Social Media Is Killing the Democratic Party
Social Media Is Killing the Democratic Party
The Democratic Party of old was like a farmers’ market: a place where a bunch of people with wildly different interests came together in a spirit of cautious cooperation. Union workers, environmentalists, feminists, professors, animal rights activists, civil rights leaders, and Hollywood glitterati could all coexist under one big political tent. It was almost like if you majored in progressivism, you had to minor in one of its sub-ideologies.
These disparate Democrats didn’t necessarily like one another, but they tolerated the strangeness of the coalition because it won elections. Everyone knew that the path to power meant compromise, so you ignored some of the more pungent aromas at the produce stands next to yours.
But that was before social media made it impossible to ignore anyone.
It’s Democrats who pay the price. Today, one public school teacher with a TikTok account, green hair, and a septum piercing can hijack a political movement. Six college students with a bullhorn and a drum can become the face of a party they don’t even belong to. Ragtag speakers at a climate rally demanding the end of capitalism become stand-ins for every Democrat running for office in a red or purple district.
In the social media era, the Democratic coalition’s balancing act has tipped hard toward the loudest and most ideologically rigid participants. Republicans, meanwhile, have figured out how to use this to their advantage. They don’t have to paint all Democrats as radical; they just have to show the country what the very visible radicals are saying, kick back, and let the algorithm do the rest.
Consider the average voter in a swing state. Maybe people in that category aren’t deeply engaged in politics. Perhaps they’re just trying to keep up with their mortgage, their kids’ playdates, and what’s happening on The White Lotus. And then they log on to Facebook and see a viral video of a progressive activist shouting down a speaker for not using the proper pronouns. Or they see their liberal neighbors lionizing a telegenic young man who shot a health insurance executive in the back, depriving his two sons of a father. To those voters, this is now what the Democratic Party stands for. Not jobs, not health care, not education, but fringe cultural obsessions that alienate more people than they attract.
Worse, social media doesn’t just project the fringe voices outward, it gives these voices leverage to shame and silence moderates within their own coalition. The purists don’t want to persuade; they want to punish. Suppose you’re a moderate Democrat who dares to suggest a middle-ground position on anything from gender to policing. You might find yourself the victim of a cancel mob from your own side before the other party even gets involved. The result is a feedback loop of political self-harm.
You could see this dynamic at work recently when Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, a likely 2028 Democratic presidential candidate, attended a White House meeting with President Donald Trump. A bit of bipartisan cooperation to benefit her state was the goal, but Whitmer found herself in what might be called a compromising position — standing in the Oval Office, with press cameras at the ready. She did everything she could to downplay her presence, at one point even obscuring her face in a photo. In today’s Democratic Party, being seen as working with a Republican, and especially Trump — even for the good of your state — can get you labeled a sellout by your allies. The incentives are completely backward.
Meanwhile those with the most viral appeal accrue real power. In previous political eras, someone like Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez might have served as an energetic backbencher, important to her local district but not a national leader. Today, thanks to her savvy social media presence, she’s drawing big crowds around the country and is even considered a potential presidential front-runner.
Despite AOC’s having the worst approval rating of any Democratic politician measured by a February Gallup poll, the overly online left actually believes that the tonic for the losses of Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris in the past decade is to run an even less qualified candidate who is significantly further to the left. This is like making a drunk driver do a couple of extra shots of Wild Turkey to calm his nerves.
Then there’s the elevation of mouthy neophyte David Hogg to vice chairman of the national Democratic Party. The name of the top dog at the DNC is about as well known as the shortstop of the Binghamton Rumble Ponies minor league baseball team. But Hogg, a survivor of the 2018 Parkland school shooting who gained social media fame, has announced his intention to launch primary races against vulnerable Democrats.
The 25-year-old Hogg, armed only with a bottomless reserve of self-regard and 1 million followers on X (Twitter), has never actually run a campaign or successfully helped a candidate win a race. And yet he has gone to war with some of the biggest names in Democratic politics, such as James Carville, who dubbed Hogg a “contemptible little twerp.”
Democrats are increasingly elevating “influencers” instead of coalition-builders. The online crowd may love it. But swing voters? Not so much.
All of this makes it extraordinarily difficult for Democrats to rebuild the kind of broad coalition that once delivered them national power. In a pre-algorithmic world, you could tell the union guys in Michigan not to worry about the college activists in Berkeley. Now, the union guys are seeing every sign the activists wave and every statue they pull down, in real time. And they don’t like it one bit.
At the same time, Republicans have been thriving in this new-media era. Trump rose to the presidency in part because he spoke directly to voters without the filter of the mainstream media. And once president, he was able to create an alternate reality in which his every action was “perfect,” he actually won the 2020 presidential election, “tariff” is a beautiful word, and so on. Social media helped him to command complete control of the party and quash dissent.
The old idea of big-tent politics assumes a certain amount of grace — that not everyone in your party needs to agree on every cultural issue, since the goal is winning elections, not policing orthodoxy. But social media has made grace nearly impossible. Every tweet is a litmus test. Every video is a referendum. Every candidate is now held accountable for the most absurd thing said by a loudmouth stranger with a smartphone.
Democrats can still win elections — Joe Biden did in 2020 — but the long-term prognosis for a party that is increasingly defined by its most performative wing is not good. Their brand is suffering as the extremists punish the moderates for acting like grown-ups. Until Democrats log off and tune out their own extremes, they’ll keep losing voters faster than they gain followers.
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