The News
One of the Democratic Party’s most prolific lawyers also is becoming one of its most prolific posters.
Marc Elias has argued dozens of cases around mail-in balloting and election access across the country and in front of the Supreme Court over the last decade. But he has also moonlighted as an election law content creator and advisor for Democracy Docket, a digital media company he founded in 2020 to focus on redistricting, gerrymandering, and voting access.
What began as a hobby to help explain complex redistricting cases more effectively has grown into a serious media operation. Last month, Democracy Docket surpassed 500,000 free email subscribers, the company first told Semafor, including 70,000 subscribers paying $10 a month or $120 per year. The company also has a YouTube channel with more than 800,000 subscribers, a following that has grown significantly in recent months (the account has added half a million subscribers on the platform since January 2025).
“In this era where so many political disputes, so many public controversies really wind up in court, and oftentimes the court arguments frame the public debate — I think lawyers have an obligation to speak directly and plainly in language that everyone, non-lawyers and lawyers alike, can understand,” he said. “That is something I’ve tried to do, particularly in the area of voting and elections, but really more broadly, in the area of democracy.”
Elias told Semafor that he founded the outlet for a fairly prosaic reason: He’d maxed out the number of people he could send emails to on a private email listserv that he’d previously used to send election and redistricting law updates to a few hundred Democratic policymakers, executives, and officials across the country.
The timing turned out to be convenient: COVID-19 lockdowns prompted a wave of court cases around mail-in balloting, an issue which Elias knew well and was, at times, directly involved in. Democracy Docket began posting public legal documents before many news outlets, gaining email subscribers and direct online traffic through Twitter and Facebook.
Elias told Semafor that his readership is a mix of DC insiders, #Resistance liberals who watch Elias’ interviews on MS NOW, and legal and political professionals interested in keeping up with the ins and outs of election laws and voting access issues.
While Elias told Semafor he dedicates just a few days a month to the management side, he acknowledged Democracy Docket has become a profitable enterprise. Asked how much money the company brought in each year, Elias declined to elaborate but said that the vast majority of the company’s revenue came from basic subscriptions, with a small but growing VIP tier of supporters paying $500 a year. Those projections would likely put the company in the ballpark of $9 million to $11 million in annual revenue.
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Max’s view
Democracy Docket is part of a wave of new digital news outlets founded in the Trump era that have surged during the Republican president’s second term.
While liberal and left-of-center audiences channeled their interest (and horror) with Trump during his first term by tuning into MSNBC, CNN, The New York Times, and The Washington Post, this go around, shares of those audiences have seemed to abandon traditional outlets for more ideological new media outlets positioned against traditional media.
Outlets like Zeteo, The Bulwark, Crooked Media, and More Perfect Union have added millions of readers, listeners, and YouTube subscribers, even as cable news viewership continues to slide. Some of the movement appears to be ideological: Elias told me that some of the best days of membership for the site have come in the wake of blow-ups at major news outlets like CBS News, which he argues shows viewers were upset with what they saw as media owners’ capitulation to Donald Trump.
But perhaps more interesting, Democracy Docket’s real innovation is in the continued erosion of the wall between real political players and the media that cover them. The proximity between Elias’ legal work and journalistic output is likely a bit too close for those who prefer a more traditional separation of church and state, though Elias insists that he’s fairly hands-off when it comes to the newsroom’s coverage. He said that he has occasionally disagreed with Democracy Docket’s stories and opinions.
“Sometimes you’ll see they report it one way and then I write an opinion piece and I don’t correct them in my opinion piece, I just like say ‘this is what I think about the case, and if you want to know what I think the outcome of the case is, you know, become a premium member,’” he said.
Notable
- Older outlets like the Guardian and The Atlantic have similarly benefited from increased left-of-center interest by explicitly positioning themselves as checks on the current administration — and even on some of their less-aggressive peers.