Our autopsy of the DNC autopsy

Why did the Democrats lose so badly in 2024? Rob Flaherty joins us to dissect the "DNC autopsy" — the formerly internal report about what went wrong in 2024 — about which he gave his own thoughts on The Bulwark in May. Rob was the deputy campaign manager for Kamala Harris and also formerly a digital strategist for Joe Biden. Rob distills his analysis of what happened in 2024, and then Ryan & Grant present Panic World’s own version of the DNC autopsy and get Rob’s response, as well as additional details from what he saw behind-the-scenes. How much did Harris only having 107 days matter? Or the administration’s stances on Palestine and Israel? How about Democratic Party’s general branding problems? Check out Rob's DNC autopsy on The Bulwark. You can also find him on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, @Rob_Flaherty — and you can follow his podcast Nobody Knows Anything here or wherever you listen. Want even more Panic World content? Like ad-free episodes, bonuses & exclusives, and access to our members-only Discord? Sign up for a membership for just five bucks a month at https://www.patreon.com/PanicWorld. For Apple Podcast users, you can also find all of our bonus content — plus other great COURIER shows — with a subscription to COURIER+. SponsorsThis episode is brought to you by Mint Mobile. To get your new wireless plan for only $15 a month, go to https://www.mintmobile.com/courier/ — that's it, there's no catch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Ryan Broderick?

  Why do you think Democrats, I think I would say are still so unable to tap into the disillusionment the same way Republicans can?

• 0:09Speaker 01

  People in politics pretend they're super data-driven, but like at the end of the day, like they just do what feels good to them. We tend to actually often explicitly say if it is resonant on the internet, it is not a good thing to be saying.

• 0:24Ryan Broderick?

  But they know like what's happened in America for the last like decade, right? Like they know.

• 0:29Speaker 01

  You know, power structures in the party are real, man. And like the people in charge still like don't consume the media that most voters consume. And so therefore it doesn't feel real to them. And that includes candidates, by the way.

• 0:44Ryan Broderick?

  We are months away from the 2026 midterms, where America will go to the ballot yet again to decide our stupid country's idiotic future. But we're no closer to understanding what happened in 2024, the last time we voted, that put us into this nightmare from which we cannot wait. Well, this week we have Rob Flaherty, former deputy campaign manager for Kamala Harris's 2024 campaign, who has recently written a juicy little tell-all, all about everything that went wrong with the Democrats in 2024. And we're going to be asking him the questions that we've been agonizing over for literally years now. I was wondering if we could talk about how you and I first met?

• 1:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure.

• 1:27Ryan Broderick?

  I know I've never publicly talked about this part of that story, but basically I received an email from you in, I believe, 2023, 2024?

• 1:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:40Ryan Broderick?

  And I thought it was a phishing scam.

• 1:43Ryan Broderick?

  Because it was from a White House email address.

• 2:03Ryan Broderick?

  You were working with Biden, President Joe Biden, and you reached out to me and invited me to the White House. We didn't meet when I went, but I would love to hear why you emailed me.

• 2:17Speaker 01

  I'm a longtime garbage day enthusiast and I've been a subscriber for quite a bit. One of the big things we were trying to tackle at the beginning of the campaign, I still think we need to tackle, is the fact that so much of like political conversation happens in private spaces on the internet. And you, in your piece, I think, I'm not even joking. I mean, it was in, I put it in decks that we talked about with donors and like how to do the campaign, the sort of breakdown of like the public internet as like a consumption surface and the private internet as sort of a discussion surface.

• 2:53Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 2:54Speaker 01

  And, and that breakdown was a great articulation that was like very formative in like how we talked about social and how we talked about digital strategy as we went along. And so, yes, I did reach out.

• 3:07Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. Well, yeah. So as I said, you weren't at the, the meeting I went to, and I did agree for that meeting to be off the record. So I won't go too deep into it. But for me, it was instructive, I will say, on the surface level to just sort of get a sense of what people within the US government knew and didn't know about the internet. I'm always fascinated by sort of when you get to the higher levels of power, like what people are actually thinking about when it comes to the internet. That meeting was also quite instructive for me going into the 2024 election because I was like, okay, I have a vague idea of like how we've ended up here when it comes to, when we get to November 2024.

• 3:46Speaker 01

  Thousand percent. The point about public internet, private internet, like we came in being like, this is the, you know, this is the thing. Like people, our supporters are their own media channels. Our supporters have their own influence. They're having these conversations in places we can't see. It was a thing we super failed at operationalizing and, and actually making it work. But it is.

• 4:05Ryan Broderick?

  Was that surprising? Like, like, I guess, like, did you go into that thinking one thing and then be like, uh-oh? Or was this sort of like you knew, like this was going to be a long, a long summer?

• 4:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, it, it became pretty clear that.

• 4:22Speaker 01

  We had it. So there was these, what is happening in Gaza is not equivalent to what I'm about to say, but we had some experience.

• 4:28Ryan Broderick?

  Hey, that's a great way to start off.

• 4:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know. But like.

• 4:32Ryan Broderick?

  That will not be clipped.

• 4:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was gonna say, like, we had a little bit of experience. This happened to Biden around Willow. There was a drilling project in Alaska, the Willow Project.

• 4:43Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, okay.

• 4:44Speaker 01

  We tried to stop it in the Trump, from the Trump administration letting it happen. There was a court case that like, was gonna probably say it had to go forward. And so we settled with the oil companies to like.

• 4:56Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 4:57Speaker 01

  You know, whatever. And it became this like whole fucking TikTok thing. Like, it was this massive thing. And it was like, maybe like, some level of astroturfed, but like, also then it spun into being real. And I remember like, we, I was on Biden's trip to Ireland, and I was talking to some random person who brought it, an Irish person who like, brought it up to me. It's like a reason why young people shouldn't be with Biden. Like, these things were like, it made it so hard to communicate around. Like, we had, we had been used to these kinds of things. And then you get to Gaza, which just made it like, by the time we hit like, mid-November, you know, it was just sort of like, oh, my God, like, this is really hard. And I would say I probably underestimated it. Even in.

• 5:41Ryan Broderick?

  I think the mainstream media did as well. I think like, we're still sort of, this is very much like a postmortem. And we're, for our audience, we're trying to figure out like, exactly what happened here. And I'm curious like, what Rob's feelings are about it. And so we are going to be talking about things like, like Palestine and Israel, in sort of this macro concept of like, how were people feeling about it? So if, from here on out, if we sound a little more like, antiseptic than usual, like that's.

• 6:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:05Ryan Broderick?

  Let me just start with, hello, my name is Ryan Broderick. Welcome to Panic World, a show about how the internet warps our minds. Our, I'm so flustered, I forgot the, the tagline again. Wow, it's been a while. I memorized it for a little bit. Um, should I help you? How the internet warps our minds, our culture, and eventually reality. And joining us today is former deputy campaign manager on Kamala Harris's 2024 presidential campaign, digital strategist to Biden, my email pen pal. Rob Flaherty, welcome to the show. How are you?

• 6:33Speaker 01

  Thrilled to be here, Ryan. It's like, it's, you know, stepping into like a thing that I watch, which is kind of crazy.

• 6:40Ryan Broderick?

  And we wanted you to come on the show today to talk about the DNC autopsy, which is something that we haven't covered yet. And just for our listeners who are a little out of the loop, tell me if I'm wrong here. The way to describe this is there is an alleged report floating around Democratic establishment circles that would have explained what went wrong in 2024. And there's been sort of different takes on if it exists, if it does exist, what's in it, how well it was put together. But you, in the bulwark, put out what you told the DNC autopsy team. And I have never clicked on a link faster. I was like, I have to know. I've been dying to know. And to spoil a little bit for you, we have put together our own DNC autopsy for you today.

• 7:24Ryan Broderick?

  But I want to start with sort of the top level stuff here. So for people who haven't read your piece, what would you say is sort of the ultimate takeaway for you, you know, thinking about all this, you know, almost two years later?

• 7:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think there's like a lot of different take. I mean, the piece is super long. It's like long. And, you know, I put a lot in it. The high level stuff is like, the bar of authenticity for a candidate and for a campaign has been raised to a sort of infinitely high level. And in order to succeed, I think more than any of the tactical, like tiki-taki stuff, a campaign needs to have a clearly articulated reason about what it is for, why you are in the race, and then what you're going to do. And I think part of this owing to 107 days, part of this owing to the principles or whatever,

• 8:20Speaker 01

  there was sort of never like a clear through line that people could hold on to and that felt sort of believable to folks. And so sort of from there, you get all kinds of trouble.

• 8:30Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 8:30Speaker 01

  And so it's sort of, to me, the most productive use of the autopsy was going to be, all right, what did, what did we learn and what can we do differently on like a tactical? Uh, level.

• 8:38Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. So we have, I have a section here where you talk about sort of the, the democratic branding going into 2024 and you, you write, and again, I'm sorry if this is uncomfortable to read your own words back to you. I don't ever like it when people do it to me, but you write, we underestimated then and are underestimating now just how disillusioned people are. There was and is a pervasive sense that nothing works and the institutions holding us up have failed. Media, government, business, no one trusts anyone anymore for reasons both of Democrats own making and from simply being incumbents, the democratic brand sucked. And what I think is interesting, eh, in that first line, you basically say like, people are disillusioned. And I, I was sort of hoping you could go a little deeper into that. Like, is, are you

• 9:22Ryan Broderick?

  just saying that like people, like disillusioned in the entire democratic process and disillusioned in the Democrats themselves? Like, eh, how, what's your read there?

• 9:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. You know, there are basically status quo voters, you know, I've called them opt-in voters and there are sort of status quo, I don't know what the opposite of status quo is, disillusionment voters.

• 9:42Ryan Broderick?

  Sure. Yeah.

• 9:44Ryan Broderick?

  The median American voter. That's what you're trying to, yeah.

• 9:46Speaker 01

  I mean, that's, I mean, precisely, right? That.

• 9:49Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 9:51Speaker 01

  I think that there is a just sort of foundational level of pessimism about the future for a lot of people. I think there is a sense that nothing works anymore. Um, certainly not the government, certainly not the media. I think social trust is going down. And so I think that that changes like who the conception of like a swing voter is. And I think like political campaigns for a long time have been like a swing voter is somebody who like, maybe votes for a Republican and maybe votes for a Democrat and is like a moderate. And I think that a lot of the campaign was sort of architected around that ethos, which is the traditional campaign ethos, right? What it means to moderate, what it means to whatever.

• 10:33Speaker 01

  And I think fundamentally, like James Salrico uses this now, but like this idea of like left, right, up, down. I think there's some truth, right? To the idea that there are voters who are like, like, fuck all of you people. Like, I don't, I fucking hate all of this, and I hate you. And if you're in charge, you're gonna get it, you know, like, and this is true for conservative parties that have been in power. This is true of progressive parties that have been in power. But I do think at some fundamental level, the basic coalitional math for Democrats has oriented itself around this sort of coalition of the engaged, and Trump sort of oriented around the coalition of the disengaged. And there's

• 11:15Speaker 01

  just more of the latter than the former. And, you know, you find yourself in, you know, a difficult situation. And part of that is how you have to talk to people, and how you get to them. But there's something bigger than that, that, you know, is more than just like, oh, if you went on 10 podcasts, they'd like you more. It's like, there's a bigger problem about how we talk about ourselves, and what we are, and what we, you know, claim to represent.

• 11:36Ryan Broderick?

  So you don't think Biden would have won if he had gone on Nick Fuentes's livestream?

• 11:41Speaker 01

  I can't, I can't even imagine explaining that to him.

• 11:45Ryan Broderick?

  Well, I mean, speaking of imagining, I guess, like, so, I broadly buy your argument that, like, basically, there is a, there is a modern American voter who kind of just wants to burn it all down. And there are, and there are some on the left and some on the right. And they have, obviously, I think the ones on the right are much more dangerous, essentially, to like, the, like, the Democratic project. But like, that is sort of a feeling that a lot of people have. Why do you think Democrats, I think, I would say, are still so unable to tap into the disillusionment the same way Republicans can?

• 12:21Speaker 01

  I think there's like, a couple of different reasons.

• 12:24Ryan Broderick?

  Is it the flash mobs?

• 12:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, uh, yeah, yeah, you gotta, um, you gotta just do more, like, viral dances, and that'll...

• 12:30Ryan Broderick?

  More viral dances? That's right.

• 12:32Speaker 02

  That's what I've been demanding.

• 12:33Speaker 01

  It's the people, people are crying out. I think it's like, there's a few things. One is, um...

• 12:41Speaker 01

  People in politics pretend they're super data driven, but like at the end of the day, like they just do what feels good to them, you know, and this is, you see this on people posting about politics, Democrats simply need to do the thing that confirms all of my priors and they'll win or whatever. But I think that when you actually think about like staffers, people on campaigns, they are typically pretty, doing pretty good.

• 13:01Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 13:01Speaker 01

  I am part of this too. And so the aesthetics of like democratic campaign world, it's like not legible. Like you literally, you know, the like kind of disaffection that people feel. And so I think that like shades some of the decision-making, other parts of it are just, I think like a cultural view of an old set of rules. Like what it means to persuade voters from the ground up is test the best message, say it at people a lot via like mostly television media and they'll eventually believe it versus the opposite, which is sort of like building messaging up from what people is resonating with people, which is what conservatives do quite well. And so I think there is just like a cultural

• 13:45Speaker 01

  construction of what it means to like, like be in a campaign and be in politics that is like a little data that exists in democratic politics. In addition, just sort of like not having it be visible because everyone is like college educated urbanite, you know, who's like working on these things.

• 14:02Ryan Broderick?

  You sort of described this, this like social media branding death spiral. Once Kamala enters the race, she can't obviously like say like, yeah, Biden was totally unfit to run and we knew, but now I'm here. So it's fine. And also couldn't like articulate why she was running. But then when the issue of like, especially Palestine appears, there's nothing to fall back on. I think the argument you made was like Palestine, from your point of view, didn't totally move the needle for like the majority voter, but it created like social media conversations that Harris couldn't navigate. Is that, was that fair to say?

• 14:46Speaker 01

  That's basically right. There are things that live in politics that you just can't measure. Right. Like there are like tools that we use to make public opinion legible, polling focus group, well, less focus groups, but you know, all the stuff. And I think that this is an issue that meaningfully affected the way you had to communicate and the like, the brick wall that you had to like communicate through. But like, was it the thing that voters in a poll would say was like, I care about this a lot. It's like, what's moving my vote when I say it out loud? No. But like, was it a thing that, you know, you go on the internet, no one's saying anything nice about Harris because if they do, they're going to get whacked on this, or they are saying proactively bad things about Harris

• 15:29Speaker 01

  on this. Like, it just, it made it so that there was a weight around the campaign. And so it's like, you know, is it, you know, there were people running around saying, well, no, it's not moving voters. It doesn't really matter. And it's like, oh, actually, I think there's like a more intangible, but yet still tangible way that like it did, you know, it was a moral question for a lot of people that we just didn't, didn't really have an answer for. And then there was just no way to communicate around it once you didn't have that answer.

• 15:56Ryan Broderick?

  I see these dynamics a lot, actually, when like two fan armies go at it with each other. I was trying to figure out like, who was spreading rumors about one pop star? And then when I tracked it down, it was coming from a Olivia Rodrigo fan, who was basically like on TikTok, building out your faves problematic receipts for that other pop star. And so like, I was trying to imagine like, okay, if your pop star one's management team, you're seeing like, oh, this person has problematic views on Israel, this person has problematic views on AI, this person has problematic views on whatever. But you're

• 16:36Ryan Broderick?

  probably not understanding that like, that's part of a larger ecosystem where like, if you don't have really solid, like, explanations for everything that you do and think and feel, they're used by

• 16:53Ryan Broderick?

  Other fandoms, for lack of a better word, to pounce on anyone in your comment section. That's that's sort of the the closest pop culture equivalent I've seen to what you're describing, which is like, it's not just like people will attack Harris if she can't be clear about how she feels about Palestine. It's that they're going to pounce on anyone in her comment section that's supportive of her similarly sort of shutting that down.

• 17:14Speaker 01

  A hundred percent. It made it impossible to say anything nice about Biden on the internet.

• 17:19Ryan Broderick?

  Yes.

• 17:20Speaker 01

  And then it made it impossible to say anything nice about Kamala Harris. I mean, it was easier for Kamala Harris, but still very difficult because there was just like a lot of risk of what was going to happen. And like creators, you know, you guys know this better than anybody. They're they're small businesses, you know, and

• 17:34Ryan Broderick?

  That's right. And that's why we're both Republican.

• 17:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 17:38Ryan Broderick?

  I'm about to outflank Ryan and

• 17:40Speaker 01

  I entered the manosphere here.

• 17:41Ryan Broderick?

  We're Republican. We're just really bad at business, so we make a live podcast.

• 17:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, you know, like, these folks are concerned about all that stuff. So we it impacted creators, but it also impacted humans who had influence in their community.

• 17:54Ryan Broderick?

  Right. Because it's not just like you're watching TV and you receive that information and feel a certain way about it. It's the human supporter of the candidate is also media.

• 18:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, a hundred percent.

• 18:05Ryan Broderick?

  So it's crazy that like, it's been that way since at least 2008, and yet it's still kind of a mind bending concept, I think, for a lot of people to understand that, like, it's not just how I perform on the internet. It's how I create a space for the people who support me to perform on the internet for me.

• 18:18Speaker 01

  Thousand percent.

• 18:19Ryan Broderick?

  And and and before we go to our first break, I wanted to throw an idea at you to get your thoughts on because it didn't appear in your piece, best as I could tell. But it was something that kind of has stuck out to our researcher, Adam, and it's sort of been his bugaboo for years. He believes that the 2024 election was actually decided in October 2023, when RFK moved to being independent. And through his research, and it'll be reflected in what we sort of throw at you today, he believes truly that like, the the thing that no one really understood was how powerful RFK would be specifically on Instagram and Facebook going into 2024.

• 19:00Speaker 01

  Like, I haven't had to think about it more.

• 19:02Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm just throwing that hot one at you.

• 19:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, throwing that one. I think there is truth to, I think we underestimated, not the power of RFK, though.

• 19:14Speaker 01

  RFK is the channel of it, probably the like influence of Maha as like a general thing and like the magnetic force that it was, how it was sort of picking off like unconventional, unconventional voters. I don't have enough off the top of my head to like say in a very informed way that like what electoral impact that had in the beyond the abstract.

• 19:33Ryan Broderick?

  Was he on your radar sort of? I mean, I guess.

• 19:36Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, we had a like after 2016 in particular, where there was a real impact that third parties had, I think there were sort of a determination not to get caught lying down on some of this stuff. And so, you know, we were pitching stories on RFK. We were like running content campaigns about RFK, like those kinds of things to try to pull voters back. Like there was.

• 19:57Ryan Broderick?

  Did you ever ask Kamala to work out with her jeans on?

• 20:01Speaker 01

  You know, I dare not.

• 20:03Ryan Broderick?

  Okay. Well.

• 20:04Speaker 02

  Is her pole form better? I know.

• 20:06Ryan Broderick?

  Next time. Yeah. Did she, could she just like pick up two snakes? I guess. I think I saw him do that yesterday.

• 20:13Speaker 01

  She's busy murdering a couple of bears, you know?

• 20:15Ryan Broderick?

  Right, right. Yeah. She could have just been eating roadkill. We're going to go to a word from our sponsor and then we're going to come back and we're going to throw at you our DNC autopsy and get your thoughts on it. This is going to be basically all of garbage day and panic world's various gripes over the last two years. So buckle up. Here we go.

• 20:35Speaker 01

  Bring it.

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• 22:39Ryan Broderick?

  So, uh, we're gonna start in 2024, uh, basically right after RFK has said that he's moving to independent. So that's October 2023, January 2024, Ron DeSantis suspends his campaign and we get an official Biden-Trump rematch. This might sound like a leading question, but I am curious. Like, how seriously were you guys taking Trump? Were alarm bells going off as early as January 2024?

• 23:03Speaker 01

  That, what about?

• 23:05Ryan Broderick?

  That Trump could, that Trump could win?

• 23:07Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. I mean, we knew from the very beginning, especially in the Biden context, this was a super close race.

• 23:13Ryan Broderick?

  Okay.

• 23:13Speaker 01

  And the, the definitional thing about it, particularly in the Biden era, was, uh, like, there were no, like, voters were locked in. Like, there was no real movement. I mean, there was like little moments here and there. Uh, but that was like really the definitional thing of the Biden era was it was just sort of stuck. Trump was a, a real viewed as the threat, viewed as... Going to win like like, you know, there were likely scenarios where he was going to win, but more likely than not, probably. So yeah, I mean, I think super seriously.

• 23:47Ryan Broderick?

  I ask just because I feel like a common refrain from a lot of particularly left wing digital media. I know I have made this argument many, many times. It was just like, and it's funny because I I've had this gripe for so many years. And now if you like had put a gun to my head, be like, what do you mean by this? I actually don't know what I would have wanted. But there was this sort of feeling of like, when are they going to get serious? I suppose it's good to know that you guys were like, yeah, Trump could like easily win this and we need to get serious. And I and I guess I wonder like, how do you telegraph seriousness in a in a in an inherently unserious media environment now? Like, like it, it does sort of break my brain to think about.

• 24:26Speaker 01

  Well, this is what's tricky, right? Because like, you have to remember that the voters, there's two types of voters who could who are going to be able to decide this election. They were a subset of the like traditional swing voters, like people who are like, ah, you know, whatever. And then a lot of them were what you might call disaffected Democrats, or, you know, we called them persuade to participate or whatever. Like, right. But these voters who like, it was more about they traditionally voted for Democrats and then they were either going to stay home or maybe vote for Trump. And what those voters needed was probably different than like what super high attention people needed, right? And a lot

• 25:09Speaker 01

  of those voters, one of the things I think we found looking backwards on the campaign was like, we hit them with ads.

• 25:16Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 25:16Speaker 01

  They liked the ads. The ads tested well, and we hit the voters that we thought we were going to hit with them. And something just and we even changed how they thought about Kamala Harris on the economy, whatever, all of that. But something didn't gel. And I think there just is this thing where what does it look like to be serious and to like lock in? I think there's the like, what does it look like to campaign at 11 all the time, every day?

• 25:41Ryan Broderick?

  I think that's, that's sort of my question. Yeah, I actually don't know.

• 25:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. And like, some of that is like, narrative optical stuff, like Zoran is doing a very good job at this right now, where like,

• 25:53Ryan Broderick?

  He feels like the guy doesn't sleep. Yeah, he's very good at it.

• 25:56Speaker 01

  But he probably his day to day is the same as most mayors. But like,

• 25:59Ryan Broderick?

  I imagine.

• 26:00Speaker 01

  He is. Telling a narrative story about how much he is doing. You know, with Biden, like, we would, we would try to do that, but I think it just was, there were reality limits and there were also like optical limits, you know, which is like a video of Joe Biden in a G7 meeting was never going to do as well as a video of Joe Biden falling over, you know, and like, people, people kind of saw age for what it was. I mean, it was the unmistakable definitional thing. There, it was difficult to show he's like, super locked in because that just doesn't, it doesn't comport with the narrative about who he was and what people were seeing about him.

• 26:35Ryan Broderick?

  Well, when we're talking about like the narrative formation, you know, early in 2024, the next big moment on our autopsy that I feel like doesn't get as much scrutiny as I think it should, is the ban on TikTok. So this was sort of a weird one where Adam and I, my researcher Adam, thought we were crazy and we started asking around and then we started like looking through our own reporting. And what we realized was that when the ban hit, you know, even though it wasn't totally functional, obviously people were still on TikTok and, you know, but it was like this slow kind of like ceasing of things. And we don't to this day know if ByteDance was throttling itself to avoid scrutiny or if the average American user was like, I think it's banned, so I'm not going to use

• 27:19Ryan Broderick?

  it or whatever, or I can't download it from the app store, whatever. Basically, it, it grinded TikTok to a halt. It made it not as active as it would have been in a normal election year. I think it kind of froze the people on there and they're on there and they're going to use it, but it, it's not like getting, we sort of noticed there were not new memes to write about, there were not new trends to write about, like TikTok culture just sort of went like, flat for most of 2024. It stayed that way. And I think it, it sort of has continued to be flat.

• 27:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's interesting. Like, I think sentiment analysis is like largely bullshit, but there's, um, there's a sentiment analysis tool that I've played around with and getting into the, you know, general election times.

• 28:01Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 28:02Speaker 01

  Harris was sort of had a more positive sentiment. There were more positive videos of Harris on TikTok. And the moment it flips is Trump at McDonald's and that sort of like kickstarts and jettisons, um, a sort of tsunami of, of Trump, pro-Trump content. That was the late.

• 28:20Ryan Broderick?

  That is so embarrassed, that is so embarrassing for America.

• 28:23Speaker 01

  It's embarrassing on all accounts, I think.

• 28:25Ryan Broderick?

  I, goddamn, I want to die hearing that.

• 28:30Speaker 01

  And so what I will say is that like TikTok basically up until that moment was like our home turf.

• 28:36Ryan Broderick?

  Sure.

• 28:36Speaker 01

  And there was polling that showed this, like voters who were more likely to use TikTok were more likely to vote for Kamala Harris demographically and these kinds of things. You know, I think that TikTok was just a interesting, it ended up being a difficult surface for us in the Harris era. It was impossible for us in the Biden era.

• 28:54Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 28:54Speaker 01

  And so, yeah, I mean, it's interesting, the flattening of TikTok. But, you know, generally, basically up until the last month, at least in the Harris context, more TikTok would have probably been helpful. So it's hard to say like what the, what it would have been.

• 29:11Ryan Broderick?

  I take the claims that like TikTok was being censored or manipulated to hide, you know, atrocities in Palestine with a big grain of salt. I think it's a little more complicated than that when you're dealing with algorithmic platforms as large as TikTok.

• 29:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:27Ryan Broderick?

  But just to sort of throw a little bit on the heap here, in May of 2024, Mitt Romney ends up asking Blinken why the nonstop barrage of horrific images coming out of Gaza is affecting Israeli PR. And then he ends up saying, some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down potentially TikTok. I think the right wing clearly understood that young people were on TikTok and we don't have a great way to be on TikTok. We need to do something about TikTok. That would be my, my most skeptical take on that, I would say.

• 29:59Speaker 01

  I have not seen any intelligence as it relates to TikTok. I don't know anything. So this is me just talking and sort of relaying the steel man of what I think.

• 30:10Ryan Broderick?

  There is a red dot that just appeared on your head through the window, but yeah.

• 30:14Speaker 01

  The steel man, I think of that version of the argument is sort of twofold, which is one.

• 30:23Speaker 01

  The evidence points to China having real control over the platform and China having a vested interest in causing sort of civic and social discord on hot topic issues and therefore would have an advantage in disproportionately amplifying certain things that are hot topics as the Russians did in 2016 and, you know, yada, yada, yada. And so having a platform that is dominant with young people, that is controlled by and able to execute on the diplomatic interests of China is probably a bad thing. I don't think that's a crazy position to hold. I don't think the ban was good politics. I don't think it was the right thing to do, but like, I don't think that's a crazy view to hold. And then you do talk to some people who are in the

• 31:08Speaker 01

  sort of foreign policy blob who say that like the, you know, the intel is quite scary or whatever. I don't know.

• 31:15Ryan Broderick?

  I mean, I had a conversation with a ByteDance employee in Beijing in 2019, saying this out loud, knowing that I might never get a visa to go to China again. It's a lovely country, but

• 31:25Speaker 01

  I've always wanted

• 31:26Ryan Broderick?

  that it's great. I went to Wuhan, China on December 9th, 2019. Fun, fun fact, took a train across China. But I met an employee at ByteDance in 2019 who said that yes, they, he was an American who's working over there or in some capacity with them. And he was like, yes, even the most average employee at ByteDance has like read, write access to most TikTok content globally, in the same way that like when I was a comment moderator for a long time and like you could just open up a control panel and like delete comments, change comments, whatever, not change them, but like remove them, hide them, like they can do the same thing. And it was really not like something they had thought much about. I don't want to get down into the weeds of like what TikTok's

• 32:10Ryan Broderick?

  algorithm can and can't do in terms of civic unrest, because I'm also kind of like a Russia skeptic to a degree, but like I am with you that like I, I think the ban Definitely put Biden in particular in a really tough spot. I mean, you guys had an account, like a campaign account on the app that is being banned, right? Like, that's tough. Like, that's a, I think it goes back to kind of like the branding death spiral, where it's like, you can't fully articulate what you're doing and why. So like, the average person's like, I don't get it. Like, I thought the app was banned and the president's on there campaigning. And anyways, when we get to June, we get to the first debate. You've obviously written and talked a bit about, you know, what that was like. But for our audience,

• 32:53Ryan Broderick?

  how did you feel about the first debate? Because I have a tweet from the time that just, I just wrote, uh oh.

• 33:01Speaker 02

  Do you snack during the debate? Were you like?

• 33:04Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, like, were you just like squeezing like a, like a fidget spinner to dust or something? Like, I mean, how did, how did you feel about that one?

• 33:11Speaker 01

  So I thought he was having a stroke. No, um, I, uh, that's a joke. I'm joking.

• 33:16Ryan Broderick?

  Honestly, I think you would have done better.

• 33:18Speaker 01

  That's a joke.

• 33:19Ryan Broderick?

  If he had had a medical crisis, I think the country would have rallied around him. But yeah, I mean, like, how did you feel?

• 33:25Speaker 01

  Not good, man. Like, you know.

• 33:29Ryan Broderick?

  Sorry to ask that in so simple terms. I just, how did you feel?

• 33:32Speaker 01

  There's like two things. There's a lot about this because it is just an incredibly difficult. So you're watching it and it's like, this is terrible. You know what I mean? Like, he, I remember I was sitting in, so I was at the, I was at the debate. I was in, it's at Georgia Tech and I was sitting, we watched it in the Georgia Tech men's basketball film room. So we're in these like, you know, whatever.

• 34:00Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 34:01Speaker 01

  Nice chairs and whatever. And, you know, he walks out, and this is just my theory. He walks out and I can, I'm like, oh, he's nervous. Like, I can see he's nervous.

• 34:12Ryan Broderick?

  He did seem nervous, yeah.

• 34:13Speaker 01

  And.

• 34:17Speaker 01

  You know, it starts going on and it's like, this is, this does not feel good. And then I think within like the first three minutes, there's like that debate. He asked me a question about abortion, that he sort of pivots to undocumented immigrants. And I'm like, oh, fuck, oh, oh, boy. And so it's, it's not, it's not good.

• 34:37Speaker 01

  And, you know, you're at this interesting position that I think, you know, as we talk about Plattner, like a lot of Democrats are sort of finding themselves in. It's just like, all right, what are we going to do now? You know, like, we just, we have to deal with what's in front of us. And what I will say is like, those three weeks between the debate and when he drops out are, it felt worse, like it felt worse than the three weeks after we lost because it just was.

• 35:09Ryan Broderick?

  The three weeks between the first debate and him dropping out.

• 35:11Speaker 01

  And him dropping out.

• 35:12Ryan Broderick?

  Because it's why?

• 35:15Speaker 01

  Like the losing, like you can almost, you can wrap your head around, but like being in three weeks of like, this is really bad. This is so bad.

• 35:24Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, sure. I understand. Yeah.

• 35:25Speaker 01

  This is terrible. And, and getting hammered every day.

• 35:30Ryan Broderick?

  It's like a slow motion car crash.

• 35:31Speaker 01

  Everybody like, like the, what, what the campaign team sort of was like experiencing in that real time is like, the whole thing is blowing up, but like, what's going to happen? We don't know. And, and how do you balance how you might be feeling about what's happening with if he's not getting out, all we can do is try to save the campaign, like all we can do.

• 36:00Ryan Broderick?

  Sorry, but do you feel like the assassination attempt, like changed any of that arithmetic as, as these like insane three weeks are playing out for you guys?

• 36:08Speaker 01

  It, I mean, it, I think it added a level of like grimness to the entire thing of like,

• 36:15Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I know what you mean.

• 36:17Speaker 01

  This is all happening. We are like the Biden of it all. What is going to happen? Are we going to lose our jobs? This is not good. Should he be in the race? Whatever. And then also, by the way, like society is unraveling.

• 36:30Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. Did you guys feel like we were like about to lose the whole country for like, it's like, oh, like, maybe we won't get to vote.

• 36:38Speaker 01

  I mean, it was this like unique moment of like, just completely being unsettled, you know? And yeah, and so you're just in this like complete fog of war, you know? And I like, and you know, I have, in life, I have very little sympathy to the Trump people and, and, and I want, what is worse for many Trump folks? But in that moment, thinking about like, like they're going through a bunch of shit too. You know what I mean? So it's like, at the same time, it's like, you know, like you feel as, you know, campaigner to campaigner like, holy shit. Like, that must be fucking terrible. Like, it was.

• 37:15Ryan Broderick?

  I think there are pros at it now. It's been three or four times now, but yeah, I imagine the first, the first assassination attempt is probably the craziest.

• 37:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I have to imagine the first is.

• 37:26Ryan Broderick?

  And I don't want to rub salt in the wound here with you guys, although I suppose that's kind of what this entire thing is about. But like, historically, the public doesn't like to vote for people who almost get assassinated, which is kind of interesting. I kind of went through it and I was like reading different historical takes on this where it's like, a lot of times like if a, an assassination attempt is carried out against a, you know, a candidate, like they don't win. Like there are a couple from like the 1800s, the 1900s that like, everyone was like, ew, this is like too intense for us. And it kind of, political violence, you know, for better or worse, I guess, does tend to sort of reflect the mood of, of a country. Shinzo Abe being an example, where they sort of ethered his entire legacy after he was killed with a contraption.

• 38:11Ryan Broderick?

  And so it's like, it's interesting to me that.

• 38:14Ryan Broderick?

  I was not one of those people who believed that the Trump photo, the victorious photo was was actually gonna help him. I thought I thought the average American would be like, this is way too much for me. I don't want anything to do with this guy anymore. How did you feel? Do you feel? This is the most callous Politico question I can think to ask. Do you feel like the Trump campaign owned the narrative of his assassination attempt?

• 38:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:37Ryan Broderick?

  Okay.

• 38:37Speaker 01

  I mean, yeah, I mean, um, like, I, the two things I remember thinking, seeing that photo are, one, thank God he's okay. And two, and like legitimately on a human level, thank God he's okay. But then like, thank God for like, society, like, we cannot, we cannot stomach an assassination right now. We like, cannot, you know?

• 38:56Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 38:56Speaker 01

  But then the second was, once you see he's okay, and you see that photo, you're like, fuck me.

• 39:04Ryan Broderick?

  It does sort of turn on your darker, your darker political impulses where you're like, yeah, damn, he kind of crushed that one.

• 39:10Speaker 01

  Especially because the Biden age thing was.

• 39:15Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, I hadn't even thought about like a vitality angle.

• 39:18Speaker 01

  It's vitality, right? Like, the entire thing is vitality.

• 39:21Ryan Broderick?

  I hadn't even thought of that.

• 39:22Speaker 01

  And so you have, like, you know, Biden, week, the whole thing that we just saw.

• 39:27Ryan Broderick?

  Right, right.

• 39:28Speaker 01

  And, and Trump, like, wow, like, it, yeah, and it was like, it couldn't have played more into that, um, argument. So, yeah, I mean, to me, especially with, by the way, when you think about the fact that this election was decided by voters who are like, fuck the system, whatever, you know, I want someone who's gonna go blow the whole thing up, like, you know, they owned the narrative coming out of that, for sure.

• 39:48Ryan Broderick?

  And so that takes us to the end of July, where Biden drops out, Kamala Harris enters the race, Biden endorses her via a couple of channels, but mainly his X account. Um, and we're gonna talk about what happens once we get to brat summer, after a word from our sponsors.

• 40:11Ryan Broderick?

  So, okay, I've sort of blocked out a lot of this stuff, but I'm gonna read you something that I wrote at the time, apparently, that I don't totally remember, which was, "2020 Biden campaign seemed stuck between wanting to copy Trump's 2016 playbook and also copy Obama's 2008 and 2012 campaign strategies, which just didn't work. R.I.P. Biden water. But the question is whether or not all this coconut posting, which I had totally forgotten about, means anything. And it's likely the answer is an unsatisfying kinda." Was there a template you guys were trying to work with? Like, was there sort

• 40:54Ryan Broderick?

  of a grand design once Harris entered the race?

• 40:57Speaker 01

  Like, in the broadest sense, to step back, like, there's a couple of things. One, you had a whole team of people who were, I was a person who had worked for Joe Biden, you have to switch candidates, you have like, a whole different thing, and you have to come up with that on the fly, right? I mean, there was no pre-planning for this outcome on the campaign level, whatever. But like-

• 41:18Ryan Broderick?

  And you could argue it's a historic, it's a historic thing. Like, this is a crazy historic thing. Yeah.

• 41:22Speaker 01

  Because if the campaign started preparing for that eventuality, it would leak. So we had to do it on the fly, everything was in our heads. So, there were like, fits and starts and whatever. So I don't think there was like, this like, grand thing. I think the things that we were thinking about were, one, how do you strike a balance between the idea that if the campaign leans in too much, it will kill the organic enthusiasm? So actually, like, the coconut posting, like, the campaign almost never posted about that, ever.

• 41:50Ryan Broderick?

  I mean, yeah, it goes back to our kind of earlier conversation about, like, it's not just what the candidate says, it's like, figuring out how to work with the fans, the supporters, and their own media. Right, exactly.

• 42:01Speaker 01

  100%. Brat Girl Summer, like, Kamala's brat, we never said, you know?

• 42:07Ryan Broderick?

  That's actually, that's actually crazy, though. Yeah. Like, that's like, one of those things that, like, will be in a history book where it's like, fun fact, Kamala Harris never said, "I'm brat."

• 42:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. No, it was all Charlie XCX, right? And no one, that just happened. So some of these things stuck to the campaign. Now, the thing was, is I think that then set the-

• 42:28Speaker 01

  The like, I didn't even know, the temperature that it sort of set the ecosystem around us, which made it that the audience was growing and loved that and then wanted more of that. Right. And so I talk about this in the article to your point about like, kind of like, did it, whatever. Like, I think on balance, our problem with Biden early, when we switched to Harris, was reconsolidating the base. Like, we had to get voters back. We had to make it cool to like Harris. And I think, I think it did that. And I think Kamala HQ was pretty instructive in doing that. And that voice was instructive in doing that. I think the challenge was, it's, it's kind of like how like, the YouTube algorithm, like, well, it serves you to the people that's most likely, that most likely like your content and then kind of finds, it stops once it starts finding the people who are like, eh, you know?

• 43:13Ryan Broderick?

  Right, exactly.

• 43:14Speaker 01

  It's a little bit like that. I think we found all of the people. And then it was like, what lives beyond that? Yeah, I mean, I think that like, we tried to lean into it enough that it was resonant and that it worked. And I think it had real value, right? I think like, those accounts and that voice like built Project 2025 up, like, it could do stuff that Kamala Harris couldn't do authentically and all of that. But like, yeah, there's, I think, a legitimate argument and criticism to be made. And I don't know how much I agree with it, that like, if that's what the, if that, if that infilled the brand and felt like it was for an in-group and not an out-group, then it could have been damaging. I don't, you know, I don't, I don't know. I don't think I subscribe to that. But I think, you know, it is a criticism that I think is, is worth merit and discussion.

• 43:57Ryan Broderick?

  Well, this time period is also kind of the, we start to get the sense of like, what Trump's 2024 campaign even looks like. This is where you start to get kind of the, the bro oligarchy emerging and JD Vance is becoming kind of a character. And then you have Tim Walz on, on your side. And I emailed you about this actually before this episode because I was curious. And it's one of these things that has haunted me forever. And I know you already told me, but just for the, the audience listening, I, I've just been desperate to know. Why when Walls figured out an attack line of like, these guys are fucking weirdos?

• 44:36Ryan Broderick?

  To me, I mean, maybe I am just a middle-aged millennial that is so laser targeted by American football edits and Sega Dreamcast posting and calling Republicans weird fucking assholes. But like, to me, I was like, that's cool. That's interesting. But then it just sort of felt like by the time we hit like May and August, it disappeared. And I've always just sort of never understood why.

• 44:59Speaker 01

  I think the concern inside the campaign, and again, I was not in these conversations. So this is just, you know, whatever. But like, especially because like the running mate team tends to operate, at least in Democratic world, as like kind of a satellite, you know? But I think that my understanding was there was a sense that like, what worked for him was like, nice guy, Tim Walls, and sort of the like, name-calling gratuitous stuff, sort of felt like it was, well, it just felt like it was gratuitous and over the top. And people wouldn't take him seriously in the same way. I will admit, I was a fan of Weird. It was like, one of the reasons I was Team Walls.

• 45:39Ryan Broderick?

  I thought it was cool. I had never, it's something I'd been waiting 10 years for someone to say.

• 45:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. And what I thought was interesting about Walls is he came in with a lot of interesting novel arguments. I think in his speech, on the day he gets announced, he either, I think he might have made a couch joke.

• 45:58Ryan Broderick?

  He did. He did. He leaned into the couch fucker stuff, which was also very relevatory for me at the time. I was like, Dan, this guy's, this guy's firing on all cylinders.

• 46:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. I think that it kind of comes down to like, the difference, like, this is, this, this fight plays out in a lot of different places in Dem world of traditional communicators and digital communicators and digital communicators who are like, say the resonant thing. And traditional communicators who are like, say the thing that is like, most like persuasive and whatever. I think that that was like a case where like, the internet people were like, this is gold. And the, the sort of more traditional folks were like, this is off-putting. And I think both had some merit, you know? I think my macro lesson for like, how Democrats construct messaging is like, we tend to actually often explicitly say, if it is. Resident on the internet, it is not a good thing to be saying, um, because it is

• 46:50Speaker 01

  anti persuasive. Um, that is, that is a literal line of thinking that like people will say and exist.

• 46:57Ryan Broderick?

  So they, but they know like what's happened in America for the last like decade, right? Like they know.

• 47:03Speaker 01

  A hundred percent.

• 47:04Ryan Broderick?

  They had, they, they, they know like who, who's president again.

• 47:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. If you, there's, there's, there's viralism versus persuasionism or whatever, but, um,

• 47:15Ryan Broderick?

  This is blowing my mind. Like I actually like, I'm, I like, I'm turning bright red thinking.

• 47:21Speaker 01

  The basic to, again, I would, um, I'm, I'm going to do a good faith.

• 47:25Ryan Broderick?

  Sure.

• 47:26Speaker 01

  Steel man of their argument.

• 47:27Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I'm curious.

• 47:29Speaker 01

  That, um, things that generate the most heat on the internet.

• 47:35Ryan Broderick?

  Uh huh.

• 47:36Speaker 01

  Have the most like partisan support and because people are going to like it, they're going to engage with it, they're going to share it, that therefore makes it whatever. If it's going viral, it anti correlates with what is actually going to change voters because those voters tend to want kind of moderate things. And so it's not a wholly untrue thing that, you know.

• 47:59Ryan Broderick?

  Wait, hold on, before you move past that, why is it, why is that true of Democrats and not seemingly true of Republicans?

• 48:07Speaker 01

  Well, then this is where the argument falls over.

• 48:10Ryan Broderick?

  Right. Like I don't get like if they, like, I guess it's sort of like, okay, here, here, what I would say this is, is like, you're in a high school cafeteria, middle school cafeteria, and half the cafeteria, they're like, we only want ice cream. And the school's like, you can have as much ice cream as you want. And then they turn to the other half and they're like, we can't give you ice cream all the time. I think you guys want like real food too. And then you're just like, wait, what? What the fuck are you talking about? I would also like to just eat ice cream all day.

• 48:38Speaker 01

  Totally. The core difference between how Democrats like set up our system and how Republicans set up their system is Democrats tend to go, this is like, we have tested this. This is the most persuasive message, you know, and it's usually like, we need to lower prescription drugs. And then what you do is you take that, you put it into ads, and you say it over and over and over and over again at people. I kind of talked about this earlier. Republicans go the other way. They say, all right, I've got a gazillion voices on the internet. They're all gonna try a bunch of shit. Oh, this is working in this corner. All right, I'm gonna try it. Oh, great. Okay. And then it makes its way on to Fox News. And then it make or on to, you know, Tucker or Meghan or whatever. And then it makes its way on to Fox News.

• 49:21Speaker 01

  And then it makes its way to the candidate. And they kind of take the thing that is resonant, and they figure out how to make it persuasive. We say, what's the thing that's persuasive? How do we make it resonant? And we're sort of chasing, like, what's the viral way to say prescription drug, you know? And

• 49:36Ryan Broderick?

  It's much more memetic on the right.

• 49:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, totally.

• 49:38Ryan Broderick?

  And, and it, I mean, actually, we, we've done episodes sort of about the Rush Limbaugh era. And it was the same then, too. Like, the Republicans have always had this, like, winner takes all media apparatus that kind of creates policy for them.

• 49:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:53Ryan Broderick?

  And I think, I think the left, and I'm sort of excluding Democrats from that term, like, the, what used to be the dirtbag left, bread tube, the sort of online left, are trying to create a version of that, but without any money, or, like, you know, thought into how the average person would receive what they're putting out there. And so they're not, I think, as successful as sort of like a bunch of guys bloviating on massive, you know, cable news channels, or radio waves, or social media accounts, or whatever.

• 50:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it's true. The other thing is, is

• 50:29Speaker 01

  Like the right, they are still trying to do like the thing, the goal, if you are a political operative is to find the resonant thing that is also persuade, that also moves people, right? Like that's what you want to level up to. And the right does that by going

• 50:41Ryan Broderick?

  My thing, by the way, is I'd be a single issue candidate to abolish the TSA and put everyone who's ever worked for the TSA in jail forever. And I think I could win.

• 50:53Speaker 01

  Viral, viral and persuasive.

• 50:55Ryan Broderick?

  I think that's it. I think just get rid of the whole thing. We don't need it anymore. But no, I get what you're saying. Yeah. And but my research admin put together like a lot of sort of our clips from this time period. And like reading them back, I, I was very angry. And I think I was very angry because from my point of view, which I would like to think is sort of fairly consistent with like, the average person's point of view, is Kamala Harris has appeared. Okay, like, that's cool. Like, there's some wacky TikTok stuff happening. That's fun. She introduces me to this new old man, who is very, very angry, and I'm very, very angry, and I like that. And then all of a sudden, he kind of takes a backseat. And then she goes very hardline into the pro-Israel, or at least, you know,

• 51:39Ryan Broderick?

  anti Palestinian protester stuff. So you kind of get the DNC incident, where, you know, there are mass arrests in front of the Israeli consulate in Chicago. And so by the time we, we get to, like, the end of August, I guess, I was just sort of like, I don't actually understand what's going on anymore.

• 51:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:59Ryan Broderick?

  For someone like me, who only does kind of consume this stuff via the internet, at least firsthand, I was confused. And so, like, by the time we especially hit the Springfield, Ohio, eating the cats and dog stuff, I was like, everything is about Trump, and I don't even know where the Harris campaign fits into the national conversation. They've sort of, they've sort of taken over the court in a lot of ways. Does that seem fair?

• 52:24Speaker 01

  Well, I, you know, I say this in the piece, I think I say this in the piece, I do say this in the piece, that like, what happened is like, I mean, there are many things that happened. But like, from my lens, we had an attentional event every single week that was like, hardwired in from the switch. So she switches, we announce walls, we have the convention, we have the debate, like, the focus was on Kamala Harris, basically right until the debate. And then the debate happens and it is like an open fight for attention and in a cage with Donald Trump, who is the best at getting attention in the whole fucking world.

• 53:02Ryan Broderick?

  He's pretty good at it.

• 53:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, we were not very good at that. And so that's sort of what happened is the entire conversation about the election is about Donald Trump. Straight up at the end. And I think conventional wisdom was like, oh, great. If people are talking about how much Donald Trump suck or if Donald Trump is the thing. It's a referendum on Trump, not a referendum on Biden. Great. But actually, that's not how it works. And, you know, you found yourself in this position where, yeah, like Trump sort of controlled the narrative down the stretch. In a way that made it, again, difficult to communicate through, through sort of more traditional, traditional methods.

• 53:37Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. And like, and for people listening, like, we're not going step by step through like what the Trump team is doing during this time period, because one, we've, we have many episodes about that. But also like, I think it, I mean, what I liked about sort of what you have written so far is like judging the, like judging the Harris campaign, the DNC. Sort of operation on its own merits, right? Like, it's not like, oh, Trump is doing manosphere stuff. We've got to do manosphere stuff. Now, obviously, like, there was the Joe Rogan incident, but like, I, I, I think it is, it is worth sort of holding up. The, the, as you said, the, the things happening every week and going like, you know, why didn't this work? Did this work? You know, what could have happened here?

• 54:18Ryan Broderick?

  And it is, I had totally forgotten that Vance and Walz debated, actually. I just straight up forgot that happened. And it is so, it is such a bummer because like, I think a lot like, it would have been great, I think, just for, for me personally, if he had eviscerated Vance on stage. By the time I get to the fall, you know, we're, we're a month out and Trump is inescapable. And he now has the influencer army that he's been sort of building with Baron and Joe Rogan all summer. Which is insane to say out loud and like, you know, everything that we're looking at on social at the time, my team is like, oh, like Trump is the top of every leaderboard we have in some. Or he's partnered with someone, you know, the, he's on every podcast, he's everywhere.

• 55:02Ryan Broderick?

  And I guess like, from your point of view, like, one, is that true? Like, does that feel right? That like by the fall, Trump is just sort of taking over the internet? And two, like, does that even matter? Like, is that important? I guess I'm trying to sort of figure out like how you guys judge these things.

• 55:20Speaker 01

  It's not that Trump took over the internet. It's that Trump defined the contours of the conversation on the internet.

• 55:26Ryan Broderick?

  That's fair. That's, yeah, that's, that seems right.

• 55:29Speaker 01

  The discussion was all on his turf and the mainstream discussion was all on his turf. I think that we were dominating a pocket. He was dominating a pocket and then sort of like everywhere else was reacting to him. You know, what's funny is like, there was a poll that came out, I think I mentioned it in the piece, but a poll that came out just for the election that showed that more voters actually saw coalers on podcast clips than, or on podcasts generally than, than Trump. And I don't know if I fully buy the poll, but like the theory that I have behind it is Trump was doing a frequency play at one audience and we were doing a low frequency play at a bunch of different audiences.

• 56:10Speaker 01

  So we were trying to talk to young women with Alex Cooper and we were trying to talk with young black men with all the smoke and we were trying to talk, you know, yeah, da, da, da, da, da, da. And those were persuasion audiences, so audiences that like didn't necessarily, like we had to get back. So we weren't, we were in enemy territory. It was not enemy territory, but they were, it was not just like, oh, I love this guy or this gal. And, you know, Trump was like doing a home turf game and he had built up this ecosystem over the course of a couple of years.

• 56:39Ryan Broderick?

  To your point though, and I think the deck, you know, I give you guys a bit of credit there. The deck was stacked against you. Jamal Bowie has like a great take on this where he keeps saying everything is gender and that like by this point of Trump, in Trumpism, everything has kind of become gender. And so for him, he doesn't actually have to pick out a bunch of different voters in a coalition if he can just target white men. And so if he just goes on Manosphere podcasts, if he just hangs out with Theo Von or whatever, like he can kind of shotgun blast his entire like core. Does that, right? I mean, that, that's how I would perceive it.

• 57:17Speaker 01

  To me, it's true of fandoms. It's true of political campaigns. Like the thing you want is like a core that sort of pulls people in or pushes messages out. His was, he, he, he's super focused on his and yeah, it was, it was, um, it's just true that like, again, where the questions were.

• 57:39Speaker 01

  Vitality and who's going to go fight for you and have the right priorities. There's just this thing that sort of sticks to women candidates. Like you would hear this people being like, well, I don't know. Something I just don't trust about Kamala Harris or whatever. Like, you know, you'd hear that about Hillary, something I just don't trust about Hillary. Now, people will disagree about both of those questions on the merits or whatever. But like, that question comes back and I do think you see it with AOC right now, too. Who

• 58:05Ryan Broderick?

  It's starting.

• 58:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:06Ryan Broderick?

  It's like, as she's become clearly more like open about telegraphing some kind of run, people are beginning to talk about her that way, which is sort of wild.

• 58:15Speaker 01

  Well, it's, you know, like Zohra Mamdani, like goes to the White House and pals around with Trump and is texting with him and is cutting deals left and right. And people are like, our woke deal maker, you know, whatever.

• 58:26Ryan Broderick?

  This is exactly how Grant, my producer, talks about female politicians. Like, he doesn't like it when they have fun, but he loves it when like the male ones do.

• 58:33Speaker 01

  That's so right, you know, it's, and Grant, that shame on you.

• 58:36Speaker 02

  I was just about to say something nice about Ryan, too. And, uh, you know what? Now, now lost to all time.

• 58:41Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 58:41Speaker 02

  Sorry, please keep going.

• 58:43Ryan Broderick?

  Well, to, to, to close the, the loop here on our garbage day autopsy, I think gender comes into play in a huge way as the, the sort of tech guys all start to align around late October. That, that's when you get Jeff Bezos blocking the Washington Post endorsement. It's when you get Elon Musk doing his like fucked up weird little jump. And then he like does that little Nazi salute.

• 59:09Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 59:10Ryan Broderick?

  You get like, all of the podcast guys going in. You get Trump's big day at McDonald's. By the fall, they had figured out that they could guck up the works online with bullshit, like in Springfield, Ohio. And then they could just sort of pal around and act like they don't give a shit, which is both aspirational for men and taps into those disillusioned voters you talked about at the beginning. So it's like, yeah, I don't care about America so much that I'm going to like go pretend to work at McDonald's for fun. You know, me and my boys are just going to like hang out, even though someone literally shot at us on this stage like three months ago and I'm going to do a fucked up weird jump. Like, it was such a total

• 59:48Ryan Broderick?

  disregard for any of it. Meanwhile, like you go over to the Harris campaign and you guys are still like trying to like trying to engage with people. You compared to the other side, they might as well have just been like peeing in the middle of Times Square with their pants down. They don't care. And and it taps into, I think, a psychology that's very, very popular right now, which is like, I don't give a shit about this at all.

• 1:00:08Speaker 01

  Well, and it goes back to the very first thing we talked about, right? Which is like the swing voter right now is not this like left and right person. It's this person who's like, I don't fuck all of this, like, you know, they're swinging between like, burn the whole thing down and I have hope, you know? And and so in that way, when you're sort of the candidate who's, we're going to bring back the experts or whatever, you know? That's hard to sustain when people are like, I don't know, I'll take the guy pissing in the street who like might give me a better shot.

• 1:00:37Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:38Speaker 01

  Uh, and so that's a material condition question as much as anything.

• 1:00:41Ryan Broderick?

  I guess like, you know, to to take things home, wrap things up, like you guys would probably do all the same stuff again, right? Like, I feel like you're fine with that.

• 1:00:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, here's here's my like long term thing. Like, I think you see lots of political people right now. Who say the internet is the most important thing. The internet is real life now. We have to do podcasts.

• 1:01:10Ryan Broderick?

  I'm saying.

• 1:01:11Speaker 01

  And you're and you're going to be in the 2028 field, right? But I do think that, you know, power structures in the party are real, man. And like the people in charge still like, uh, don't consume the media that most voters consume. And so therefore it doesn't feel real to them.

• 1:01:26Speaker 01

  And candidate, and that includes candidates, by the way, like candidates don't use social media and therefore they don't know how important it is or whatever. So, you know, I think I think you will see some intrigue, like coming in the next like election cycle. You will see really interesting shit. You will see people try really new stuff and take big swings. You will also see some sort of frustrating stuff that looks like exactly what you've seen before.

• 1:01:48Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, that sounds about right to what I'm currently seeing. Yeah. I mean, every day it's like either someone.

• 1:01:56Ryan Broderick?

  Like doing an Obama thing, or someone who's like one step away from doing clavicular bone smashing on a live stream if someone will vote for him, right? Like it's sort of oscillating between the two right now.

• 1:02:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:08Ryan Broderick?

  And, and my assessment, which I think is fairly similar to yours of what happened in 2024 is that, yes, there were like a bunch of, hopefully, once in a, in a, in a lifetime kind of circumstances that played out. I think there were a bunch of circumstances that were out of anyone's control. Like, like genuine things that like, when you look at them all lined up, you're like, wow, that's actually crazy. Like those things happened. There is sort of the unpredictability of like RFK and the Maha movement, which I think is still, it needs more scrutiny and will hopefully one day get proper scrutiny and be fit into this context. And then I think you also just have gender and you have race at play. And then you just have the fact that Trump kind of never stopped running for president. He's effectively been running for president for like a full decade and

• 1:02:53Ryan Broderick?

  has the apparatus to do so, kind of whenever he wants. I think that's tough.

• 1:02:58Speaker 01

  I think that's right.

• 1:02:59Ryan Broderick?

  How are you feeling about 2026?

• 1:03:02Speaker 01

  26? I think we're gonna be okay. I mean, I think, I have two things about this.

• 1:03:05Ryan Broderick?

  Does that mean you don't feel good about 28?

• 1:03:08Speaker 01

  Well, here's what I'll say. The structure of 2026, we're gonna win something. I mean, they've, they've rigged the game, whatever, but we'll win the house. I feel pretty confident about that, barring something crazy. But generally, you know, in a state of nature, like I think we probably are in shooting distance of the Senate. You know, like that's all cool. I think the fundamental problem is midterm elections are when the voters who give a shit about politics show up.

• 1:03:31Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 1:03:32Speaker 01

  And those voters used to benefit Republicans. Now they benefit us. And so we'll have a great thing, but I think there still exists a fundamental problem that we don't have a coalition big enough to win a presidential election. We didn't in 2020, even when we won, we barely won by 45,000 votes, like across, you know, four states. Like if the wind blows in the wrong direction, we lose. So, you know, I think that that thing between now and then, we have to have a compelling theory of the case and really a compelling person. Like, I don't think the party solves it. I think a nominee solves it. That can make a coalition big enough that is gonna win. And I think that is, that is still unresolved, which is why I'm like, still feeling nervous.

• 1:04:12Ryan Broderick?

  I think they gotta bring back Rahm Emanuel. Have him take a crack at it or something. Look, I want to thank you for coming on, but I also want to thank you for talking about this stuff, for writing about it, for being so vocal about it. We have tried to talk to sort of members of the Democratic apparatus over the last few years and like, it's not easy to sort of get actual soul searching. We've been criticized by our own audience for not pushing people to actually do some soul searching. There's a lot of questions and I think a lot of frustration and you are so far the person who's come on, who's been like the most open to talk about this stuff. So I really have to thank you. It's genuinely fascinating. Like I wish people knew more about what was going on at the time.

• 1:04:55Ryan Broderick?

  Like I wonder what would have happened, you know, if the Democrats operated like the Republicans from the bottom up rather than the top down.

• 1:05:01Speaker 01

  We'll have to see. Maybe someone will do it next time.

• 1:05:06Ryan Broderick?

  If people want to follow you on the internet, where can they do that?

• 1:05:09Speaker 01

  I am on, well, first of all, I have my own podcast, if you want bad takes like these, which is Nobody Knows Anything. You can watch on YouTube or wherever you listen to your preferred podcasts like this one. And then I'm on the artist formerly known as Twitter as Rob underscore Flaherty. So you can find me there.

• 1:05:29Ryan Broderick?

  Thank you so much. This was a blast. Panic World is a production of Courier. It is written and produced by Grant Irving and hosted by me, Ryan Broderick. Josh Fielstedt is our production coordinator and our amazing researcher is Adam Bumis. From Courier is Shane Verkest, who edits our video episodes, along with our producer, Devin Maroney, and National Managing Director and Executive Producer Kevin Dreyfus. R.C. DeMezzo is their VP of Brand and Social. Charlotte Robinson is their Deputy Director of Brand and Social. Mary Ann Kuga is their Director of Marketing. YouTube and Podcast Growth Marketer Samantha Hallows. And Tracy Kaplan is the Senior Vice President of Sales and Distribution. If you want to sponsor the show or give us products to sell, she's the one to talk to.

• 1:06:12Ryan Broderick?

  You can email her at [email protected]. Be sure to check out the Panic World YouTube channel, which you can find at youtube.com/at Panic World Pod. And please give us some nice ratings on podcast apps and leave a funny review. Lastly, here's my advice for you. Chill out and touch grass while you still can.