still active, although Raising Kaine eventually led to Blue Virginia, which obviously is still around, since that’s…this blog you’re reading right now! LOL). Oh, and in addition to all those state-based progressive blogs, many of which were excellent in terms of quality and quantity, there were also MANY other progressive blogs that weren’t in the “Soapblox Network.” Just here in Virginia, for instance, as of July 2008 there were pro-Democratic and/or progressive blogs like Anonymous Is a Woman, 750 Volts, Bryan J. Scrafford, Waldo Jaquith, Vivian J. Paige, Not Larry Sabato, etc. Again, most if not all of those are long gone – partly due to changes in the way people communicate (e.g., a move towards Facebook, Twitter, podcasts, Substack, you name it), but also partly due to an almost complete lack of support from the Democratic “establishment,” donors, etc. The fact is, the vast majority of people can’t spend the time and energy, for years on end, doing this work without any compensation or other support. On the right, they get that support in a big way. On our side…nope, nada pretty much.

So what’s the problem with any of that, you ask? This article explains it well:

“The conservative media landscape in the United States is exceptionally well-funded, meticulously constructed, and highly coordinated. Wealthy donors, PACs, and corporations with a vested interest in preserving or expanding conservative policies strategically invest in right-wing media channels and up and coming content creators…

…There is simply zero equivalent to this massive infrastructure on the left.”

Also see David Rothschild, who writes:

• “Democrats get crushed in messaging because there is no viable left-of-center media creating & nurturing narratives to counter the massive right-wing media ecosystems (which bully the Corporate Media into submission).”
• “Rather than create a left-of-center, objective, pro-democratic media, we should just rely on entities [who] *obviously [despise] us* to get our message across is absolutely insane thinking from Democrats.”

And how this plays out, as the superb Amanda Marcotte – an early blogger, herself – explains, in the recent presidential election:

“The problem wasn’t Democratic policy or messaging. It’s ignorance. As Heather “Digby” Parton wrote at Salon Wednesday, people backed Trump’s ‘aesthetics and attitudes’ but knew nothing about his policies. Before the election, Catherine Rampell and Youyou Zhou at the Washington Post polled voters about policies without revealing which candidate proposed them. Harris’ were far more popular — even Trump voters generally liked her ideas more, as long as they knew they weren’t hers.”

So yeah, what happens is very simple: a) Democrats do a great job in terms of policy; b) the “mainstream media” barely even reports on those policy successes, and if they do, it’s often/usually spun in a negative way, or they don’t make clear that DEMOCRATS did this great stuff; c) Republicans do a horrible job, but again the media does its “both sides” thing by blaming “Congress” or “Washington” or whatever, generically; d) the vast right-wing echo chamber (TV, radio, podcasts, etc.) puts out a narrative, relentlessly, that Democrats are a disaster and Republicans are the only ones who really care about you, blah blah blah; e) that message isn’t countered, at all, by Democrats, because even if they put out press releases or whatever, the media doesn’t cover it; f) voters, unsurprisingly, have NO IDEA that Democrats did all the great things they did, that Republicans are horrible – including voting against many of those great things that voters strongly approve of – etc; g) voters are like, “I’m mad about xyz, Democrats are in the White House, so I’ll vote Republican!” Maddening.

Now, of course, a disatrous media ecosystem isn’t the entire problem, but it’s a big part of the problem. Because the fact is, as Asha Rangappa explains:

“Democrats aren’t going to win elections again until they build a well-oiled information ecosystem that extends to podcasts and every social media platform and can pierce the right-wing propaganda bubble . It doesn’t matter if you delivered on the economy or we are actually safer if people are being pummeled by domestic and foreign disinformation that crime and inflation are up. It’s an information war at this point.”

And, as Heather Cox Richardson points out – agreeing with Rangappa – “It has been an information war since 2015. Most people just didn’t realize it.”

My big questions are why Democrats, since at least 2008 or so, have been SO disdainful of pro-Democratic “netroots” activists? And why haven’t Democrats invested the resources, as the right wing has done, in building up our own channels to get our messaging out? Why is it that so many of the top political podcasts are right wing; that if you want to listen to discussion of politics on the radio, it’s overwhelmingly right wing; that much of the top content on social media is right wing; that cable TV has minimal pro-Democratic content and TONS of pro-Republican, right-wing content; etc? And why do Democrats actually believe that without the means to inform the public of facts, reality, Democratic successes, Republican failures/extremism, etc., that voters are just going to magically know this stuff? Do Democrats actually believe that the “mainstream media” is going to do this job (that’s insane if Democrats still believe that)? And, finally, what do Democrats plan to DO ABOUT THIS? Nothing, as they’ve done since the mid-to-late 2000s? Because if Democrats don’t figure this out, ASAP, we are seriously doomed, as we just saw in the 2024 election, when an INFINITELY superior Democratic presidential nominee actually lost to a convicted felon, traitor, insurrectionist, imbecile, sadist, scumbag, etc…

P.S. For those who think we can use Facebook for political organizing/activism, note that Meta has – certainly over the past few years – grown VERY hostile to pro-Democratic political content, frequently taking down perfectly fine (factual, reasonable, etc.) – posts for NO GOOD REASON AT ALL, while allowing all kinds of extreme, false, insane right-wing content (e.g., COVID denial, climate science denial, bigotry) to remain And note that Meta doesn’t just own Facebook but also Threads and Instagram – both of which are also not friendly to Democratic political content.