Got a Spare Billion?

Democrats need more than protests to match the MAGA media machine

Credit: Getty Images

The “Big Ugly Bill” that just passed by Congress should be a big red flag for the Democratic Party and those who want to see Donald Trump taken down a notch in the midterm elections.

It’s not just the price of the bill or the damage it will do, but Republican voters, infrequent voters, and those who aren’t big news consumers are intentionally being left in the dark. The right-wing media machine is now dominating our media ecosystem, and truth is the victim.

You may or may not agree with those who believe our system of government, which depends on a free and independent press, is in grave danger because of this. Certainly many Americans would say that is an overstatement. But it is, to say the least, an important development.

And it helps explain why congressional Republicans passed a bill that is so unpopular. How unloved is this bill? It is the least popular piece of legislation in the history of modern polling. It throws millions off Medicaid, takes food assistance away from children, and gives tax cuts to the uber-wealthy, all while ballooning the deficit. It passed both houses of Congress, albeit by the slimmest of margins, because Republicans are betting that voters don’t know, and don’t care to learn, about the details. They may be right.

A Navigator Research poll of Republican voters found that the more they heard about the bill, the less they liked it, by a lot. The midterms are 15 months away. How do Democrats educate the voting public about this damaging legislation, and so many other things? It can be done, but is a lot harder than it used to be.

The biggest political divide in this country is no longer between Democrats and Republicans or liberals and conservatives. It is between the informed and the uninformed or misinformed. The more informed a person is, the more likely they are to vote for Democrats. The problem is the Right is winning the information wars, and they are misinforming a lot of people in the process.

This war has been decades in the making. Republicans fired the first shot and are winning the current battle, by taking control of the narrative and peppering that narrative with half-truths and distortions.

While Democrats were focused on things like running the government, Republicans built a hard-right media behemoth, paid for by billionaires like Rupert Murdoch, the Koch brothers, the Dickey brothers, and Peter Thiel. Newer financiers include Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. Republicans and their billionaire enablers recognized that controlling popular opinion will ultimately lead to controlling the government.

Several Supreme Court cases made the Republicans’ job that much easier. The Buckley and Bellotti decisions found that “money is free speech” and “corporations are persons.” Then Citizens United opened the funding floodgates, permitting unlimited money to be spent on elections.

These cases allowed wealthy donors to buy political power by investing in right-wing media ventures. The hugely well-coordinated conservative media landscape includes traditional outlets like cable news, radio, and newspapers. More importantly, it is made up of digital media, including social media and podcasts.

Today the most popular podcast can reach more people than all of the major cable news networks combined. And the most popular podcast is the right-leaning “The Joe Rogan Experience.” Rogan, who has more than 39 million listeners for a single podcast, does not call his show “political.” In fact, the podcast is categorized as “comedy,” which brings us to another point.

Right-leaning information — or propaganda — is making its way into comedy, entertainment, sports, and lifestyle programming, through platforms like TikTok, Spotify, and YouTube. So people who eschew traditional political news are still getting a version of it — they just may not realize they are hearing it.

The billionaires who have funded the Republican media ecosystem need to look no further than the top podcasts to know their money has been well spent. Nine of the top 10 podcasts are hosted by self-described conservative voices. “Overall, right-leaning online shows have amassed nearly 481 million followers across platforms — almost five times more than the 104 million followers for left-leaning shows,” according to “The Objective” and Media Matters.

And those podcasters are trusted. According to a Pew Research study, 87% of podcast listeners believe the “news” they hear, saying they think the information is accurate. Additionally, 1 in 5 Americans regularly get their news from “social media influencers,” who by and large do not have a journalism background.

Now the results of the 2024 election make more sense. Polls showed that the more news a voter consumed, the more likely they were to vote for Kamala Harris. For Democrats that is a major problem, because the right-wing media machine dominated both traditional and social media during the election. It did an outstanding job of getting their often-distorted message to the population as a whole. The Democrats didn’t and don’t have the same media levers to pull.

In an average week during the 2024 campaign, 23.5 million Americans heard Donald Trump’s podcast appearances; Harris reached only 6.4 million, according to Edison Podcast Metrics.

Democrats need a plan that includes a billionaire, or three … or five. A decent number of very wealthy donors give to Democratic candidates and causes in general. But no one, it seems, is working hard enough or smart enough to counter the Republican media operation. If this doesn’t change, MAGA will continue to lie and distort and spew disinformation, and thus win elections and the hearts and minds of the voting public.

Democrats can learn how to meet this challenge by studying the Republicans’ success. The key is becoming less beholden to traditional media and meeting persuadable voters where they are. And they are online. See: Zohran Mamdani, Democratic nominee for New York City mayor. He won the race partly because he dominated social media.

It has become painfully and spectacularly obvious that building a sustained and coordinated media machine is crucial to political success. It cannot be an afterthought for any candidate or party determined to win.

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Stay Steady,
Dan