Wake up babe they've posted another dated meme

It’s the rare hyper-online discussion with actual real-world consequences. What is up with Democrats’ social media right now?

The question has seemed to consume online Democratic circles in recent weeks. Senators coordinating a response to the president’s address to Congress? Compiled into an embarrassing compilation. Lighthearded attempts at joining in on old memes? Roundly mocked. Members freelancing on their own? Brutally ratioed. Even stabs at policy wonkery were met with enough backlash to prompt public self-reflection from DNC staff.

It would appear that, in the eyes of the internet, none of Democrats’ efforts are quite hitting. The depth of dissatisfaction suggests a broader malaise no tweet or TikTok alone can correct. But the fact that no approach has broken through points to deeper questions facing the party: What exactly is their online presence seeking to achieve? Who is the audience for their content? And in a time when social platforms are amplifying controversial, engagement-bait content more than ever, what exactly is the premium to place on going viral?

The fundamental purpose of virality was a common theme in the conversations I had with nearly a dozen digital staffers. “I think there’s always a push to just have the biggest [engagement] number you can have,” said one staffer, who runs digital strategy for a Democratic senator. “That can definitely cause a lot of people to just chase whatever posts will get big numbers, and a lot of times that’s kind of while ignoring some of the message.”

Several Democratic Hill staffers made mention of the accounts of Rep. Rosa DeLauro, a longtime Connecticut congresswoman. DeLauro has an impressive resume — she is the ranking member on the House Appropriations Committee — but is most well-known to journalists and political junkies for her eclectic and colorful personal style. A tattooed octogenerian with a technicolor bob and a staunchly liberal record, she would seem to have all the makings of a viral Democratic star. But her accounts have largely careened between standard Democratic messaging and stale memes. In one video, she reads from a list of Gen Z slang. A recent tweet saw her account responding to DOGE cuts with “I know your real tea, diva.”

Interestingly, the approach divides some campaign and Hill staffers. One remarked that, while it’s clear staff are “making her do that,” they found the result “funny, especially knowing that’s not really her vibe.” Others were less generous with their assessments. “It’s just stupid,” said one staffer, who handles digital for a Democratic member of Congress. “Those [videos] could be made by anyone.”

The strategy is far from unique — corporate brands now also lean into the memes du jour — and not wholly unreasonable. Anyone who has spent time in digital media is familiar with the order of things: Optimize for algorithms and tap into existing conversations online. And if something works, do it again, then do it ten more times. It’s a way of thinking born in the 2010s internet, when many staffers first came up. “Some people try to focus so much on just chasing whatever big number they can get,” said one staffer leading digital operations for a Democratic member. “They kind of ignore what at the end of the day is the purpose, which is reaching actual people and our constituents.”

But as the dynamics of social platforms — including the political leanings of their owners — evolve, the emphasis on virality may be outdated. With Meta’s recent shifts, every major social platform now essentially prioritizes posts with a lot of negative engagement over those with mostly positive, but fewer, interactions. The upshot may be that, in the years ahead, the Democrats or liberal accounts most likely to go viral are the worst-positioned to persuade the broader electorate.

That dynamic is part of a long-time tension between content intended to persuade undecided voters and content intended to galvanize true believers. “There's certainly a limit with persuasion when it comes to digital," said one former staffer, who ran digital operations of Kamala Harris’s campaign in a swing state last year. “If someone’s following the Kamala [...] account, for example, they’re already on board.”

All of these issues feed into uncomfortable questions about culture, demographics, and Democrats’ modern coalition. The past few election cycles have seen the party steadily improving among voters who have college degrees and follow the news closely — incidentally groups from which Democratic digital staffers overwhelmingly hail. One source estimates around three quarters of private sector digital staffers are women, and 90% have college degrees. In the political realm, any staffer is obviously a close follower of the news cycle. The data points to a reality that’s hard to ignore: Democrats’ messaging to the electorate is largely being driven by people belonging to the only groups that have moved towards the party in recent years: high-information news followers and the college-educated.

It’s an awkward but notable fact, particularly after Democrats’ erosion with young men and non-white voters in 2024. “There are very, very few straight men doing digital at this point,” said one veteran of Democratic campaigns, who runs the popular anonymous Twitter account ‘Organizer Memes.’ “But even more so, there’s almost no Black and brown men.” At the same time, the staffer argued that senior leadership deserves more scrutiny. “I think a lot more about the people at the top that get to make decisions about what comes out and what tone we take, a lot less about the digital strategists and digital organizers that are taking orders,” they added.

Calls for a more diverse staffing pool were a common theme in conversations. “I don’t think you need a college degree to effectively communicate in a digital environment,” said Caleb Brock, the newly-hired digital director for Rep. Ro Khanna. “You’ll get people posting stuff that just absolutely misses the moment if they haven’t had the lived experience of normal, everyday people.”

There are reasons to believe Democrats’ digital problem isn’t quite so dire. At the moment, public messaging is the rare lever of power in which Democrats have any direct input (contrary to some assumptions, the party’s leadership is not actually in possession of a “Stop Elon” button it is declining to press), which is clearly intensifying reactions. “While there has been content that people may consider ‘cringe’ or ‘embarrassing,’ it hasn’t been overtly harmful,” said Annie Wu Henry, a digital strategist with experience in Democratic campaigns. “The real risk lies in letting these moments scare us off from continuing to try or not learning from these experiences.”

The Democratic Party is also, plainly, an easy punching bag right now — polls show the party’s image is at a historic low, with more of its own voters expressing disapproval than any other time in modern history. “The leadership vacuum that Democrats have offline is really translating to a communications problem online,” said Kyle Tharp, who writes the Chaotic Era newsletter on online influence and Democratic messaging. “A lot of people are taking to the internet to criticize Democrats en masse because they want to see them fight harder and prevent all these terrible things from happening offline.”

That may well be true. But for a restless party, it may not be a total consolation. As many have found over the years, you can’t just escape your life’s problems online. Eventually, they find you. 

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