Like a lot of Harris-Walz staffers, Erik Balsbaugh woke up that morning optimistic.
He suspected a similar dynamic female voters fury over efforts to dismantle abortion access would fuel a Harris victory.
It got silent when the first results from Florida started coming out, he recalls.
An for Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, is displayed on the 580,000-square-foot Exosphere at Sphere on Oct. 30, 2024 in Las Vegas, Nevada.Ethan Miller/Getty Images
Right after Florida came in, Democrats posted a weaker-than-expected performance in Virginia.
By then, the ballroom had emptied out.
even as, in his gut, he already knew.
Together, those seven appearances accounted for nearly the same number of views that Rogans Trump interview brought in.
That Rogan appearance racked up 37 million views on YouTube alone in the first three days it was live.
Harris biggest podcast appearance onCall Her Daddy meanwhile still hasnt cracked 1 million views on YouTube.
Does she do something with Ina Garten?…
The campaign just didnt know how to reach them, the source admits.
We are in a media environment that these voters are definitionally hard for us to reach….
They dont want to talk about politics, they dont want to engage with politics.
Its been this burgeoning underground world thats not so underground anymore.
We have failed to connect time and time again about the real core issues that matter to them.
Democrats forgot how to talk to American voters while failing, comically, to reach persuadable voters.
According to Trump insiders,SNLdid not extend an invitation to Trump to appear on the show.
The Trump campaign believes the free airtime was worth about $1 million.
Democrats, he challenges, didnt.
You cant get to a storyline if youre optimizing for each individual product, says a Democratic strategist.
Youre telling people what they care about at no point are you asking them what they care about.
(Future Forward points out that it did, in fact, use Trump clips in its ads.
Economic sentimentdidnt improve, though, and many Americans finances didnt either.
The strategy did, however, yield a tone-deaf clip the Trump campaign could use ina series of ads.
Balsbaugh first started noticing a shift in 2015.
He worked for Hillary Clintons campaign that year, before landing a job with the casino lobby.
Kids were getting red-pilled.
It felt like the YouTube algorithm was all right wing.
It felt like the kids were getting red-pilled, he says.
(MassLiberal a tongue-in-cheek nod to his old boss, John Kerry.)
It wasnt just in the games where he took note of this dynamic.
Two years ago, Balsbaugh started a program called Progressive Victory to counter growing right-wing influence on streaming platforms.
There is no one reason why, but Balsbaugh has a couple of theories about the partys reluctance.
For one thing, streaming is live, and therefore unpredictable a problem for campaigns consumed with control.
Balsbaugh saw this firsthand when he organized a big event in Ohio last year, featuring prominent streamers.
In these communities, authenticity is king.
Republicans, Balsbaugh says, spent a lot more money on streaming.
We spent a lot more money on controlled message bites that we put out.
Theirs was authentic, and ours was super message-tested.
They werent asking, like, How many people were moved by this message?
They just funded [streaming influencers] and let them grow.
Whereas we need to have a program.
Were going to need to have the key performance indicators.
