What happened?
Why Democratic funders don't fund media
A framing question:
“Missouri voted for a $15 minimum wage, paid sick leave, and abortion rights & Democrats cannot compete there at all. Why?
The answer to that is the road to a comeback.”1
We don’t know what wins elections
“Campaign Effects” can move results by roughly at most 5%. Democrats pretty much achieved this, with swing states moving against us 3-5% less than the national average. This tells me that we are doing pretty well in this category, which includes pretty much all campaign activity: Ads, Volunteering, etc.2
Roughly 65% of results are just consistency across election cycles, the smart advisor Matt Singer tells me.
That leaves around 30% of “Other.” This category consists of global events, plus activities whose impact is near-impossible to measure:
Changing the “Information Environment”3
Recruitment and selection of candidates
Choices of broad messaging/policy selection and emphasis
Most time and money focuses on the 5%
Although “Other” has ~six times the impact of Campaign Effects, the time and investment of Democratic funders and professionals is flipped roughly the other way around (i.e. there’s much more focus on Campaign Effects).4
Why? I’ll illustrate with the example of the information environment.
The Information Environment
For the last few years, smart people have been warning that Democrats are lagging badly in the information environment; not just due to TV behemoths Fox News and Sinclair, but also among new media like streamers in fitness and video games.
For the past few years, I’ve had a nagging feeling that I should pay more attention to this area.
Why haven’t I? Here are some reasons that apply to me and (I think) almost all Democratic funders and professionals:
Limited experience: I don’t have media experience or expertise. I’m not personally a consumer of much new media, so I have little sense of what’s needed.
Complexity: It’s not obvious what the solutions are.5
Measurability (Streetlight effect): It’s hard to measure what political impact any media project is having. This is a problem for analyzing projects, and also for recruiting funders and other allies.
Large check sizes and limited revenue: Media projects often require large amounts of capital. And obviously it’s a tough industry.
Long-term: Building a subscriber base takes time. It seems hard to test new things with limited capital.
Orthodoxy: There could be pushback for supporting creators who take positions unpopular among Democrats.6
General interest: It’s a big world, and there are projects that engage me more than creating new media companies.
These are mostly good reasons!
But if too much of the movement follows this logic, we end up seriously under-investing.
And that’s how we end up with elections decided by things like this:
Political historian Brian Rosenwald posted this recently.
From the inside we see how the sausage is made and see all the (many, many) ways that things could improve; but from the top-down view, we did pretty well!
The “information environment” includes the mainstream media and also new media that goes by many names: Streamers, Creators, Podcasters, Influencers, etc. It also includes social media, both broadly and also in niches such as local Facebook groups. Only 15% of Americans pay for news; with most high-quality journalism locked behind paywalls, media for the other 85% is a lower-quality subset.
I’m not pointing fingers here; this is true for me as well. And there absolutely are Democratic funders and professionals working hard and well in this space, including Way to Win, Courier, and others. But the group working here is much smaller, with less funding and fewer people.
The likely solutions won’t look like political news. According to Ryan O’Donnell of Data for Progress, people who pay the most attention to political news were Harris +8, whereas the least were Trump +15.
This is less of an issue for me, but is for some others.
In the social media era, Americans (of which voters are a subset) now choose the information bubble they want to live in - so there is a Red bubble and a Blue bubble. I think the Blue bubble is robust, but maybe we don't have top-tier creators for all of the key demographic groups we need to reach. For example, who speaks to the Joe Rogan demographic? Who speaks to working class Latino men? Are there a few creators out there we should know, follow, and promote? Do we need a discovery engine to help voters find progressive creators who speak to their concerns?