Oh, how the tables have turned. For years, Democrats owned the cultural zeitgeist. They were the party that could tap into mainstream media, Hollywood, and pop culture to deliver sweeping electoral victories—just ask Barack Obama, whose 2008 and 2012 campaigns set the gold standard. But the Democratic Party of 2024? It’s a relic—elitist, out of touch, and rejected by the very voters they once claimed to champion. And nowhere is that disconnect more apparent than in the postmortem offered by Kamala Harris’ former digital director, Rob Flaherty.
In his interview with Semafor, Flaherty admitted something that should send shivers down the spines of Democratic strategists: they’ve lost the culture. The alternative media sphere—YouTubers, podcasters, influencers—has become a dominant force, and guess who tapped into it? Donald Trump. Trump’s ability to leverage alternative platforms and speak directly to the working-class, multiracial base is no longer a surprise; it’s the cornerstone of his historic 2024 victory.
Flaherty and his team knew where the battle needed to be fought: “The race was going to come down to voters who do not pay attention to politics or mainstream news and instead get their information from people on YouTube, their friends’ Instagram stories, or links or memes dropped in a group chat.”
Yet even with that awareness, they failed. Why? Because the Democrats’ message doesn’t resonate outside their echo chamber. When your party is defined by academic snobbery and elitist platitudes, it’s no wonder sports podcasts, online influencers, and culture creators wanted nothing to do with Kamala Harris.
Flaherty revealed that Harris’ campaign tried—desperately, it seems—to book her on popular sports platforms, one of the last true monocultures in American society. But one by one, the biggest names in sports media turned her down. “It got more complicated for sports personalities to take us on their shows because they didn’t want to ‘do politics,’” he admitted. In other words, Harris—and the Democratic Party—weren’t cool enough for the room. Sports figures who might have leaned Democrat in years past weren’t willing to associate themselves with Harris because her campaign reeked of establishment failure.
Flaherty doesn’t hold back on legacy media, either, calling it effectively useless in swaying elections. In his view, outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post now preach only to the choir—die-hard liberals who don’t need convincing.
The audiences that matter, the ones who decide elections, are tuning into alternative media where Trump’s America First message dominates. Meanwhile, Flaherty admitted that Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter (X) was a game-changer, neutralizing the platform’s leftist bias and giving conservatives and Trump supporters a place to fight back.
But here’s the kicker: while Flaherty talks about the Democrats needing to rebuild their own alternative media ecosystem, he sidesteps the candidate quality issue. Let’s be honest—Kamala Harris was a disaster. She burned through $1 billion and the best campaign talent money could buy, only to get shellacked at the polls.
Why? Because Harris is the embodiment of everything voters despise about the Democratic Party: incoherence, elitism, and a total inability to connect with the struggles of everyday Americans. You can spend all the money in the world, flood social media with ads, and plaster a candidate’s face across every digital platform. But if the candidate is fundamentally flawed—like Harris—it doesn’t matter.
