Behind the scenes of the DNC’s online vibe shift

In early March, the vibes for the social media team at the Democratic National Committee were grim. For days, they had been getting dragged by thousands of people online for sharing a graphic outlining lots of Democratic micro-accomplishments in the month of February. “Bro no one is reading that,” “Who the f*ck gets paid to do this,” and “It’s amazing how you guys keep bragging about losing lmao,” were just a few of the responses the post elicited on X. POLITICO even ran a leading newsletter item about it. 

The graphic didn’t land as intended, in part because it was shared during a period of mass frustration with anyone on the national level who was a Democrat. Elon Musk’s D.O.G.E was ramping up and creating shocking headlines every day, while party leaders like Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries were seen as floundering and unwilling to fight. “Anyone who's done a bad post on the internet knows that feeling of seeing the tide of public opinion start to shift,” says Paulina Mangubat, the DNC’s Digital Content and Creative Director. “I took it pretty hard, and so did the rest of the team.” 

The DNC’s social media staff were still figuring out how to best operate in the new, second Trump era. Should they be using their accounts to share hopeful news of Democratic accomplishments from around the country? What about articulating the party’s policy platform? Promoting emerging Democratic leaders?

In February, I wrote about how the DNC can be one of the toughest places to work in communications in politics. That’s because their messaging has to be seen as inclusive of the party’s entire big tent, making the promotion of specific progressive policies nearly impossible. There’s also personality drama at play: for example, if the DNC’s social media feeds are seen as promoting a progressive member of Congress too much, more conservative Democrats may complain. What if they uplift one prospective 2028 presidential candidate more than the others? Their boss will likely receive more than a few angry phone calls. For a social media team of mostly twenty-somethings tasked with cranking out viral content, this is a challenging situation to navigate. 

After “Graphic-Gate,” as the team now refers to it, Mangubat arranged for a weeklong strategy retreat to assess their processes and posting strategy. “We really took a full week to reflect on what should we do more of? What should we do less of? It was important for the team just to recenter and remind themselves that they were not defined by one bad post.”

They came out of the retreat with several ways to revamp their team’s work. First, they adopted a new objections-focused approvals process that allows posters to give just a 15-minute warning before content is published. That helped them begin to engage more rapidly and effectively with the breaking news of the day.   

Their team also refreshed the committee’s branding and logo across social platforms, replacing a capital letter “D” with a bold, blue donkey icon. While right-wing accounts were eager to mock the new mascot, many normie Democrats online inexplicably went wild for the donkey. “It was important have a visual signifier that, although the accounts were not necessarily under new management in terms of the staff involved, we were under new management in terms of our approach.”

Most importantly, they soon began using the committee’s social accounts to more aggressively taunt, troll, and criticize Republican politicians and Trump administration officials. “Ugly ass truck,” deadpanned one post, in reference to an Elon Musk-built Cybertruck being showcased by the White House. One viral clapback cleverly went after Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth for his alleged problems with alcohol, while another appeared to reference a “cuck chair” in response to Trump advisor Stephen Miller. They also have tapped into issues that resonate with people who spend a lot of time online, like Trump’s association with Jeffrey Epstein. 

While this type of comedic sh*tposting and dunking may have become more common on the DNC’s accounts, the underlying goal is to use any means necessary to educate audiences about Republican extremism and hold the Trump administration accountable. It’s similar to the role that their rivals at the Republican National Committee have effectively played for years.

As a result of these recent changes, the DNC’s social media team is putting up numbers they haven’t seen in a long time. Across social media platforms, their accounts have grown by one million followers year to date, far outpacing this same period last year. 

Much of that growth has come from TikTok, where a disproportionate amount of young people spend their time. “TikTok is our fastest growing platform in terms of followers, since January we’ve added at least half a million people to our audience,” Mangubat says. That has made the @democrats one of the most-followed explicitly political accounts on the platform. Meanwhile, on Instagram, “We’ve taken notes from accounts like @complex and @sainthoax to mix in memes and turn the account into more of a destination.”

As I’ve written before, the Democratic Party is facing much larger challenges than anything that can be solved within the walls of its headquarters on South Capitol Street. But injecting a little more energy and enthusiasm into the party’s national brand isn’t hurting, and it's apparently exactly what some very online grassroots Democrats were waiting for. 

Chart: The top political-adjacent podcasts this week

Conservative-leaning podcasts continue to dominate long-form podcast content in the U.S. Since YouTube recently began publishing podcast rankings, we can now get a clearer picture of the most downloaded podcasts in the U.S. by platform. Here’s a snapshot of what that looks like this week:

More things you should read: 

• Wealthy conservative operative Leonard Leo has successfully captured the Supreme Court, and now he’s investing in a new battlefield: culture and entertainment. The Wall Street Journal just published a piece detailing the dark money financier’s efforts to fund movie studios and networks to shift American culture to the right. 

• Democrats are continuing to try to focus group their way out of their problems with young men. Elena Schneider at POLITICO looked at the early results from one $20 million effort aimed at understanding the boys’ shift away from the party. 

• Speaking of young men, GOP pollster Patrick Ruffini published a new data-driven analysis of “the collapsing turnout of Democratic men,” and a new Gallup poll shows young American men are lonelier than their peers in any other Western nation. 

• Because Donald Trump doesn’t have the attention span to read his daily intelligence briefing, the Director of National Intelligence is considering hiring FOX News hosts to create a fake broadcast in hopes that he will start consuming the critical national security information.

• Did Calvin Coolidge host the first White House influencer briefing?

One last thing: If Democrats tweeted like Trump

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