This essay is the third installment in a series on the thinkers, upstarts and ideologues battling for control of the Democratic Party.
During the first night of the recent government shutdown, congressional Democrats organized a livestream on YouTube featuring members of Congress, streamers and influencers to hammer home their message about the expiring Affordable Care Act subsidies and the impending spike in health insurance premiums. At its peak, it attracted just 1,000 viewers to watch the House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries. At other times during the 24-hour session, the viewers dwindled to a few dozen.
Ever since the dawn of modern media and Teddy Roosevelt’s coinage of the term “bully pulpit,” political parties that don’t control the White House have struggled to match the agenda-setting power of the presidency. We’re living through an asymmetry that seems more daunting and profound than ever. President Trump has a feral, almost pathological genius for getting people to talk about him, and to a degree that his supporters find thrilling and his opponents find suffocating, he dominates the nation’s and the world’s attention.
The Democratic Party currently stands as the central bulwark against a collapse of America’s constitutional and democratic order. And while Mr. Trump’s agenda and leadership are polling near his second term’s lows, the opposition party is as unpopular as it has been in decades.
There is a necessary and invigorating debate over the direction of the Democratic Party and what it must do to regain the voters it lost in 2024 and get enough electoral victories to retake power at the federal level. Some argue that Democrats need to move to the right on certain high-profile issues — whether immigration or civil rights for trans people — while others say the Democrats need to double down on working-class populism and court voters who have given up on the system in disgust.
But one thing that tends to get lost in this discussion is that for all the failures of the Democratic Party in 2024, in narrow terms the Harris-Walz campaign’s message was actually an effective one. The campaign and its allied super PAC spent more money on advertising than any other presidential effort in history, and most of that was concentrated in the swing states. There, voters were less likely to defect to Mr. Trump than in nonswing states such as New Jersey, New York and California. And the message of those ads was in line with a lot of what many critics have suggested — focused on core economic issues and framed in populist terms, with Ms. Harris portrayed as an ally of the working class.
In other words, even though she lost, her core problem was not her message, however imperfect it might have been. It was an inability to get enough people to hear it, in spite of record-breaking advertising spending. If Mr. Trump had not run a single paid advertisement in the race, he almost surely would have dominated the single most important resource of our age: attention. Democrats need to win the attention contest in 2026 and beyond if they want to win back the country.
The old way is dying. Any campaign must have a theory and a plan for capturing the attention of the voters they need to win. Before the era of TV, campaigns used all kinds of strategies, like doing whistle-stop tours and training supporters to give speeches to local assembly halls on the candidate’s behalf. For much of the past four decades or so, the reach and power of broadcast TV solved this problem for campaigns.
The recipe was fairly straightforward for politicians seeking political office at the statewide and federal levels: raise a ton of money and then spend it on 15- or 30-second TV ads. There were and are other forms of advertising — radio ads, mailers and digital advertising, most prominently — but the main way you got the attention of your potential voters was through TV ads. This made sense; TV was the place that attracted the most attention from potential voters collected (particularly during, say, the prime local viewing hours of network evening news). If you had enough money to buy ads, you could reach the voters you wanted to reach, and the problem was simply getting enough money.
That world no longer exists. TV viewership has declined, and audiences have fractured. Money cannot buy attention as reliably or directly as it once did.
Therefore, it will not do to run the old playbook and hope for victory in this very new game. Here are some guiding principles to earning attention in the fractured, distracted world of modern content consumption.
Go everywhere.
One of the most enduring images I have of the 2024 presidential campaign was Mr. Trump on the “Bussin’ With the Boys” podcast weeks before Election Day. Hosted by two former N.F.L. players, the podcast usually takes place on a set that looks like a bus and features the hosts talking sports and getting up to fairly typical bro high jinks. On Oct. 15, it ran an interview with Mr. Trump (in his trademark red tie reaching below his belt) sitting in a chair across from the hosts, Will Compton and Taylor Lewan, both of whom were in casual pants and sweatshirts. On a table behind the three of them, someone had arranged the world’s most hilariously halfhearted seasonal decorations — about half a dozen pumpkins with scattered cotton stretched over them.
Having spent a considerable amount of time in my career interacting with various communications staff members for politicians, I can imagine how aghast many of them would have been at the optics. It looked truly ridiculous: schlocky and fly-by-night. But it’s a new world. “Bussin’ With the Boys” has tens of thousands of listeners and is mainly targeted at young men, who probably don’t pay very close attention to politics or even news.
As strange as some of Mr. Trump’s podcast interviews were during the 2024 campaign, they often gave him opportunities to show sides of himself that voters hadn’t seen in other venues. The most I’ve ever liked Mr. Trump in my life was when he discussed addiction with the podcaster Theo Von, talking compassionately about Mr. Trump’s brother’s alcoholism and peppering Mr. Von with earnest questions about his experience of substance abuse, like whether cocaine was a “stronger up” than alcohol.
All of this was part of a larger pattern in the 2024 presidential campaign. In our current environment, national candidates must be comfortable talking off-script in a wide variety of venues with lots of different kinds of interlocutors. Mr. Trump and particularly JD Vance were far more willing to give interviews, take questions and talk to all kinds of outlets (often friendly but not always) than Ms. Harris and Mr. Walz were.
Although eventually the Democrats’ campaign made concerted outreach in new places, from “The Breakfast Club” to Howard Stern’s show to “Call Her Daddy,” the disparity in approaches was particularly acute in the summer of 2024, when it felt as though Ms. Harris and Mr. Walz were avoiding the press. Mr. Walz, in particular, was underutilized: The reason he emerged as a V.P. front-runner was his feisty, funny, effective appearances on a range of TV interviews after she became the nominee.
Yet once he became her running mate, the campaign more or less shut him down. Mr. Walz later said that the campaign was too risk averse. “I think we probably should have just rolled the dice and done the town halls,” where voters may say “I don’t believe in you,” he said. “In football parlance, we were in a prevent defense to not lose when we never had anything to lose because I don’t think we were ever ahead.”
In her new book, Ms. Harris confirms this general risk aversion, noting that her first choice for a vice-presidential nominee was Pete Buttigieg but that she feared putting a gay man on the ticket would backfire. This exact fear of things blowing up is what guided the communication strategy for much of the campaign as well. They were playing as if they had a lead when they didn’t.
Always be posting.
It’s not just how you campaign and which outlets you talk to, though. Successful campaigns must prioritize producing content. One thing successful content creators will tell you about excelling in the world of digital attention is that there’s no penalty for quantity. No one checks your percentages — only your total numbers. You need to always be posting if you want a better chance of things going viral or at least ending up in the algorithmic slipstream that shoots it out to millions of eyeballs. So Democratic campaigns and candidates should be thinking about how their campaigns are going to produce a lot of attention-grabbing short-form videos to meet the most disengaged and youngest voters where they are.
Zohran Mamdani propelled himself from polling figures as low as 1 percent to more Democratic primary votes than any other New York City mayoral candidate ever on the strength of funny, charming, on-the-street videos in which he talked straight to camera and interviewed voters. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has brilliantly used Instagram Live streams to talk directly to constituents and answer questions about the nuts and bolts of the personal and the political, from her skin care routine to the most obscure elements of congressional procedure.
When he served as a representative from North Carolina’s 14th Congressional District in 2023 and 2024, the Democrat Jeff Jackson routinely uploaded straight-to-camera videos to TikTok in which he plainly described for constituents what was happening in Congress — the movements of a particular bill and the procedural mechanisms, the weeds of legislation being considered, the machinations on Capitol Hill in response to the failure of Silicon Valley Bank. Mr. Jackson, handsome and plain-spoken, is very good at talking, and his TikToks did enormous numbers. In 2024, when Republicans in the state legislature redrew his district to make it insurmountably Republican, he ran for attorney general instead. He won 51.4 to 48.6 percent in 2024, outperforming Ms. Harris in the state by 3.6 percentage points.
Don’t worry so much about negative attention.
Political professionals tend to be pretty obsessed with downside risk. During the summer of 2024, the Harris-Walz campaign might be forgiven for its approach as then-Senator JD Vance got near-endless flak from some of his most off-putting past statements, like disparaging “childless cat ladies.” If you focus on just paid media, you can script, curate and edit every aspect of a 30-second ad. But when you sit down for an interview, you have less control, and a lot can go wrong. Mr. Vance and Mr. Trump attracted a ton of negative attention, but it’s hard to argue that it wasn’t worth the publicity.
More recently, the top two finishers in New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary took radically different approaches to the media. The early front-runner, Andrew Cuomo, took very few questions, did very few local media appearances and tried to limit his appearances to controlled set pieces while his allied super PAC dropped tens of millions of dollars largely on negative ads against his main rival. Mr. Mamdani, on the other hand, was seemingly everywhere, from local news to podcasts to the celebrity news site Pop Crave to a partly Urdu-language interview on Pakistani TV.
In the week before the election, it seemed that this willingness to go anywhere and talk to everyone might come back to bite him. He took some heat for refusing to outright condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada” in a podcast exchange, which briefly flared into a story that dominated the news. But in the end, the burst of press didn’t seem to cause any measurable damage to his campaign.
Politicians and campaign staff members of a certain generation live in fear of the gaffe, the moment when a politician says something awkward or wrong or offensive that comes to define who the person. But because of how distracted and distractible the public has become, gaffes — or controversial and even offensive statements by candidates — do not matter the way they once did. This has to do with the context of the broader attention environment.
We all understand intuitively that there is a connection between focus and memory. When we are paying total attention to something, it stamps our memory indelibly. When we’re distracted, it’s very hard to remember what just happened. Well, we’re distracted all the time now, and no one can remember anything.
There’s a sense that nothing sticks to Mr. Trump, that he can say and do numerous things in a single day that would have constituted a weeklong scandal years ago. Part of that has to do with his shamelessness, and part of it has to do with the sheer quantity of news he generates. More broadly, I think we increasingly live in a postgaffe, even a postscandal society.
This has some extremely dangerous implications: Taboos in society are important, and we are watching many of them, particularly around racism and antisemitism, degrade before our eyes. If there’s an upside, it’s that something like the Howard Dean scream — when he got a little too loud at a rally — are absolutely inconceivable as scandals today. Democratic operatives and candidates need to stop being scared of their own shadows and internalize the notion that attention is good, that even negative attention might redound to their benefit and that the public is so easily distracted that no one is going to hold supposed gaffes against them the way people once might have.
Recruit candidates who are good at getting attention and talking to people.
It almost seems ludicrous to state this explicitly, but if you’re going to compete in this new environment, you need candidates with a natural aptitude for attracting attention and then holding it. The ancient Greeks called this quality charisma, and it’s the word we still use to describe it (or, as the kids say, rizz). You would think that charisma would be an obvious criterion for success in contemporary electoral politics, but somewhat oddly, that’s less often the case than it would appear.
When parties and campaign committees are searching for candidates to recruit and then support in key contested races — the 20 or so most competitive House districts or swing-state Senate seats — they are primarily looking for candidates who can raise or donate enough money to buy enough ads to be competitive. It’s hard to overstate how much the ability and willingness to raise money is the quality that matters most in traditional candidate recruitment and support.
While money still definitely matters — just ask the Pennsylvania senator and former hedge fund chief executive David McCormick — its relative import is waning fast. If you stop thinking about candidates as magnets to attract checks and start thinking about them as people magnets, you expand the pool of good candidates. I’ve met incredibly charismatic, bright, capable people from all walks of life, from acupuncturists to general contractors to bodega cashiers and beyond, and essentially none of them are rich enough or know enough rich people to be able to plausibly run for office and certainly would never attract the support of Democratic Party campaign arms. Maybe if there’s an upside to this strange new world, it’s the possibility of more of these people having what it takes to win.
There is, of course, no universal template for campaign victory. Many of the calculations of cost, benefit and risk will depend on the race itself and the dynamics of the electorate. What will not vary is the need to solve the fundamental problem of attention: attracting the attention of the voters you will need to win in an era when this attention can no longer be purchased in bulk from TV networks. If Democrats want to build a party that can win back the country, first they need to figure out how to capture its attention.
Chris Hayes is the host of MSNBC’s “All In With Chris Hayes” and the author of “The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource.”
Source photographs by Anna Rose Layden and David Dee Delgado/Getty Images, and Victor J. Blue for The New York Times.
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