I have always maintained that the American electorate is fundamentally ungrateful. You give them the most robust, highly-produced ecosystem of political podcasts in human history, and they still find a way to complain about the price of groceries. For years, I have watched my colleagues in the political media tear their hair out over the Democratic Party’s persistent inability to maintain control of the federal government. But after listening to a recent, incredibly illuminating dialogue between my dear friends Chris Hayes and Ezra Klein—a conversation I was unfortunately unable to join because I was moderating an exclusive panel on the discursive contours of the midterms at the Aspen Institute—I experienced a profound paradigm shift.
We need to stop worrying about archaic, analog metrics like winning a majority of electoral votes or holding legislative majorities. The real battlefield, as Chris and Ezra so astutely noted, is the attention economy. And frankly, I am relieved to announce that in the metric that truly matters, the Democrats are already a permanent ruling majority.
I have to confess, I used to be one of those quaint traditionalists who believed that passing laws was the primary objective of a political apparatus. But as I was telling a very senior deputy chief of staff over an oat milk cortado in Adams Morgan last week, we have been viewing the problem through entirely the wrong epistemological lens. The physical realm is messy. It is full of gerrymandering, filibusters, and uncredentialed voters who refuse to read the New York Times opinion page before making up their minds. The digital realm, however, is pure. It is meritocratic. And it is entirely dominated by the people who know how to optimize a ring light.
Consider the singular genius of Senator Jon Ossoff. If you look purely at the Senate floor, you might see a junior senator from Georgia constrained by gridlock and the realities of a hostile administration. But if you look at TikTok, you see a sovereign emperor of engagement. The man knows how to look into a camera lens with the kind of intense, smoldering earnestness that generates millions of impressions before lunch. Does a viral clip of him deeply furrowing his brow at a tech executive actually result in regulatory reform? Of course not. But to ask that question is to completely miss the point. He is generating sustained, high-quality attention. He is winning the vibes primary. And as any media executive will tell you, vibes can be monetized. Legislation cannot.
This is the brilliance of the framework outlined by political strategists like Graham Platner, who understand that the old rules of political gravity no longer apply. For too long, we have burdened our elected officials with the exhausting, unglamorous work of trying to materially improve people’s lives. It is a thankless task. You build a bridge in Ohio, and it serves merely a few thousand commuters a day, most of whom do not even subscribe to a premium Substack tier. But you engineer a flawless, thirty-second takedown of a conservative witness in a subcommittee hearing, and you reach three million highly educated Brooklynites who will immediately share it to their Instagram stories. Which of these actions has a larger impact on the discourse? The answer is obvious to anyone who is not hopelessly provincial.
It is simply a fact that an aggressively retweeted thread about democratic backsliding holds infinitely more legislative weight than the actual passage of a bill.
The fundamental problem with our current political discourse is that the working class is stubbornly fixated on materiality. They obsess over whether their wages are stagnating or whether their local hospital is closing down, completely failing to account for the fact that the Democrats are absolutely crushing the Republicans in podcast listener retention rates. It is an astonishing failure of perspective. I recently found myself sitting next to a laid-off auto worker on a flight from Detroit to Washington, and when I tried to explain to him that the progressive coalition was currently dominating the battle for attention, he looked at me with total incomprehension. He kept talking about his pension. It was deeply embarrassing for him.
This is why the synthesis provided by Klein and Hayes is so essential. They have given us the intellectual permission to decouple the concept of political success from the cumbersome necessity of holding public office. Right now, Donald Trump is the President of the United States. He commands the military, he directs federal agencies, and he appoints judges. But ask yourself this: does he have a critically acclaimed limited-series narrative audio documentary exploring the structural inequities of the filibuster? He does not. He merely wields the brute, unimaginative power of the state. We, on the other hand, wield the power of the algorithm. We are the shadow presidents of the timeline.
Once you accept this premise, everything else falls perfectly into place. The agonizing post-mortems after every electoral defeat are completely unnecessary. We did not lose the election; we simply transitioned to a more streamlined, opposition-based content strategy. In fact, one could argue that holding power is actively detrimental to the project of generating engaging political media. When you are in charge, you are forced to make difficult compromises that alienate your core audience. You have to negotiate with unpleasant people from states with low broadband penetration. You have to explain why the things you promised have not magically materialized.
But when you are out of power, you are free. You are unshackled from the dreary mechanics of roll call votes and budget reconciliations. You can dedicate your entire schedule to going on friendly television programs to eloquently articulate how outraged you are. You can launch a daily newsletter. You can cultivate a deeply passionate parasocial relationship with millions of subscribers who will gladly pay seven dollars a month to hear you explain why the people currently passing the laws are bad. It is a flawless business model, masquerading as a political movement.
I firmly believe that the Democratic Party needs to formally embrace this transition. We should stop pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into doomed Senate races in the Midwest and instead invest that capital where it belongs: in state-of-the-art podcast studios for our most telegenic operatives. We should stop pretending that our goal is to govern the physical United States and accept our destiny as a premium digital media brand.
Imagine a world where Jon Ossoff never has to pretend to care about agricultural subsidies again. He could simply stream on Twitch full-time, breaking down the day’s political news with the aesthetic precision of a lifestyle influencer. Imagine the sheer volume of high-quality content we could produce if our best and brightest minds were not constantly distracted by the need to fly back to their districts to attend town halls in poorly lit high school gymnasiums.
I realize this is a radical proposition for some. There are those who will cling to the outdated notion that the purpose of politics is the acquisition and application of state power. But those people are living in the past. They are fighting a nineteenth-century ground war while we are fighting a twenty-first-century air war. They can have the White House. They can have the courts. They can have the legislative branch.
As long as I can continue to have a highly stimulating, three-hour conversation about the meta-narrative of the electorate over a plate of sustainably sourced branzino with the smartest pundits in the country, I will consider that a profound and lasting victory for the American people. We have won the battle for attention. And really, what else is there?