How Low Will Democrats Go? Probably Not Low Enough.

[brooklynite]

New York Magazine

A decade ago, in the era of proverbial hope and change, the internet was Democratic territory. Like Hollywood, like the music industry, it was run by media elites and young people, rendering it seemingly impenetrable to conservatives. Maybe it was complacency, or maybe it was a certain vital energy shifting to the weirder, darker corners of the social web rather than the ad-agency-approved mainstream of microtargeted emails, but there’s a consensus that Democrats lost the internet in 2016. Or, really, lost Facebook, which has become tantamount to losing the internet. There was, of course, Russian disinformation and Macedonian fake news, but also there was a social-media strategy based on ironic memes, conspiracy signaling, and invented content that has since become de rigueur in the Republican Party. For instance, in November, on the first day of impeachment hearings, the Arizona congressman Paul Gosar, elected in the tea-party wave of 2010, crafted a 23-tweet thread defending the president. Together, the first letters of each tweet spelled out “Epstein didn’t kill himself.”

This election cycle, Democrats are again struggling to compete. Lefty Twitter is active and funny but is mainly devoted to tearing down centrist-seeming Democratic candidates (like “Mayo Pete,” as his extremely online antagonists have christened him). Instead, almost all of the most-viral content is coming from the Trump right. A video of Joe Biden massaging his own shoulders was created by a Kansas-based meme-lord who goes by Carpe Donktum and was invited to the White House over the summer. Both Donald Trump and Donald Jr. tweeted it out. The parody site JoeBiden.info — now advertising JOE BIDEN TOUCHED ME T-shirts, in what looks like official campaign font — was created by someone working for Trump’s reelection campaign. After climate activist Greta Thunberg was named Time’s Person of the Year, the campaign Photoshopped Trump’s head onto her body and used the parody cover in a tweet.

“If you talk to Democratic institutions, they have a research team; they have a mobilization team that has an earned-media, paid-media, and social-media person. They have all these silos,” Hougland says. Trump, by contrast, understands that “it’s not paid or earned. Not fake or real. Not machine or human. Not foreign or domestic. All part of the same discourse.” (And, not insignificantly, he’s also outspending all the leading Democrats online.)

Democrats are trying to course-correct. LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman has emerged as an internet-first megadonor whose resistance-y fund Investing in Us is backing the political tech accelerator Higher Ground Labs (not to be confused with Higher Ground Productions, the Obamas’ Netflix shop), which is in turn funding Hougland’s influencer gambit. A lot of cash is pouring into a buzzy digital agency called Acronym, led by Obamaworld veterans. And then there’s Mike Bloomberg, who is planning an unprecedented nine-figure digital-ad campaign.