There are a lot of smart people thinking about how Democrats can reach key audiences. Few of them have as much insight as Rob Flaherty.
Rob led digital strategy in the Biden White House and later served as Deputy Campaign Manager for the Harris-Walz campaign. Since then, he’s become one of the most interesting voices on how Democrats can compete (and win) in the battle for people’s attention.
I think you’ll learn a lot from this week’s conversation on Democrats lighting up the internet, taking big swings online, and why the left could use its own army of loosely connected online voices who shitpost all the time.
This is ON BACKGROUND:
5 short questions. 5 quick responses featuring Rob Flaherty, former White House Director of Digital Strategy, Deputy Campaign Manager for Harris for President, and current host of the Nobody Knows Anything podcast.
Rob, you’ve worked with a lot of traditional flacks who’ve always seen comms as talking to reporters, putting out press releases, and sending a few snarky tweets. Why are we wrong? And why should we bother adapting?
Well, I think it’s a question of what “comms” is and who you’re comms-ing too. For a really long time, the game of political communications was shaping gatekeepers who shape voters through relationship building and management. Makes a lot of sense. But media has changed a lot! Everyone’s media now – you are, some random influencer you’ve never heard of is, and the voter you’re trying to reach is too. You can go direct.
In the older era, you shaped people’s political perceptions by shaping political media, which in a world of more limited choices was very high-reach. Now it’s not. People’s media environments are shaped by their personal preferences, algorithms, sure, but also just choices: the choice to watch sports and never turn on CNN. The choice to watch a Sabrina Carpenter Tinydesk but never read the New York Times.
What this does to comms is that it means you have to be more thoughtful about who you’re reaching and how. If the audience you need to communicate with is, say, young Black men, those people exist in a different consumption place than, say, college-educated women.
BUT! That is not to say the press release/reporter TLC/snarky tweet thing is dead and irrelevant. It’s just how you shape traditional media – and traditional media consumption is actually a psychographic choice; it says something about who you are that you care what the New York Times or CNN or the Sacramento Bee has to say. And also trad media still shape The Discourse. But I think of “elite” media management as an “audience” strategy. It’s what you do to reach and shape the perceptions of high-information voters and elites. It’s necessary, but it’s not sufficient. And in doing it, you’re a specialist just like the influencer person or the content person.
More than a year ago, you wrote a New York Times essay calling on Dems to think beyond traditional press and command more of the online attention economy to reach voters who’ve opted-out of consuming mainstream news. How do you think we’re doing with that?
Better! Sort of? Part of it is just: it’s easier to get attention when you’re against something than when you’re for it. Being the out-party helps, especially when Donald Trump continues to hit the “price go higher” button for some reason.
What I think has broken through to people is the idea that content matters. Zohran helped. But I think you are seeing a lot of people doing content without thinking about why they are doing content and for whom. So you get a lot of people trying to Do A Zohran but not actually thinking about the broader implications on the internet on the way they need to adjust their overall strategy.
What I mean by that is that content/videos/whatever are just a tactic like press releases or bus tours or door knocking. It’s all just message dissemination. Most of the problems I see us running into are about “what we’re about” problems and not distribution problems.
Comms on digital is the never-ending hunt for the “thing that is resonant enough to get wide reach and magnetic enough to get people to agree with you.” You need something that persuades and engages. And that comes from iteration and experimentation and taking risks. And to do that well you need to achieve volume/more shots on goal. We are very (VERY) bad at this. We’ve got a culture of command-and-control messaging.
I’ll give you one example of the disconnect: people on the left often say stuff like “the right wing media is so good at dominating narratives.” Well, I’ll tell you how they do it.
They have a loose, unconnected group of online voices who shit post all the time. And all of those folks make their money by achieving lots of views. And so they herd; if one of the million swings that they all take starts to work, more people start doing it. And then that works its way up the chain. The bigger influencers start to talk about it. Then Fox. Then the candidates. They build an entire architecture off of what has social heat, which tells you it has resonance. Then they build it into something that changes votes (and sometimes, btw, it doesn’t and no one cares). They talk with people – their audience’s preferences shape what they do.
On the left, we talk at people. We say “this is the most persuasive message, I will figure out how to make it click with you.” We try to hit the viral button on pre-prescribed messaging. It is a much harder pull.
A former colleague of mine and I got in a tiff on Twitter about this disconnect a while back; they made the claim that digital people mostly just care about racking up retweets and not what actually moves people. And I do think there’s some of that. But I think the real disconnect is that traditional comms is focused on having the best, tight message and repeating it based on what you know to work based on exogenous factors (polling/testing/whatever) until it’s socially resonant (and therefore people respond to it organically). Digital people are trying to take a lot of swings to find what engages in order to find what might persuade. Top down vs bottom up. Everyone’s got their incentives. I just think the digital ones are closer to the modern information environment.
A lot of Democrats have posted more to TikTok and YouTube and engaged with online influencers. Some of this has been great. Some of it’s been cringe. What’s your best advice for folks looking to show up authentically in online spaces where voters are already skeptical of politicians?
I would take a candidate never posting over a candidate posting off-brand.
Social is basically the presentation of the candidates’ brand. It’s marketing. It is an extension of the principal and what they believe/how they act. If your boss likes Taylor Swift, great. Post about Taylor Swift. But if they are a 60 year old man who has never heard of Taylor Swift, don’t post about Taylor Swift. Would you do a TikTok trend natively? Great. Do it. Do you not use TikTok and you’re just doing some dance/trend because your staffer told you to do it? Don’t do it.
Now at this point you’ll probably go back and look at some bad/weird posts/videos/whatever from Joe Biden at one point or another while I was at the helm and say “this guy is full of shit.” And I’m a little full of shit. But he was a good example of this: we usually played pretty conservatively because it just wasn’t authentic to do the super trendy stuff with an 80 year old man. That’s not to say we would never do off-brand stuff (gotta take swings!) and there weren’t bad ideas (a lot of which were mine).We’d also spread our wings a bit when the social narrative supported it (that SOTU where he did well, student loan stuff).
But so much of digital is also reading the green – you can do crazier stuff when the social context in which you’re posting will allow for it. But when it’s not, you have to play a little more conservatively. Sometimes you just misread. But! You should aim not to.
And so my rule of thumb is:
Would the person I work for do this if they were left to their own devices?
If no, would they actually be good at it?
If the answer to both is no, it’s probably worth a skip. Do an interview!
Any examples of electeds or candidates doing this particularly well? On either side of the aisle.
Will put Zohran and AOC to the side for this exercise.
On our side: You would be surprised to know that Adam Schiff is absolutely shredding on YouTube. He just got the reps in and takes the time with it. That is great.
Jeff Jackson is the best communicator in the party on digital (he kind of stopped once he left congress), but he did direct-to-camera TikToks that would light the internet on fire by being earnest and assuming little prior knowledge about what was going on. He also was directly involved in the production/scripting of the content (very important).
Robert Garcia is quite good at driving attention (again because he’s a social native!)
On the other side: James Fishback is an absolute monster but he is doing interesting content stuff. Senator Kennedy has also started doing very funny TikTok videos that are very clearly just him posting himself. Worth looking at that – you don’t need to be AOC to do it!
What do you want to shout from the rooftops?
Digital isn’t a tactic as much as it is a series of implications for how everyone’s work needs to change. It is a reflection of offline, whether you like it or not.
Voters consume most of their media on things that aren’t television. Why are you mostly advertising on television? Things get more reach when they are socially resonant because it shows people want to see more of it. Why aren’t you taking social resonance into account? 81% of the country goes to Youtube once per week. Why are you spending all your time focused on the 200,000 people watching day-side cable.
People treat digital as Special Teams: a kicker who comes on the field, does the digital, and gets off. And that’s cool – like I said before, everyone’s a tactician. But the big problems happen when your strategy doesn’t account for the reality that’s in front of you.
Lastly, and I realize this is 6 questions, who should we talk to next?
Liz Allen!! The GOAT. Kate Berner.
Tyler Steinhardt from Vocal Media is also really smart about the next wave of digital tactics. Daniella Hernandez Guerrero is an insanely sharp influencer strategist.
Thanks for your time, Rob.