Politics
Dems concede Republicans ‘running circles’ around them online as Trump remakes Washington
The Department of Government Efficiency created its own account on X last November, amassing 4 million followers with a stream of news on contract cancellations and other cuts to the bureaucracy. Elon Musk has posted relentlessly on the social media platform he owns, promoting his own voice on an algorithm he controls.
The Democratic National Committee, meanwhile, started a rapid response account in January with about 121,000 followers, a fraction of DOGE’s reach. And Democrats held traditional rallies outside the USAID and Treasury buildings, where Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, was mocked on late-night TV and by even some within his own party after leading a chant of “We will win!”
It was a halting response by Democrats to a flood of pro-DOGE messaging. And what was worse, according to interviews with more than a dozen Democratic elected officials and strategists, was that they were doing it on the wrong platform — convening a conventional show of resistance for local and national TV cameras, as Schumer did while holding a carton of eggs, while largely leaving unanswered the torrent of MAGA orthodoxy and, in many cases, disinformation online.
In the online war, said Chi Ossé, a Democratic New York City councilman who has built an online following through his short-form, explanatory videos, you “don’t see those folks anywhere.”
“Trump and Republicans have been able to grasp different types of media in how to get their message across that impacts society as a whole, and I do believe that Dem leadership is missing the mark, not only in the election but in our resistance 2.0,” Ossé said. “We need to be active in every medium.”
Instead, in the early days of Trump’s second term, they’re getting swamped. The rapid response account the DNC started in January is a fifth of the size of @RapidResponse47, the Trump White House’s account. Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader, has almost a million followers. But Musk, who has posted hundreds of times over the last month, has more than 217 million followers. Some Democratic groups, like MoveOn.Org and Human Rights Campaign, are posting far less on X — if not leaving the site completely for Bluesky, a left-leaning version of X with far fewer users and nowhere the same audience reach.
Conservative personalities hold five of the top 10 podcasts on Spotify, while for liberals, only the New York Times’ columnist Ezra Klein cracks that list. When Ben Shapiro, the controversial conservative podcaster, posts on Facebook, 9.4 million people are following along, compared to about 1.8 million for Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.).
Three months after their losses in the November elections — and now three weeks into Donald Trump’s presidency — some Democrats concede they are losing an asymmetrical battle with the president and his MAGA allies, where Trump and Musk have dominated online spaces over the last month. And there is no consensus among them about how to fix their rapid response problems or who’s to blame, these Democrats said.
“Republicans are running circles around Democrats for how to connect to the culture today,” said John Della Volpe, director of Harvard University’s youth poll and an expert on Gen Z. “People are still asking me in these post-election meetings, ‘Who is Theo Von?’ Even if they had the best message, you can’t connect if you’re not part of modern American culture, if you’re not injecting yourself into these spaces where people already are.”
Democrats’ weakness in reaching voters outside traditional channels — TikTok, not BLN; YouTube, not national newspapers — isn’t new. One post-election analysis from Navigator Research, a Democratic research project, found that a majority of “swing voters” and new Trump voters last year got their news primarily from social media and alternative sources, like podcasts. Broadcast and cable news were far less popular amongst those two groups, the research found, while half of Kamala Harris’ voters got their news from broadcast TV outlets.
“Republicans’ ability to speak into the ecosystem is sharper, more precise and Democrats are behind in that,” said Dan Sena, a longtime Democratic strategist and former executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Sena, like other Democrats, noted that Republicans benefit from a broader media ecosystem that amplifies their message, where a story can travel from a Republican influencer’s video to Musk’s X feed to Joe Rogan’s podcast to Fox News, reaching millions of viewers along the way.
“There is a fight for the attention economy, and today the Republicans are winning. No doubt,” he added.
Sena warned that the fix won’t come from the Democratic National Committee, DCCC or other affiliated party arms, therefore, it’s “not even a fix we can expect right now,” he said. Instead, “that’s going to come through our candidates pushing back, getting their own internal communications sharper as we head into 2026.”
“The leadership vacuum IRL is causing a messaging vacuum online,” said Kyle Tharp, a progressive researcher who tracks digital political trends through his substack, Chaotic Era. “Even though there are some bright spots, Democrats are still getting steamrolled online and there’s not a lot they can do about it because there’s not a single coordinating body or person to push an offensive message.”
“I don’t know how fixable that problem is right now,” Tharp added.
There are some exceptions among Democrats who are piercing through, including Ocasio-Cortez, who regularly goes viral with her Instagram live videos and posts on X. Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.), the first Gen Z member of Congress, frequently spars with Republicans online, as do Sens. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) and Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii).
Some Democrats are sharpening their language, which can often generate more online attention, though not without risk of turning off some voters. On Wednesday, Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) posted a clip of himself on CNN calling Musk “a dick” because “what the American public wants is for us to actually bring weapons to this bar fight.”
“They should be creating bait of their own. Be more aggressive, be more outlandish,” said Tim Miller, a former GOP strategist who now hosts a podcast on The Bulwark, a site founded by anti-Trump Republicans. “I think they should be doing 700X of what they’re doing, in terms of output, volume, platforms, speed.”
And there’s also some evidence that at least some Democrats have gotten the message. Progressive influencer Brian Tyler Cohen spoke to Senate and House members at their respective meetings this week about how to engage on social media, according to two people familiar with the meetings and granted anonymity to discuss private events. Jeffries appeared on Cohen’s show and Jon Stewart’s podcast this week.
Nine Democratic senators joined Pod Save America for a series of live interviews last week, beaming in from Schumer’s office. Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Schatz appeared on Adam Mockler’s YouTube show in recent weeks. Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) popped up on The David Pakman Show, another YouTube show for progressives. The DNC hired the staffers behind the @KamalaHQ X account to run its new @FactPostNews efforts, which can be found on X, BlueSky, Threads, Instagram and Facebook.
But even Democrats acknowledge those efforts are the exception in their party. Thirty-five-year-old Texas state Rep. James Talarico, who like Ossé has used social media to push through his political priorities, called the national Democratic response to Trump, “too slow and too tepid and not meeting the moment.”
“Just like the printing press or the radio or the TV, social media is now how we communicate and if we’re not adapting to this new environment, we’re not going to get heard,” Talarico said. “If our party doesn’t keep up, we’re going to be left behind.”
Byron Donalds says he is not a ‘yes man’ to Trump
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The progressive political action committee Justice Democrats has appointed Rev. Hodari Williams as its new executive director. The change sets the organization up to hone a civil rights message ahead of the 2028 election cycle, Williams told Blue Light News.
His appointment, shared first with Blue Light News, comes at a time when self-proclaimed progressives (and socialists) are flooding the scene. The PAC has had its most successful election cycle ever, helping seven candidates — including Donavan McKinney in Michigan, Melat Kiros in Colorado and Darializa Avila Chevalier in New York — defeat incumbents in the primaries. While those candidates are heavily favored to win on Election Day, the fates of three other Justice Democrats candidates, including Tennessee’s state Rep. Justin Pearson, remain less certain going into November.
At one point, the group tried to get Williams to run for office. Though he declined, Williams said now is the right time to force change.
“America and its present-day politicians, from my experience, have a high blood pressure of promises and anemia of political courage,” Williams said in an interview, using a common Kenyan political expression. “Right now, JD is producing candidates who have the political courage to deal with the crises that are existing in marginalized and disenfranchised communities, and I want to be a part of that.”
Williams, 46, was born and raised in Lakewood, New Jersey. His parents were activists and community organizers who raised him on the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement. After graduating from Francis Marion University in Florence, South Carolina, with his bachelor’s degree, he joined the NAACP as a field organizer for voter rights and empowerment while pursuing his Master’s of Divinity at the Interdenominational Theological Center. In his time with the NAACP, Williams traveled across the Black Belt, where he said he witnessed poverty and inequity up close.
“Civil rights traditionally has been something that people have tried to separate from progressivism … but these movements are inseparable,” said Williams. “What I witnessed in the South as a worker in voter rights and voter empowerment and education, and as a regional representative for the NAACP, was that the conditions that created inequity still existed and needed to be confronted and challenged.”
His work took him to Kenya, where he served as a program coordinator with the Presbyterian Church USA. In Nairobi, he supported the Green Belt Movement’s work against deforestation and its mission to highlight environmental justice as a tool for economic empowerment and self-determination.
Now, as some Black and brown voters express concerns of being tokenized by traditional Democratic candidates, Williams plans to bring his experience working in racial justice circles to his new role.
“I have worked in communities that have borne the brunt of failed promises from the current Democratic leadership,” Williams said. “I have opened the doors of my congregations to politicians and have experienced the absence of those politicians after the elections.”
He continued: “Black communities have become destinations for environmental hazards and data centers. Unemployment has risen. Black federal employees have been targeted. The list goes on. I’ve pastored these people. I’ve prayed with them. I’ve listened to them as they’ve shed tears. Now I’ve decided I want to move from triage work to really transformational work.”
Some of that work will require challenging other Black leaders.
“Unfortunately, many of our Black politicians have become victims of corporate capture, and their voices have been taken by entities like AIPAC,” said Williams, referring to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. “They have not really been able to stand for the issues that are affecting the communities that that many of us are fighting for, and JD candidates are free from that, and they’re free to take bold and significant action to move forward legislation.”
But with the 2026 election cycle nearly over, the PAC is already brainstorming how to establish a strong progressive coalition for the 2028 presidential election. That will mean convincing the mainstream Democratic party that Justice Democrats have built a lasting coalition of the party’s base, said Williams.
“We hope that the Democratic Party would see that we’re developing a blueprint to show them how the base is being energized around the issues that are kitchen table issues that people want us to deal with,” said Williams.
“It’s not enough for us just to have a call to defeat a fascist president. We don’t want a fascist president. We want him out, but we also want a vision of what America could look like when affordability, healthcare, civil rights, housing, and livable wages — all of those things are at the top of the political agenda,” he added.
Williams succeeds current executive director and co-founder Alexandra Rojas, who will become president of Justice Democrats’ board and will support Williams as a senior adviser.
Iowa Rep. Ashley Hinson took a swipe at the savings habits of millennials as she fielded a question Wednesday about Social Security during a Senate campaign debate.
Hinson, the Republican candidate facing off against Democrat state Rep. Josh Turek, was asked about ensuring the solvency of Social Security when she raised the broader prospect of savings by millennials, the demographic consisting of people born from 1981-1996.
She said the country needed to have a “serious conversation” about “how young people are saving money,” as part of the discussion about the future of Social Security.
“We also need to be talking about millennials saving money,” she later added. “Millennials are the worst group of savers in the country right now and have the least amount of savings. So those are ways where I think we can help have a bigger conversation around saving in general, planning for retirement, and making sure we’re all able to experience a robust retirement.”
Hinson faces a tough race in Iowa against Turek amid a difficult political environment for Republicans. Voters are overwhelmingly pessimistic about the state of the economy and their own personal finances, and they support Social Security while being concerned about the program’s future.
Hinson said she would not support cutting benefits and suggested creating a bipartisan commission to present suggestions to Congress to save the program. When pushed on her statement that “all options should be on the table,” she turned her attention to young people.
“I think my dad and I had this discussion when I was in sixth grade, looking at a ledger book and trying to figure out, hey, how are we going to make sure you’re set up for your life?” she said. “So we need to be having a conversation simultaneously to all solutions on the table, to make sure that it can stay solvent, while we’re also talking about, how do we get more young people to save?”
Hinson’s campaign did not immediately respond to a request for clarification.
Turek, when asked about Social Security, said he supports removing the payroll tax cap.
“The best way we can keep this solvent is by taking off the cap,” Turek said. “Let’s make sure that billionaires and large corporations are paying their fair share. That will move the needle in a very serious way to keep Social Security solvent.”
Hinson disagreed. “The only thing I’m hearing from him is that the only solution to everything is to raise taxes,” she said.
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