This morning, the New York Times published an essay by former Harris for President Deputy Campaign Manager Rob Flaherty that detailed what many people I’ve spoken with since November consider to be an existential question for the Democratic Party. In the piece, Flaherty argues that one of the biggest problems facing liberals is their inability to reach what he calls “opt-out voters” - people who don’t care about or don’t trust our politics, and don’t consume that kind of information online or off. 

“Today’s culture is no longer a creation of executives in New York City and Los Angeles. Thanks to algorithms and an endless set of media choices, what you see, read and hear is a personalized reflection of your own interests. It’s like a city with a lot of different neighborhoods,” he writes. “You might live in the personal fitness neighborhood or the parenting neighborhood, but you’ll never cross over into the equine science neighborhood or, say, the politics neighborhood. So if you don’t care about politics — or more precisely, don’t trust our politics — you don’t have to hear about it at all. A voter can turn on, tune in or opt out.”

He goes on to argue that Democrats should invest in cultural programming to meet those audiences, just as the right has done in spaces like “the manosphere.” Its a similar argument to what folks like Tara McGowan and Dan Pfeiffer have been saying for several years. I don’t believe it's hyperbole to say that what Rob laid out in his essay is pretty much all that matters for Democrats over the next three years, so I recently spoke with him to dive deeper into some of the topics he touched on. 

The below Q&A has been edited for clarity and length:

KT: In the essay, you write, “Democrats today are rowing upstream against powerful new cultural currents.” Where do you think those currents are flowing from? Is it a backlash against decades of progressive cultural overreach or dominance (i.e., Hollywood liberalism, political correctness)

RF: I don't think every dynamic here is new. I think the fundamental thing that conservatives have been able to figure out is how to make their sort of reactionary politics countercultural. That comes from a lot of different places. Part of it is certainly post-pandemic backlash to a lot of different things, a part of it is a progressive movement that feels progressive but not inclusive. I also think that in an anti-institutional moment, Democrats became the institution. 

All of those things come together, plus the fact that we don't have the cultural pipeline to reach people in the ways they're getting information. There’s a perfect storm of voter sentiment, political party, media environment, that all kind of comes together to put us in a bad spot. 

KT: Let’s talk about those “cultural pipelines” that the right owns. Which audience segments or niche interests do you think the right has made the most inroads with?

RF: Obviously, there’s the “manosphere,” but they’re moving into a lot of different places right now. One is the way they co-opted health and wellness content to become “MAHA,” and built a political movement out of it; politicizing audiences that hadn’t been engaged before has been really effective for them. 

We have to do a lot of work to counter them in those specific places, but I think that we have gotten so focused on those specific interests that we forget that we also have to build our own boat, and then go a rung out. I think other interests, for example - book talk and history content - are the kind of corners of the internet where we can build counter-narratives with the right level of investment, talent, and participation from both within the Democratic party and outside the party.

KT: So you’re questioning whether Democrats are ever going to win the sports radio bros, vs. identifying their own cultural communities (like hikers or something) and begin to focus on building audiences there?

RF: The answer is all of the above. Trump comes for the Democratic base and tries to drive our numbers down. I think there is concrete value in trying to do the same by reaching the MAGA base. I do not think for one minute that we should be ceding Joe Rogan or Theo Von listeners. But we also have to keep our eye on who's reaching young black men, who’s reaching suburban white women, who's reaching younger women. The fundamental challenge of being a really diverse coalition is we've got a lot of places we gotta be. That's just a different sort of strategic framework than the right has had to use.

KT: You also write about how it is “generally profitable to be online and conservative,” referring to the monetization potential of most right-leaning digital media efforts. For example, The Daily Wire reportedly brought in $200 million in revenue last year. As Democrats begin to consider funding more of these cultural or media efforts, do you think some of the same revenue models work for liberal audiences?

RF: Yes and no. It’s important to remember that the right consumer and the left consumer are very different. The average NPR listener probably has more than double the average income of the average American. Democrats subscribe to a lot of stuff - that's why Substacks are doing well. That calls for a slightly differentiated funding model than those on the right, which has been funded by a bunch of really political advertisers, subscriptions, and all this stuff like “Buy Gold” scammers. 

At the end of the day, the future of media is going to be personality-driven and focused on individual brands - it is not going to be gazillion-dollar companies. It will more likely be $20 or $30 million companies run by a person. So, in that future, these folks will need diverse revenue models that will take many different things into account, because we are necessarily talking to different audiences. 

It’s important to remember that we didn't get here by accident. The right has been funding this stuff at least initially with philanthropy, and it has built profitable business models because they’ve cultivated an audience over time that seeks an alternative to other content out there. We have to start doing that. 

KT: Democratic donors are accustomed to spending money on explicitly political projects, which are generally short-term and tied to an election cycle. You’re talking about building things that are more cultural and not necessarily political and news-driven. How do you get liberal donors to support non-political projects with little provable electoral ROI at the outset? 

RF: If you're trying to measure cultural change through the metrics of electoral politics, a randomized control trial (RCT) or other form of political campaign measurement is never going to prove value here. 

I don’t think Charlie Kirk is sitting in a room and saying, “Well, you know, this is a good idea, but the Analyst Institute says otherwise.” We need to build long-term investment, and profitability is the thing that we need to be building towards. If a media effort is not profitable or making money, it means the algorithm's probably not showing its stuff to people, which means you’re creating content that likely isn't resonant with or reaching audiences. 

I understand there are ways to say stuff on the internet that are not necessarily profitable and still reach a lot of people and all of those things, but I think we need to be building a profitable ecosystem. That means taking a lot of long-term bets: five-year, ten-year bets on folks. I know there will be many interesting people out there building really cool new models for this. I don't know if any one of them is going to be successful, and I don't know if any of them are going to fail but if it leads to a more verdant ecosystem, I think it's a good thing.

KT: How much do you think progressive investment needs to go into starting something new vs. supporting some of these creators and efforts that already exist?

RF: Success begets success. I think what’s going to happen is that in the next six or nine months, a lot of people on the left are going to start investing in media and content efforts to get that flywheel going among creators who are already successful.

KT: There’s a part of your essay where you write about political campaign TV advertising. You have a unique perspective from helping lead the Harris campaign last year. Harris for President spent around $300 million on broadcast and cable TV ads in 2024, and far, far less on external creator engagement. This conversation is becoming really stale at this point - every cycle, everyone complains we spend too much on TV ads. I don’t want to dwell on it too much, but can you explain why it continues to happen? Is there just competitive pressure on TV ad spending that says you can't be outspent by the other side no matter what?

RF: It’s like that old saying, “Nobody ever got fired for hiring IBM.” If you do the same thing that you have always done and you lose, it's because it must have been some other thing. If you do something different or innovative and you lose, it's because you did the thing that was different. 

My hot take is that advertising works. Just look at the battleground states. There was a seven-point swing to the right nationally and only a two-point swing in the battleground states. That shows that spending money in the battlegrounds can change public opinion. There’s no questioning that. But, we can either spend our time (through advertising) trying to optimize that -2% gap to a +.01% gap, or, we can ask ourselves why the country swung seven points to the right. The latter, for me, is the much bigger and more important question. 

We have to answer both of those things at the same time. I think that we had a pretty good media mix on the campaign. That is not to say that we did things perfectly with all the caveats that come with that. The reality is that campaigns are going to have to spend much more on the internet in order to move folks. There’s obviously still institutional resistance and rent-seeking from traditional consultants, but I think even your hardest and fastest TV consultant sees the writing on the wall and is starting to adjust. 

KT: I agree with most of your arguments wholeheartedly, but something I think about a lot is how absurd so much of this conversation sounds to conservatives. Many on the political right will likely read your essay and say your arguments are completely upside down: Democrats own Hollywood. They own the entire legacy press. Universities are dominated by liberal thinking. Corporate boardrooms are (mostly) paying lip service to liberal values. Conservatives have a strong argument that they are still the underdogs when it comes to the fight for “culture.” What are your thoughts on that?

RF: Conservatives unintentionally backed themselves into a position where they own the channels and ways to speak to disaffected voters. They were able to do it, because conservatives do not feel represented by the majority of the cultural forces you mentioned. So, in a moment where a broad swath of the country has rejected the majority monoculture, and you have positioned yourself as an alternative in the spaces where they are going to move, you're already there to catch people. 

So yes, I am certain that conservatives are going to read these arguments and say this is delusional, that liberals control everything. But to the extent we have quote-unquote “control,” it's that the left has a cultural cache in institutions that are losing their relevance. For example, on your point about academia, the number of people going to college is going down, and at peak, it was like 30% or something. If you think that we control the Hollywood studios, well, YouTube is taking over Netflix in terms of viewership. If you think that we control the mainstream press, first of all, they don’t carry our water, and second of all, they are not reaching any voters that we actually need to win. 

When vast swaths of the country are moving to be against our institutions, the right has been there to pick them up.

KT: I’m curious as to your thoughts about where politicians and elected officials fit in to all of this. People have been upset by the Democrats’ lack of fight. How do those public figures better capitalize on this moment?

RF: At the end of the day, the incentives of media in this new era are toward authenticity. You can throw a baseball in this town (DC) and hit some Democratic digital person who says authenticity matters. But that authenticity can’t just be spun up to play to the internet’s incentives. It needs to be authenticity that demonstrates a person or politician really believes what they're saying. I think the electorate will give you a lot of credit if it seems like you actually believe some stuff and you're saying it out loud. 

I don’t think the vast majority of what I call these “opt-out” voters are socialists by any means. Probably most of them aren't, but I think they would give Bernie Sanders a lot of credit for saying what he believes. I think they give Donald Trump a similar amount of credit for being authentic.  

Something I’ve thought about recently is how every other medium is moving towards personality-driven everything. For example, the future of news is individual reporters with newsletters or YouTube channels, not big networks. Is it the case that politics is just moving this way too? I hear a lot that the Democratic Party needs to fix its brand. But the reality is that it wasn’t the Democratic Party that won in 2008. It was Barack Obama. Honestly, Trump’s brand was never tied to the Republican Party either. 

Personalities are driving politics from here on, because that's how everything else is moving. I don’t think I'm totally willing to write off the exercise of saying the Democratic Party is for X, Y, or Z issue. But in terms of the future of the party, it’s important for individuals to be perceived as meaning what they say, and they're fighting for something and not just trying to win an election. 

More things you should read: 

• New York Magazine published an interesting profile of Semafor, which Charlotte Klein calls “a newsletter-and-events business that is both a modern media mash-up and a throwback to a pre-Trump era.” 

• MAGA elites are opening a pricey clubhouse in Georgetown. 

• Here’s another long read on Hasan Piker, who addressed how his physical attractiveness is important for his credibility among right-wing bro audiences: “It’s the one aspect that many of my haters can’t shake,” Mr. Piker said of his appearance in a Twitch broadcast last year. “They can’t turn around and be like, ‘You’re not hot.’”

• Are young people already abandoning Trump? G. Elliott Morris explains in his Substack, Strength in Numbers.

• The Bulwark’s Lauren Egan published some additional reporting on the Trump administration’s attack on Democratic fundraising giant ActBlue.

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