Democrats don’t always need to choose between being exciting and winning elections.
But sometimes that choice is real. And sometimes what the “exciting” people are saying is bad!
The share of the Democratic ecosystem dedicated to extracting money from progressive political hobbyists has increased in recent years, and with it the incentive for denying the reality that clicks =/= majorities.
There may be no better example than Mehdi Hasan dunking on Roy Cooper this morning at the Crooked Con gathering put on by Pod Save America, where “Friends of the Pod” ($9.99/mo) tickets were discounted to $169.1
Senator-elect Roy Cooper not only flipped a seat by twenty points, his coattails broke the GOP gerrymander of North Carolina, ushering in a half-dozen members of Congress and the state House of Representatives for the first time since 2010.
But readers of Mehdi’s Zeteo newsletter ($12/mo) can disregard that, because Cooper is boooooooooring. Ignore the millions of Tar Heel lives that will be improved, let’s focus on the adoring progressive crowd of people who paid good money to cheer former Crooked Media podcast host Abdul El-Sayed on a weekday morning in DC.
Excitement vs. Winning
This is not a one-off thing. Let’s take a look at Pod Save America founder Jon Favreau’s critique of Welcome from August:
Favreau, to his credit, later admitted that he did find some of our Win The Middle slate candidates exciting and that he and Pod Save put time & money into helping those candidates.
But then brought up a sore point: my point that Democrats who win swing districts can be bad for Crooked’s business. He said “aside from being offensive is not in any way true, we’ve had many of those candidates on the pod.”
Excitement vs. Profitability
The attention economy rewards conflict, and Roy Cooper’s style of leadership is not especially conflict-driven or “exciting.” Same with many moderate elected officials who win swing districts.
Excitement is different than likeability. There is an old trope about voters preferring the candidate they’d “want to have a beer with.” Earlier this cycle, progressives went all-in on the idea that voters wanted someone that would be in a bar fight with them. They breathlessly heralded tough guy candidates like Graham Platner as the future.
But when the dust settled after the election, the big winners were James Talarico and Josh Turek and Adam Hamilton. Forget bar fights, its not clear these guys have ever been in a bar or been in a fight. Civility won!
But less conflict and less excitement mean fewer clicks, fewer shares, fewer new subscribers, and less ad revenue.
In an interview with Matthew Yglesias, Favreau discussed this conundrum between highly profitable leftist podcast guests like Zohran Mamdani and the lower-engagement swing district winner Cait Conley:
As someone who runs a media company who we try to have everyone on. And a lot of this is the attention that the person ends up commanding with audiences, right?
Like we’ve talked to Mamdani a bunch of times, very popular, right? Not just with our audience, but like those clips travel beyond our audience, right? And we will have Cait Conley, who’s in a much more important to the future of the country district to win when she’s in town.
And who knows, maybe it’ll also be an incredibly viral clip, but our experience has been a lot of these candidates were in really important races that we ended up talking to, like it doesn’t go anywhere because people are like, well, I don’t really want to, I’m not as excited about that.
Yglesias was much more blunt the following day, stating “there are very strong financial incentives throughout the media to tell an unrepresentative group of highly engaged, educated, younger progressives what they want to hear.”
Yglesias reiterated that point today, saying “it’s unquestionably true that Cooper-type nominees are worse for the business model of progressive media outlets.”
Things Will Get Worse
If the frame was just about policy - say, “Medicare For All is exciting” - then it would be one thing. But the audience demands something far more than policy.
When Matthew Yglesias was on The Bulwark pod2 last year soon after the killing of the United Healthcare CEO, Tim Miller said:
Lot of discussion this week about the assassination of a healthcare executive on the street. People do not like it when you say that you think vigilante assassinations are bad, so I’m not going to do that again … well, I’m not going to do it again on this podcast.
It was kind of a joke - the guests laughed, and Yglesias mocked “Neutral on vigilante assassinations!” … but when you go back and look at the comments on the previous show where Miller did say that murdering people on the street was bad, its pretty ugly! These (profitably) progressive political hobbyists are crazy.
As a paid subscriber to The Bulwark who found their team fantastic when writing for them, I'm happy for their success!
This is not only a leftist thing, obviously.
Here’s something I’m not proud of: the most popular writing we’ve done on WelcomeStack is exactly the sort of thing Favreau asks us not to do (bashing the left in aggressive terms). The incentives are pretty clear!
We are about to enter a presidential primary where the modern progressive attention economy will command a premium. Even if it does not impact voters greatly - it turns out that the primary electorate will likely be much larger and less hobbyist in 2028 than in 2020 (we’ll have more on that soon!) - this dynamic will still shape how elites shape the presidential primary. Which in turn determines the future of the party.
Favreau and Miller seem like great guys - like they’d be good dads and would make good neighbors, and are sharp political observers with highly credible careers as operatives. (Mehdi seems like a jerk, but let’s leave that aside for now).
This is not a personal indictment on them3 - in fact, I think both of them making it explicit on their shows is a healthy thing to do. They run media businesses! They’re being honest!
For the rest of us, trying to to find a better blend of excitement and pragmatism will be a challenge over the next two years. And while people always say that leftists are more “exciting” than moderates, their true advantage is having community.
The Liberal Patriot —> WelcomeStack
Democrats can’t count on “Democratic media” to signal what’s healthy and effective for the party. Lawmakers should be wary to concede points to crowds inspired by these shows. Operatives should spend less time listening to these shows and more time doing what Roy Cooper - and Jamie Ager & Bobby Pulido and Paige Cognetti do: create community on the ground and through local press, without the pressures to go viral or feed red meat to the activists in blue dots around the country. Philanthropy needs to step in and support common sense media so that they don’t need to profit from mob mentality.
Because the best way to make “Exciting community” or “moderate winners” a false choice is to join up with others who share your values.
We were devastated earlier this year when The Liberal Patriot closed up shop. While the newsletter was by most counts a success, with more than 50,000 subscribers and a large intellectual footprint, its did not have the paid hobbyist base of an ideologically ‘exciting’ outlet.
Two of its leading writers, Ruy Teixeira & Michael Baharaeen, have brought their unique perspective to WelcomeStack.org with The Long View newsletter. As we venture into the next era of American politics, the community build up around their patriotic pragmatism needs a home. And to grow. Please support their work and ours by becoming a paid subscriber - no cheering vigilante assassins required!
You’ll be joining a team, from our colleagues to the thirteen exciting winners supported this cycle, and the thousands who have been to events like WelcomeFest. Here’s to winning, and our own type of excitement.
The discounted tickets sold out, but $250 “last call” General Admission tier tickets for the day may be available.
Yes, I mostly just listen to these shows when Yglesias is on
One aspect of my critique that I regret, and which seemed to particularly annoy Favreau, was pointing out Crooked’s investment from Soros. While I think having outside investors likely increases pressure to maintain profitability, I doubt that Soros really cares much and included their investment only muddied the argument. If there is an allegation that the Soros investment has pushed Crooked left, that argument should be made clearly and is a separate argument than the “excitement” argument made here.
