General
The day after President Donald Trump’s budget office attempted to freeze nearly all federal spending last week, congressional Democrats flooded Hill reporters’ inboxes with sharply worded statements. While a few of those statements made it into news articles, most went ignored.
Meanwhile, Sen. Brian Schatz hopped on a video call with Adam Mockler of MeidasTouch, a left-leaning network of podcasters, independent journalists and YouTube streamers, for a quick interview. Within hours, the eight-minute clip with the Hawaii Democrat had racked up tens of thousands of views.
If you judge from the commentary online since Trump returned to the White House last month, you might think the only people rank-and-file Democrats dislike more than Trump and his cronies are Democratic leaders, who have been derided as lethargic, feckless and missing in action.
Writing in The American Prospect, Ryan Cooper argued that Democrats in 2024 were largely shouting into a void. “The content of the message doesn’t matter if voters never hear it,” Cooper wrote, adding that “the typical Democratic approach of funneling billions through sporadic ad campaigns on traditional television channels is plainly not working.”
As Democrats begin their march toward the 2026 elections under an incessant barrage of executive orders from the White House and criticism from their own base, the party is still trying to coalesce around what exactly their message should be. But according to some of the congressional Democrats leading the caucus’ messaging efforts, there is growing consensus on how to get that message out to the voters who ignored them in 2024.
Rep. Debbie Dingell, chair of the Democratic Policy and Communications Committee, said the recent election results didn’t surprise her, “because I meet the voters where they are,” speaking with them in union halls, VFWs and grocery stores back in Michigan. Democrats need to approach new media the same way, she said.
“We also need to understand where people are getting their information — much of it not accurate — but it is on social media. It is from podcasts. You got to find a way that you’re communicating where people are,” Dingell said. “And as important as it is to talk at them, it’s equally as important to listen to them.”
To that end, she said her team is making “sure that members and their teams have the tools and skills that they need” to post on different forms of social media or target specific subgroups of voters with appearances on nonpolitical podcasts.
“That’s where you make a difference, that’s where it’s more effective,” she said.
On the other side of the Capitol, Democrats mostly recognize that they have largely failed to reach entire swaths of persuadable voters, said an aide to a Senate Democrat who was granted anonymity to discuss internal caucus deliberations.
“As much as you can have consensus in a political party, I think there is a consensus over here on the Senate side that we need to modernize our approach to communication and how we’re reaching voters … the people who consistently turn out for us, the people who sometimes turn out for us, and the people who really don’t like us,” the communications staffer said. “The old models of writing statements and just doing interviews with print (media) are just not reaching people the way that they used to.”
That effort is being led by Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey, who chairs Senate Democrats’ strategic communications committee. “In an increasingly fragmented media landscape where Americans get information about news and politics from a broad constellation of platforms, it’s imperative that Senate Democrats work to reach people where they are,” Booker spokesperson Jeff Giertz said in a statement. “Our work is just beginning, and we’re encouraged to see the level of enthusiasm for it so far.”
At this point, Senate Democratic aides say the caucus knows they have an audience problem and are now exploring ways to fix it, with some promising experiments on social media. But they concede a lot more needs to be done. “Our efforts are absolutely still in their infancy,” one said.
Since the election, Democrats in both chambers have made a pivot to video tailored for viewing and sharing on social media. That means vertical videos of lawmakers speaking direct-to-camera for less than a minute with captions — the sort of thing someone scrolling mindlessly while standing in a line or waiting for a bus might see and share even if their phone’s muted. And it’s not just the likes of message-savvy members like Booker or Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez; Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer — who famously still uses a flip phone — and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries have done it, as has 78-year-old Sen. Richard Blumenthal.
It’s a sign that even the old-guard Democrats get the demands of the new media environment, the first Senate aide argued. “It is different. It is not what we have seen previously. And so, I think that those are some good proof points that the caucus (is) figuring it out (and) members are buying in.”
Booker has launched a series of videos starring his colleagues with a common motif — a clip of Trump or some other Republican making a specious statement, then a quick cut to a Democratic senator saying (with a bleep), “S–t that ain’t true.” So far, Booker’s been joined by the likes of Tim Kaine, Sheldon Whitehouse, Alex Padilla and Martin Heinrich.
Numerous 2024 postmortems suggest that voters, particularly politically disengaged and swing voters who got their political news mainly from conservative and nontraditional sources — such as Fox News, streaming media like podcasts and social media — had significantly less accurate beliefs about the two candidates’ backgrounds and proposals, and were also more likely to back Trump.
Trump outperformed Kamala Harris especially with young male voters who avoid traditional political news sources, but do subscribe to podcasts that dabble in politics while focusing primarily on sports, comedy or pop culture. While Harris made her own stops on podcasts, a recent Bloomberg News analysis found Trump’s audiences on YouTube-distributed podcasts crushed hers, 113.6 million views to 6.8 million. As a result, Democratic messaging largely missed voters who never watch CNN or read a newspaper; the kind of guy who might not know that the Dallas Mavericks sending Luka Dončić to the LA Lakers for Anthony Davis wasn’t the only big trade story this weekend.
As the lawmakers test out their marketability as social media stars, Booker’s team is working on an outreach plan to content creators — Instagram influencers, podcasters, meme makers, YouTubers and more, including those who rarely, if ever, delve into politics — with plans for Democratic officials to appear on their channels or otherwise engage with them in, ideally, a non-cringey fashion.
Fear of the new and unknown, like appearing on comedy podcasts that don’t abide by the staid norms of traditional journalism, is the “biggest obstacle” to getting more Democrats on board, the first Senate staffer said. “They’re a little bit riskier, right?” the aide said. “But I think what we as a caucus are realizing is, we have to be more comfortable with risk. We have to be more comfortable with the possibility that we’re going to make a mistake, but that is a risk that’s worth taking if it means we are getting ourselves in front of audiences that we are otherwise not.”
Dingell said she’s encouraging Democrats to appear more on conservative outlets.
“I think people have to do what they’re comfortable with, but we should not be afraid to go (on conservative media),” Dingell said, adding that some Republican colleagues have recognized her as “the woman who goes on Fox News.”
“You have got to be willing to talk to everybody, or you’re not going to make a difference,” she added.
Still, it’s unclear just how many risks Democrats are comfortable taking. On Tuesday, a CNBC host complained to Sen. Peter Welch, D-Vt., that it has been hard to get Democrats to come on the network to respond to Elon Musk’s apparent takeover of the government bureaucracy. And while some Senate Democrats are showing up on Booker’s Instagram videos, not all are pushing them on their own accounts. Part of the hesitancy stems from party leaders’ decision to avoid reacting to every provocative executive order, X message or Truth Social post.
“We’ve got to be targeted, focused and effective. You can’t respond to everything,” Dingell said. “I think (Trump) is deliberately stirring everything up, and we have to pick our battles, (and) be effective at doing it.”
When it comes to comedy podcasts or sports talk radio, the hosts themselves might be reluctant to focus on politics again so soon after the election. And Democrats have to tread lightly. The goal is to prove they “aren’t a bunch of out-of-touch weirdos,” the first Senate aide said, and talking about budget impoundment on a football show just before the Super Bowl would do the opposite.
“Going on media that maybe leans more conservative and has a very male audience, and just like preaching the usual Democratic (talking points) … is that actually going to be effective? Not really,” the staffer said.
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