‘There’s a whole new bench of progressive creators’: how Democrats can catch up in the online space

Democrats’ soul-searching began even before it was clear Donald Trump would return to the White House. But their devastating losses in the 2024 election threw the party’s problems into stark relief, prompting a wave of competing explanations from inflation and the border to Gaza, Joe Biden’s age, Kamala Harris’s clipped campaign, “woke” policies, an anti-incumbent mood or, more likely, some combination of them all.

One diagnosis, however, drew striking consensus: Democrats had allowed themselves to be drowned out online by the right’s vast – and well-funded – digital army.

Since then, they have moved urgently to course-correct, streaming onto TikTok and other platforms and inundating liberal donors with pitches for podcasts and projects aimed at building a rival media ecosystem on the left.

Few have followed Democrats’ online reckoning more closely than Kyle Tharp, a progressive writer and researcher who authors the Chaotic Era, a newsletter about politics, media and online influence.

Tharp launched the Chaotic Era in January, just days before Trump’s second inauguration. Over the past year, he has tracked the surge in liberal media projects, mapped the rise of left-leaning creators on platforms like YouTube and analyzed the narratives that managed to break through the digital noise in what he calls an “especially chaotic year in American politics”.

In a recent interview, Tharp reflected on what Democrats have – and have not – learned in their quest to compete in the deeply fragmented and fast-moving new media landscape.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

What prompted you to start the Chaotic Era?

The 2024 election was kind of a wake-up call for me. I worked for a progressive media organization called Courier, where I had been running really fast-growing progressive media and TikTok accounts and seeing how content was moving on social media. But I was really shocked by the election results and felt pretty strongly that a lot of the traditional political press corps and the stories that I was reading were not capturing a lot of the different forces that were impacting our politics and the different changing ecosystems that campaigns have to work in.

I took some time off and figured out I’d go solo in January trying to lift up those new voices, new organizations, creators, forces, platforms that are all impacting our politics. I thought that this year would be especially chaotic – that’s why I named the newsletter such – but I have been really surprised at how the news cycle has just been relentless all year long.

After their 2024 losses, Democrats broadly agreed they needed to do better digitally. How much progress have they made?

There have been three big things that have happened positively for Democrats in the online space this year.

First of all, one of the biggest takeaways from the 2024 election was that Trump went on all these podcasts. There was this conversation, “Democrats need to talk to people like Joe Rogan. They really need to build their own Joe Rogan.” It became really cliche. But a lot of federally elected Democrats, members of Congress, senators, governors, folks who may be considering a 2028 presidential run have really tried to take the podcast and long-form YouTube-interview sector more seriously since 2024.

Democrats have sat down for hundreds of podcast interviews this year, ranging from super-political to pro-Democrat YouTube shows like MeidasTouch all the way to going on conservative YouTube programs and podcasts.

A couple folks that have been particularly prolific in terms of going on different podcasts this year: [California representative] Ro Khanna has gone on like 70, but [Connecticut senator] Chris Murphy, [former transportation secretary] Pete Buttigieg, [California governor] Gavin Newsom, [Illinois governor] JB Pritzker – all these folks have really found this medium to be particularly helpful in terms of getting their message out.

Secondly, a new progressive media ecosystem – a partisan media ecosystem on the left – has started to emerge to counter Fox News, the Daily Wire, the Daily Caller, the Blaze and the entire rightwing media ecosystem. There’s still a lot of catching up to do. But entrepreneurs on the left have been pitching major donors to fund some of these efforts. Some of these efforts have taken off with grassroots subscriptions like the Bulwark and Zeteo. And some have grown really rapidly on social media platforms like TikTok. And so there’s now a whole new bench of creators and progressive media brands and that’s going to pay dividends for years to come.

And then the third thing that I think Democrats have started to do well at is that they’ve really integrated paid social media creator engagement campaigns into their full media mix. It used to be that a campaign like Abigail Spanberger’s or Mikie Sherrill’s would just buy TV ads, buy some snail mail and maybe run some ads on Facebook. And now it’s become standard that every major Democratic political campaign should have some type of creator marketing strategy – whether it’s paid or unpaid, they’re going to be engaging with high-level social media creators that have big audiences to help them get their messaging out.

Despite that progress, you write that Republicans still hold a decisive advantage in the media landscape. Why does that gap persist?

Republicans and the conservative media ecosystem have had a decades-long head start in terms of investing in their media infrastructure. Everything from the Daily Wire to the Daily Caller to Breitbart, the Blaze, you name it, all of these conservative web-based media efforts were founded way back in the Obama era. Those organizations, for the past 10 years, have been growing their presence on social media and building a bench of influencers, and now those influencers – whether it be Candace Owens, Ben Shapiro, Tucker Carlson, Benny Johnson – they’re all spinning off into their own media outlets. That 10- to 20-year head start has really hurt liberal efforts and disadvantaged Democrats at election time.

Their donors have also taken this seriously. Conservative philanthropy has funded a lot of these efforts, whether it be Turning Point USA or PragerU, to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars just in the past 15 years. PragerU’s annual budget – it’s a 501(c)3 – is $70m a year in charitable funding. There’s nothing like that on the left.

A lot of conservative influencers online view their content as counter-cultural – they’re saying things that they’re not allowed to say in the mainstream media, and so that attracts a certain type of person. They use rage bait, click bait and flashy headlines and that’s helped them grow really quickly.

Have Democrats found a way to counter conservatives with their own emotional content?

Yes, and I’ll point to two examples. The pro-Democratic, progressive media outlet MeidasTouch has grown significantly, adding millions of subscribers on YouTube this year and even displacing Joe Rogan on the podcast charts because of their ability to really drive grassroots energy to their content. They use click-baity, outrage-y content formats to get folks really riled up against Trump. If you go to their YouTube page, you’ll see a lot of all-caps letters, flashing arrows and things like that.

On the politician side, I think Gavin Newsom is someone who has had a really strong year in terms of social media growth, online engagement, as well as offline success, with fundraising. And that’s because he’s exemplified what a lot of grassroots Democrats want: somebody who will speak authentically, be real and put up a fight against Trump.

After Trump’s re-election, many Democrats wanted a more aggressive posture, and the actors on the left who adopted that more aggressive posture online have seen a lot of growth and engagement.

Democrats have been on an electoral winning streak this year. Where have you seen digital strategy shape a campaign’s success?

The off year is really unique because the folks that vote are the ones that tend to be the most engaged. And in this new world we live in, it seems like a lower turnout of highly educated voters is going to benefit Democrats. So we shouldn’t read too much into the election victories.

That being said, what Newsom did in California with their ballot measure was fascinating.

His campaign deployed the party’s biggest and best messengers. There were ads from AOC [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] and other California politicians and messengers. They invited influencers and creators to all their rallies to explain the stakes of the election. Newsom went on all these podcasts. I was super skeptical of whether they would win that election, but they won it handily.

And obviously Zohran Mamdani’s campaign in New York was also fascinating, just because of the intensity and volume of content that they were able to put out, and he was just the right candidate for it.

How fractured is the digital audience Democrats are trying to reach?

Both parties’ electoral coalitions consume their news and information in 1,000 different places and have to be reached in 1,000 different ways. What that means in practice for someone like Gavin Newsom is that maybe he will go on the MeidasTouch podcast to talk to male Democrats who are over the age of 60 and are willing to donate to his campaign. But then maybe he does a tiny-mic interview with a TikTok influencer to reach a gen Z woman who may not donate but is interested in his message.

Do you see more Democrats willing to appear on hostile or rightwing platforms?

[Democrats] need to not be shrinking the tent of voters, but really expanding it. And so I think that’s why this year we’ve seen that Democratic elected officials have been given a much longer leash to go after new audiences.

When Newsom decided to platform a lot of rightwing influencers on his podcast, a lot of people rolled their eyes. He took some friendly fire and got some criticism. But now his podcast is one of the most listened-to pods of any politician in the country. People don’t typically like to listen to politicians’ podcasts, but he tapped into something and was able to build an audience there.

Democrats have spent a lot of time working to expand the reach of their message. But have they found the right message?

Democrats have really tried to tread water as the anti-Trump party for many years, and that worked in 2022, but it didn’t work last year.

So Democrats are starting to build muscle memory in terms of the tactics that they need to deploy. Now they really need to focus on comprehensive, solid messaging in policy areas to prove to the American people that they can govern. And they’re starting to understand the style, but they need to have a little bit more substance.

After a year of chronicling this, what’s your biggest takeaway – and what do you hope to see more of from Democrats next year?

Democrats have had a big year in terms of learning and understanding the new online media ecosystem, investing in it and showing up in the right places. And now they need to continue growing rapidly. And donors on the left need to take the threat of the rightwing media ecosystem seriously and start investing a lot more in ways to capture that.