Democratic influencers just can’t figure out how to talk to voters 

Former Vice President Kamala Harris’s tough loss in last year’s general election spawned a cottage industry of Democratic insiders eager to sell their solutions to the party’s messaging woes. Nearly a year later, things aren’t going well.  

California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) and former national party chair Jaime Harrison launched podcasts that quickly fell short in both social media engagement and viewership. Chorus, a scandal-plagued dark money group co-created by YouTube commentator Brian Tyler Cohen, is spending millions of dollars to cultivate Democratic influencers across social media. In May, the Democratic National Committee embarked on a multimillion-dollar scheme to build its own “liberal Joe Rogan.” The result was a YouTube news program most people don’t even know exists.  

It is easy to see why these projects are struggling despite financial and institutional support from the Democratic Party’s most influential players. Audiences flock to YouTube and TikTok and podcasts in order to be entertained. If Democrats want to build a media empire to rival MAGA’s digital dominance, they need to stop funding projects that only serve the interests of their creators and start having conversations that cut through the Beltway bubble. 

The debate around who benefits from Democrats’ big-spending media groups leapt back into the headlines in late August, when journalist Taylor Lorenz published a lengthy expose on Chorus’s strategy for recruiting young influencers. According to documents obtained by WIRED, Chorus offers influencers up to “$8,000 per month to take part in a secret program aimed at bolstering Democratic messaging on the Internet” while funneling payments through The Sixteen Thirty Fund to avoid transparency around the source of that funding.  

There’s no doubt that Chorus’s stable of creators can generate clicks. The group allegedly counts some of the party’s most influential communicators among its ranks, including TikTok nepo baby Aaron Parnas (4.3 million subscribers) and YouTuber David Pakman (3.3 million subscribers). I say “allegedly” because it is impossible to know — Chorus’s financial dealings are not transparent, and participants aren’t required to disclose that they are being paid by an interest group with a clear political agenda.

That’s especially troubling because Pakman, Parnas and other popular Chorus-connected influencers brand themselves as independent journalists despite being more akin to content marketers. Any “independent journalist” taking part in the Chorus program will quickly find their editorial independence compromised by the plain language of their contract, making actual objective reporting impossible.

“Creators … are not allowed to use any funds or resources that they receive as part of the program to make content that supports or opposes any political candidate or campaign without express authorization from Chorus in advance and in writing, per the contract,” Lorenz reports.

So why does this matter? Beyond the ethical ick of disguising advertorials as journalism, Democrats’ disillusioned base simply isn’t motivated by digital content that sounds like it was produced in a DNC editorial meeting.  

Harrison’s politics-heavy “At Our Table” YouTube channel has garnered only 2,000 subscribers. Its most popular episode features Hunter Biden complaining about George Clooney’s bad attitude. It’s hard to imagine a project less likely to capture Rogan’s audience, many of whom tune in for his nonpolitical humor and stick around for the unfiltered, often controversial political bits. By comparison, Harrison’s project seems to purposefully avoid any content that might generate a viral headline.

That’s due in part to the incestuous nature of the Democratic influencer sphere. Harrison recently appeared as a guest on Newsom’s channel, “This Is Gavin Newsom.” Harrison and Newsom have in turn appeared for softball interviews on shows hosted by Pakman, Cohen and others mentioned in the WIRED report. Those interviews aren’t designed to be newsworthy so much as they provide a safe space for party leaders to recite their talking points to the converted. No wonder nobody remembers them.  

The lack of spontaneous, unscripted moments presents a fatal flaw for these latest Democratic efforts to seize the social media conversation away from Rogan, Theo Von and other conservative-leaning podcasters. Compare any of those episodes to one mega-viral moment from lefty podcaster Sam Fragoso, who tripped up Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) with a question about former President Biden’s mental acuity. Fragoso’s clip is infinitely rewatchable exactly because it’s so rare to see a politician face a question they haven’t screened in advance.

Fragoso’s willingness to buck the script delighted viewers who have grown sick of hearing the same canned interviews regurgitated by Democratic politicians. You won’t see any of that in the official Democratic influencer ecosystem, where access to top-ranking officials depends on lobbing only the softest of softball questions.

As Rogan, Fragoso and the real podcast professionals remind us, predictability is the death knell for any interview. If your audience can predict what’s going to happen next, they’ll quickly stop tuning in. Unfortunately for Democrats, their latest media strategy is nothing if not predictable. What a missed opportunity.

Max Burns is a veteran Democratic strategist and founder of Third Degree Strategies.