David’s view
Democrats have become the quiet party. And Republicans have been happy to grab the bullhorn.
The switch happened fairly quickly. After Kamala Harris’s defeat, her digital strategist Rob Flaherty wrote that Democrats had lost the cultural conversation, and relied too much on the old media. Conservatives were served by a “network of influencers, personalities, podcasters and TikTokers who both inflame their bases and push messages into nonpolitical subcultures.”
Liberals and leftists — not the same thing — do have their own influencers, who operate outside the old media and talk about whatever’s trending. But Democrats have become far more timid about when to talk about some buzzy topic that’s not obviously political. And Republicans have never been so ready to fill the gap. Ten years of watching Donald Trump has taught them to swing at everything, and that the only bad take is the one you don’t put on social media.
There were two prime examples this week, only one of them involving the actress Sydney Sweeney. “Genes are passed down from parents to offspring,” she says in new ads for American Eagle. “My jeans are blue.” The joke was that the attractive actress had “good genes,” and this was offensive to the sort of people who refuse to call the largest bedroom in a home “the master bedroom.”
Those people weren’t Democratic politicians, who had nothing to say about the campaign, ceding the ground to Republicans, who gleefully used the backlash to paint them as hypersensitive. “The crazy left has come out against beautiful women,” wrote Sen. Ted Cruz. “This warped, moronic, and dense liberal thinking is a big reason why Americans voted the way they did in 2024,” wrote White House spokesman Stephen Cheung.
The Cruz/Cheung mockery wasn’t baseless, and a campaign like this probably couldn’t have been approved five years ago, the height of “woke-washing” in mass media. More interesting was how Democrats had walked off the field. Hillary Clinton once asked Americans to take “the Rutgers pledge” and stand up to bigotry, like the Rutgers women’s basketball team did in a fight with Don Imus. But when does a non-political story deserve their input? They are not so sure anymore.
The second story they skipped out on, while Republicans turned on klieg lights, was a brawl between white and black people at a Cincinnati music festival, caught on video. Fight videos with race angles have been appointment viewing on Elon Musk’s X. This one, in a city where Vice President JD Vance’s brother is running for mayor, got full attention from the administration; Sen. Bernie Moreno got the DOJ involved, while gubernatorial nominee Vivek Ramaswamy warned that “leftists like to lecture about ‘systemic injustice’ while thugs turn our cities into war zones.”
The power to get the country interested in a local crime story, and get politicians talking about it as a symptom of a universal problem, is vested in every politician. You may notice that Democrats stopped using it. They are far less likely now to comment on police shootings of unarmed black people, or on the dismissal of charges against the police.
Earlier this month, in Louisville, the Trump administration announced that it would seek no prison time for a police officer who shot into the home of Breonna Taylor, a black woman whose name Kamala Harris once said we should “never stop speaking.” Democrats largely did not speak her name, were mostly mute about the new sentencing memo, and none joined a protest outside the courthouse. (A judge ignored the sentencing memo and put the defendant in prison.)
Do Democrats want to wrest back their old control of the news cycle, their ability to surf the culture? Their conventional wisdom, right now, is that they’re better off wrestling the news back to Medicaid cuts — maybe the Jeffrey Epstein story, though they don’t even all agree on that. Republicans have the remote control now.
