“HAVE A GREAT LABOR DAY WEEKEND, PATRIOTS!!! GOD BLESS THE WORKING PEOPLE WHO MAKE AMERICA GREAT!,” read an August 2025 tweet, capped with three American flags and a photo of its author in a convertible, sunglasses on, peace sign raised. This wasn’t 2016. This wasn’t President Donald Trump. It was California Governor—and presidential hopeful—Gavin Newsom.

Newsom’s sudden shift to Trump-style posting has been hailed by some legacy outlets as proof Democrats are finally learning to compete in the digital-media space. The New York Times gushed that he “has that dog in him.” NBC claimed his “national profile soars.” But Democrats are not just late to the party—they’re fundamentally unprepared for it. Unlike Trump and other Republicans who thrived in podcasts and digital platforms by appearing authentic, Democrats have struggled with stiff rhetoric, unpopular policies, and a legacy-media mindset that collapses in unscripted, contentious interviews. Newsom’s Twitter cosplay is less a breakthrough than a symptom of a party pretending it can play a game it doesn’t understand.

After the 2024 election, the contrast couldn’t have been clearer. Trump and then Vice-Presidential candidate J.D. Vance seemed comfortable and unscripted on podcasts like This Past Weekend with Theo Von and The Joe Rogan Experience. To drive home the contrast, Trump used his appearance on Rogan’s show to mock his Democratic opponent for President, Vice-President Kamala Harris, for avoiding such interviews, “Can you imagine Kamala doing this show? She’d be laying on the floor… call in the medics!” Harris did eventually sit down with Call Her Daddy, but it was a softball interview that looked like a last-ditch stunt, not a confident embrace of the medium.

Since then, Democrats have been scrambling to figure out how to succeed electorally in a media environment increasingly dominated by populist rhetoric. After 2024, Trump’s side had Joe Rogan, Theo Von, Andrew Schulz’s Flagrant, and Tony Hinchcliffe’s Kill Tony, his own Truth Social platform, and Elon Musk’s X—at least until the Musk-Trump falling out. Democrats realized that they had nothing similar and tried to mimic the formula. Newsom even launched his own podcast, but misread the moment entirely. Convinced America wanted to move right, he booked guests like Charlie Kirk and Steve Bannon while back-pedaling on progressive causes like transgender rights. When that backfired, he pivoted again—back to resistance liberalism on social media.

Democrats have long struggled with the shifting news environment. After their 2016 loss, they blamed digital media, dismissing it as “fake news” or disinformation. “Over the next four years, they came to realize that digital media was not going away, and that competing successfully would require a more active media strategy. So, in 2020, Democratic allies and Trump’s opponents coordinated efforts to shape media narratives against him in what Time called a “shadow campaign.” In 2024, the Harris campaign went further, funding favorable—but false—AI-generated headlines through Google ads and enlisting influencers and celebrities. Still, these efforts could not match the brand loyalty and digital reach Trump had cultivated with online content creators.

In 2025, Democratic supporters looked beyond candidates and sought to amplify party-friendly influencers. This included a dark money group named the Sixteen Thirty Fund, which poured money into pro-Democratic Party messaging online through Chorus. The Sixteen Thirty Fund has a long history of bankrolling Democratic causes—spending $400 million in 2020 to help defeat Republicans. Chorus describes itself as “a creator-led nonprofit organization dedicated to helping content creators expand their reach and educate their audiences about news and public policy.” According to Taylor Lorenz’s August 2025 reporting in Wired, Chorus ran the Chorus Creator Incubator Program, which paid liberal content creators like David Pakman and Brian Tyler Cohen up to $8,000 a month to produce party-friendly content—without disclosing the source of the funding.

Lorenz, who has been accused of fabricating interviews and lying to editors (both of which she denies), became an easy target in this controversy. Some have criticized her for not proving the existence of dark money in the report. Others, including Pakman, threatened to sue her and Wired for defamation, while some falsely accused Lorenz of taking money from the same dark fund.

In subsequent interviews, Lorenz noted that the problem is not that creators are being paid, but that they are not disclosing where their funding comes from. Indeed, Lorenz’s reporting indicates that the Chorus funded content creators were forbidden from revealing the source of the money. It does seem that Lorenz has a point: during Trump 2.0, Pakman became a favorite of Democratic-leaning legacy media, earning glowing praise from outlets like MSNBC for his commentary on how Democrats could build influential progressive media—though he conveniently left out the role of dark money in that analysis.

Critics of the content creators note that Pakman and Cohen have avoided critiquing Israel—or, in Cohen’s case, covering the topic at all. Pakman’s former producer claimed this is because, after a White House meeting with then-President Joe Biden, content creators including Pakman discussed how covering the topic was too divisive and might cost them their audience. Thus, it may be the case that Pakman and Cohen are telling the truth—that this money did not directly influence their content—and this highlights an age-old critique from famed linguist and media scholar Noam Chomsky: people like Pakman and Cohen only receive funding from Democratic Party supporters because they already say what the funders want, and the money will stop if they change course.

At the heart of this story is the fact that, rather than creating a truly open information superhighway that levels the playing field, the digital space has merely replicated the problems of corporate media: funding has often trumped ethics, including transparency in financial support. Just like cable news, the two major parties can buy up platforms and major content producers, giving the public a narrow window into the world—though the world is far bigger than Democrats and Republicans. This is not lost on commentators in the space; left-populist commentator Krystal Ball has warned that new media outlets risk replicating the same corporate media model they claim to oppose.

Buying Attention, Not Support

With rare exceptions, such as the redistricting fight, the Democratic Party seems more focused on buying the appearance of public support than on building it through a genuinely popular policy agenda. After all, since the start of Trump’s second term, the Democratic Party’s new chair has claimed the party has “good billionaires“; young leaders like David Hogg have been sidelined for trying to transform the party toward a more populist direction; Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) refused to use parliamentary tricks to delay Trump’s agenda; top Democrats refuse to endorse candidates who are energizing the electorate such as the Democratic nominee for New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani; Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) delivered a marathon speech against Trump before ultimately voting to support his policy agenda; and Democrats are largely avoiding tapping into the energy and popular appeal of Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s “Fighting Oligarchy Tour.”

It is no surprise that polls suggest it is not working: even as Trump’s numbers dip—especially on the economy, his traditional strength—voters aren’t flocking to Democrats. Party leaders seem convinced their policies are popular and only their communication strategy needs fixing. But the data tells a different story. A recent report from the New York Times found that in the 30 states that track voter registration, since 2020, Democrats have lost ground to Republicans in all of them. That seems to indicate it is the message and policy, not the media, but Democrats forge ahead with their belief that new media will make their message and policies attractive to voters.

The irony is sharp: Democrats are chasing an artificial “new media” presence when, not long ago, a thriving, organic one already existed. Rogan, Schulz, and the social media giants were often aligned with Democrats before 2024. Now, the party is reduced to manufacturing what it squandered. And when you have to pay people to amplify your message, it means your message—and your brand—aren’t resonating. Recent polling reveals just that. In July 2025, the Wall Street Journalfound Democratic approval at its lowest point in 35 years, back when George H.W. Bush was president.

But the problem runs deeper than money or platforms. Democrats don’t have candidates who can spar in good faith while sounding authentic. The party of the educated professional class has produced politicians trained to communicate like Human Resources (HR) representatives: no jokes, no controversy, no substance, no ambiguity. In podcast spaces where comedians riff vulgar jokes and hosts lob provocative hot takes, that robotic style falls flat.

Worse, Democrats are conditioned by decades of cozy legacy media treatment. Step into new media, and suddenly their rhetorical tricks don’t work. Nowhere is this clearer than on Israel-Gaza. In podcasts and alt-media, Israel’s treatment of Gazans is routinely called “genocide”—even by Jewish commentators like Norman Finkelstein and Dave Smith. Although criticism of Israel is often treated as fringe in legacy media, polling shows these views are actually widely held. In July 2025, Gallup found that only 32% of Americans support U.S. military aid to Israel in Gaza. An August 2025 Economist/YouGov poll found that 45% of respondents called what Israel is doing in Gaza “genocide,” while only 31% disagreed with that conclusion. The same poll also found that 70% of respondents believed there is a hunger crisis in Gaza. Another poll found that about 70% of Democrats and 35% of Republicans have no confidence in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. An August 2025 Reuters poll showed that roughly 60% of Americans think the U.S. should contradict Israel and recognize Palestine as an independent nation. Even the Israeli government recognizes its waning support: a leaked study of global opinion found that substantial portions of the world—Europeans in particular—”agree with the characterization of Israel as a genocidal, apartheid state.”

In his 2025 book, When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows… Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life, Steven Pinker, the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, explains that coordination depends not only on people having a common belief or assessment, but also on knowing that many others share the same view, so they can collaborate. As media scholars such as Robin Andersen, Professor Emerita of Communications and Media Studies at Fordham University, point out, legacy media shields the Democratic Party—which tried to avoid an internal debate about Israel in 2024—from confronting widespread dissatisfaction with Israeli policy. Indeed, members of both parties and allies in the news media are trained to conflate criticism of Israel with antisemitism, a tactic that collapses in adversarial interviews in the digital-media space.

Just ask Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY). On the Adam Friedland Show, Torres, a staunch supporter of Israel, tried to avoid commenting on human rights abuses by Israel by saying he supports free speech, which he said includes criticism of Israel but not antisemitism. The host, Friedland, himself Jewish, wasn’t having it. He argued that Israel’s violence in Gaza fuels antisemitism more than anything else, cited civilian death tolls, and outright called it “genocide.” Torres, unable to rely on the usual rhetorical tactic of shutting down debate by calling his opponent antisemitic—since Friedland is Jewish—ended up flailing. He tried to rely on his identity as a person of color, a technique that works in corporate pro-Democratic Party media, by claiming it made him aware of oppression and hyper-attuned to the feelings of Jews. Just for a moment, imagine if in the middle of 2020 a white person had used an identity feature to tell a Black person how they should feel about Black Lives Matter. Liberals would have been clutching their kale. It fell totally flat.

Torres simultaneously denied that Israeli policy targets civilians while conceding that thousands had been killed, then bizarrely tried to draw a distinction between Israel’s “right-wing” government and the Israeli government itself—as if he opposed the right-wing government, which is the government of Israel, but would not denounce the government of Israel. The exchange left him looking evasive, unprepared, and profoundly out of touch, as evidenced by commentary from other creators in the space and audience reactions.

Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg fared no better. On Pod Save America—a podcast practically designed to give Democrats soft landings—he was asked about U.S. support for Israel. Buttigieg deployed the usual consultant-speak about “assessing” aid and referred to U.S.-Israel relations as friendship, noting that sometimes friends need to guide each other “to a better place.” When pressed on whether Israel’s killing of 60,000 people should end that “friendship,” he responded vaguely, saying, “Sometimes words can fail.” It was classic HR-speak—saying nothing while sounding pained. Subsequent reporting confirmed what was obvious: Buttigieg’s appearance wasn’t just a dud—it was the kind of empty performance that made him look more like a consultant auditioning for a board seat than a leader taking a stand.

Democrats who step into these independent media spaces often seem to expect the usual softball treatment from legacy outlets, only to find themselves cornered by facts—and with few skills to fight their way out. Take Michigan Senator Elissa Slotkin (D-MI), who appeared on Breaking Points and was pressed by host Krystal Ball over her hypocrisy on Palestine. Ball cited multiple examples, including Slotkin’s own past statements, showing how she condemned colleagues’ criticism of Israel while ignoring Democrats spreading Islamophobia or even calling for Gaza to be nuked. Caught off guard, Slotkin sputtered until her staff, apparently mercifully, cut the interview short.

Faking It Won’t Cut It: Democrats’ New Media Crisis

Funding conflicts and weak interview performances aren’t exclusive to Democrats or liberals. Earlier this year, reports emerged that conservative content creators such as Tim Pool, Dave Rubin and Benny Johnson were taking money to promote pro-Russian content. Republicans, too, largely trained in the legacy media space, aren’t immune from poor interviews in the digital-media space. For example, in 2025, Tucker Carlson humiliated Senator Ted Cruz by bluntly telling him, “You don’t know anything about Iran,” after Cruz fumbled basic questions about a country he was advocating bombing. But Republicans at least have figures like Trump who can command new media spaces. With few exceptions—such as Representative Ro Khanna (D-CA), who has spent years honing his communication for these platforms—Democrats are consistently exposed as unprepared, insincere, and allergic to authenticity.

That brings us back to Newsom. His Twitter-Trump cosplay might fool a few credulous reporters, but it doesn’t solve the real problem. Democrats can’t fake authenticity in spaces built on blunt honesty, biting humor, and relentless confrontation. To compete, they don’t just need new platforms—they need new policies, new skills, and candidates who can thrive outside the safe bubble of legacy media. Until then, all the paid influencers, all the all-caps tweets, all the manufactured hype won’t disguise the truth: this is a party that doesn’t get the post-legacy media era—and the digital world is punishing them for it.

The post Democrats’ Digital Dysfunction first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.