The Left Knows It’s Losing The Online Culture War
By Bradley Devlin, The Daily Signal | December 02, 2024
After Kamala Harris’ thorough defeat at the hands of Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election, Democrats claim to be engaged in all kinds of soul-searching that’s starting to look an awful lot like navel-gazing.
Some Democrats’ latest theory on why they lost the 2024 election has nothing to do with inflation, rising crime, foreign wars, open borders, or the coup Democrats threw against their own President Joe Biden. Rather, these Democrats posit that the vice president lost because the former president had a network of social media influencers pushing out his message, while Democrats did not.
A Thanksgiving Day headline in The New York Times read: “Republicans Built an Ecosystem of Influencers. Some Democrats Want One, Too.” The begrudged Democrats are often left-wing content creators themselves, some of whom have banded together to start Chorus, a new venture that seeks to bridge the supposed resource gap between the Left and the Right when it comes to social media influence operations.
Some on the right think it’s laughable that the Democratic Party, which dominates academia, Hollywood, Wall Street, and, most importantly, Big Tech and social media (X outstanding), is suffering from a lack of cultural online influence. Sadly for Democrats, the problem could be much worse.
“The Democrats already have their own ‘influencer ecosystem,’” Alex Bruesewitz, an architect of Trump’s alternative and social media strategy, posted on X. “The issue isn’t a lack of ‘influencers’ for the Democrats; rather, it’s that the influencers they have built and propped up are, quite frankly, neither the brightest nor authentic.”
The inauthenticity of Democrats’ social media influence operations has been on full display over Biden’s presidency.
In October 2022, the Biden White House invited more than 20 social media influencers to a party on the South Lawn of the White House to celebrate the passage of the antonymically named Inflation Reduction Act.
The influencers at the October 2022 party were hand-selected by the Biden White House and given a briefing by White House staff about the Inflation Reduction Act and other parts of the Biden-Harris agenda. Biden himself even made an appearance and posed with the influencers for a photo op.
That wasn’t the first time the Biden White House courted influencers to support the president’s agenda. In March 2022, the Biden White House hosted a virtual briefing for 30 social media influencers to discuss the importance of sending more American money and weapons to Ukraine. Jen Psaki, then the White House press secretary, joined National Security Council staffers in leading the briefing, which was quickly parodied by “Saturday Night Live.”
The October 2022 party wouldn’t be the last, either.
As Biden geared up for what would become his short-lived reelection bid, his digital strategy team sought to court social media influencers and promote their work supporting Biden in turn—such as Harry Sisson, an undergraduate student at NYU.
“To be clear, I’m not implying that every Democrat ‘influencer’ lacks intelligence,” Bruesewitz’s X post continued. “In fact, there are several on the left whom, despite my disagreements, I still respect. (Game recognizes game.)”
“However, to our advantage, the Democrat establishment tends to listen to the less intelligent ‘influencers,’ particularly those created by Stefanie Cutter’s firm, Precision Strategies. Yes, this is the same Stefanie Cutter who served as a senior adviser to Kamala Harris,” Bruesewitz said in his post. “David Hogg, for instance, is an ‘influencer’ cultivated by Precision Strategies. Despite his obvious intellectual shortcomings, he has managed to amass tremendous influence within the Democrat Party.”
It’s no surprise, then, that before Harris announced Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate, Hogg played a major role in astroturfing momentum for Walz’s candidacy.
Kamala Harris didn’t lose the 2024 election because of Harry Sisson or David Hogg—this is just the latest turn in the blame game.
Nevertheless, the simple truth is that leftists’ near-monopoly on America’s institutions of cultural import over the past 30 years has led them to rest on their laurels. The Left’s influence operations have, in turn, become outdated, clunky, and inauthentic—cringe.
The Right, pushed out of the commanding heights, turned to new frontiers, especially in the digital and social media space. Now conservatives are just beginning to reap the benefits of settling the digital frontier.
Bradley Devlin is politics editor for The Daily Signal.
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