What Republicans Know
Democrats have fallen behind as Republicans reconfigured how politics works
This is an excerpt from “What Republicans Know: How the Far Right Changed Politics and Left Democrats Behind.” The complete book will be available for $15 by November 30, 2025 to all purchasers. Help protect democracy with your pre-order.
For decades, public opinion polling has shown that core Republican policy positions are less popular than Democratic ones, yet since 2000 Republicans have won more presidential elections and have more often held unified control of Congress. The public doesn’t back their agenda, but they still win.
Obviously, a lot of Republicans’ victories are due to the fact that rural states are over-represented in the US political system. But that rationalization doesn’t hold when you consider that Donald Trump won the popular vote in 2024.
“We don’t have billionaires showering cash upon us” is another reply I receive when I talk about recent Republican electoral victories.
And it’s certainly true that there are more than a few reactionary oligarchs like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Marc Andreesen that have spent big on elections and media. But what you may not realize is that Democrats actually raise more money than Republicans. It’s an undeniable reality of American politics that is far less known than it should be.
In the 2024 presidential race, the Joe Biden-Kamala Harris campaigns and their related political action committees raised $2.9 billion. Donald Trump and his allies (including Musk) raised $1.8 billion. The so-called “dark money” groups that do not have to disclose their donors also favored Democrats, according to the Brennan Center, which found that organizations allied with Biden or Harris spent $1.2 billion compared to $664 million by pro-Trump groups. On the congressional side, Democratic-aligned groups spent $197 million while groups associated with Republicans spent $192 million.
Last year’s numbers reflect a long-standing trend. Dark money has favored Democrats since 2018, according to the Brennan Center. And on the campaign side, as NPR has reported, in the 2020 presidential cycle, Biden raised just over $1 billion while Trump raised about $800 million. In 2016, Hillary Clinton raised about $500 million while Trump raised just over $200 million. In 2012, Barack Obama raised nearly $700 million while Mitt Romney raised nearly $400 million.
Despite often being drastically outspent in recent campaigns, Republicans have managed to win more elections than Democrats, while also having more unpopular policy viewpoints. How is this possible? Because Republicans are better at politics than Democrats. They have to be. Instead of changing their extremist policies of slashing healthcare, science, and education, Republicans have developed such effective campaign strategies that they can still win.
The Republican political class allocates resources more efficiently, systematizes tactics—and most importantly—learns from the opposition.
Every time that Democrats win, Republicans pay attention. After Barack Obama won big in 2008, Republican elites devoured Sasha Issenberg’s The Victory Lab, which chronicled how Obama did it. As part of its 2020 strategy, the Republican National Committee required organizers to read and pass a 22-question exam about Elizabeth McKenna and Hahrie Han’s Groundbreakers, which profiled the 2012 Obama campaign’s ground game successes.
Republicans read the other side’s playbooks and operationalize them; Democrats rarely do the same. Instead of learning after losing, far too often, left-of-center leaders tend to blame opposing factions, electoral maps, external circumstances, and gerrymandering.
All of these complaints have truth to them. Republicans cheat and the American political system favors rural states over urban ones. Unfortunately, you can’t change the system until you can change your strategies. Far-right Republicans did this. After being shut out of Congress in the decades following the New Deal, they noticed how the Constitution skewed toward rural voters and began targeting them heavily. Now, they’ve amassed the power to do the slashing and burning they’ve always wanted.
If Democrats want to roll back the damage and build something better, they’ll have to start learning from the opposition as seriously as the opposition learns from them.
So what do Republicans know that Democrats don’t?
I think I’m a good person to answer that question. While today I am a progressive writer and podcaster, in a past life, I was a right-wing media and marketing consultant after leading the blogger corps that forced Dan Rather out of his CBS anchor chair, a scandal that played a big role in the 2004 presidential election. I started two of the right’s most popular websites and worked with several successful campaigns.
I learned a lot about what Republicans know during my former career, but I couldn’t take the corruption, hatred, and anti-intellectualism so I changed sides—before Trump.
Since leaving the right, I’ve become deeply concerned that the people atop the Democratic campaign and media establishments haven’t learned how Republicans managed to take control of the American political system. This must change if we want to protect our country and each other.
Obviously there are some Republican techniques (such as blatant lying) that Democrats shouldn’t pick up, but there are a lot of things they can do better. Below is a list of ten things Republicans know—habits, structures, and heuristics—that Democrats either don’t know, don’t believe, or won’t practice consistently. That needs to change to protect the future of American democracy.
1. Ecosystems matter more than money.
Despite being regularly outspent by Democrats, Republicans have been able to win more recent elections because they’ve created a sustainable ecosystem that stretches the money that they have much further. Right-wing donors, large and small, get more for their dollars because Republicans have built an incredibly efficient political economy.
The Republican secret is that party officials, campaigns, and donors spend a very hefty amount on advocacy media outlets. Beyond the numerous propaganda websites like the Breitbart or the the Epoch Times, Republican campaign dollars are also doled out to a plethora of even further-right alternatives to Fox, most of whose audience is online, including Newsmax, One America’s News, Real America’s Voice, BlazeTV, Salem News Channel, The First, LindellTV, and more
This money is not only helpful for these outlets to stay afloat, it also helps them create more Republican activists who in turn become donors—and voters. The system reinforces itself, as the chart below illustrates.
In the graphic above, Republican donors give money to campaigns, which then spend it on advertising with advocacy media and mainstream media. The money they receive enables them to maintain and expand their operations to create new reactionary activists. These activists then become donors to start a new round of the cycle. Aside from some small fund leakage to mainstream media outlets to motivate or attract uncommitted voters, most Republican money is kept within the ecosystem.
This is not at all how the Democratic political ecosystem works. Instead of creating a sustainable system, Democratic campaigns spend the majority of their campaign dollars on advertising, primarily with local broadcast television stations and cable and satellite companies. While Democrats do spend money on web advertising, according to AdImpact, their digital ad buys are mostly used for fundraising rather than for persuasion. In other words, Democratic campaigns are asking loyalists to chip in $5 dollars for the 739th time rather than trying to build a sustainable political economy.
Instead of looking at the well-tuned political-media environment that Republicans have built for themselves and copying it, Democratic strategists have resorted to increasingly bizarre and ineffective methods of buying advertising. As the New York Times’s Shane Goldmacher reported, Kamala Harris’s staff spent nearly $1 million to purchase space on the outside of the Las Vegas Sphere entertainment venue. The campaign also paid about $2.5 million for a live-streamed townhall in Detroit and even more on drone shows at football games.
“We had so much money it was hard to get it out the door,” Harris adviser Bakari Sellers told Goldmacher.
Needless to say, all of that money is gone. Had even $100 million of the campaign’s $2.9 billion been redirected towards independent media, American politics would be in a much better place. Republicans know how to invest in their people. Democrats do not. This isn’t just wasteful, it’s demoralizing and annoying to the people the party should be treating with the most respect—the hard-working citizens who give generously to protect America from Trump.
The chart below shows the Democratic political economy:
2. Fund your allies, not your opponents.
The bottom part of that chart should be terrifying to you. Besides being extremely inefficient and short-sighted financially, the current Democratic ecosystem actively undermines the party because much of the money that’s spent on advertising has gone directly to Republican-owned media companies—especially local news operations like Rupert Murdoch’s Fox stations and the two companies that canceled ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel for telling a joke, Sinclair Broadcast Group and Nexstar Media.
Fox’s obvious Republican bias has become infamous, but Sinclair’s propaganda isn’t as well-known as it should be. Run by Christian nationalist David D. Smith, the company has become notorious within local television for requiring all of its stations to run internally produced shows and specials that are blatant Republican messaging, taking advantage of the higher trust that Americans have for local TV newscasts.
For a brief moment in 2018, the dangerous scope of Sinclair propaganda became evident after Deadspin published a montage of some of the hundreds of anchors who were forced to read a script promoting Trump’s narrative against critical journalism:
The reach of Sinclair has only grown since then, however. The company now owns more than 180 stations in every region of America, including the swing states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina, and Virginia.
According to Reuters, Nexstar owns or operates more than 200 stations across the country in addition to operating the CW and NewsNation networks. It’s currently lobbying the Trump administration for approval to purchase 64 more local stations, giving it market access to 80 percent of American households.
Between them, Fox, Sinclair, and Nexstar currently operate more than 400 stations across all of the largest designated market areas. It’s a crisis of corporate consolidation. But instead of doing something to build pro-democracy media, Democratic party leaders have shoveled money into the mouth of the right’s broadcast behemoth. According to the Wall Street Journal, the Kamala Harris campaign alone aired $647 million in swing-state advertising, nearly the amount spent by Trump’s entire 2024 operation.
Hard numbers are hard to come by now with the Federal Election Commission closed for the current government shutdown, but over the decades it is almost certain that Democratic campaigns and allied groups have given more than $1 billion directly to these three right-wing media companies and Elon Musk’s X. This is an outrage that must end immediately and permanently. No station owned by Fox, Sinclair, or Nexstar should ever receive a cent of Democratic money. Ditto for Musk’s cesspool.
The urgency of doing this cannot be overstated, especially since right-wing oligarchs are trying to make the media imbalance in America even worse. Prominent Trump backer Larry Ellison and his son just bought CBS’s parent company and installed right-wing shill Bari Weiss as its news executive editor. The Ellisons are also part of a group seeking to purchase TikTok and are rumored to be trying to buy CNN’s parent company as well.
Things don’t have to be this way. There’s more than enough money to build an infrastructure of democracy. What’s lacking is the imagination and willpower to do so.
People can only know what they have seen. It’s called “What You See Is All There Is” in cognitive psychology. Stop fighting this reality and start using it. Running 30-second ads that everyone hates is a failed approach to counteracting the thousands of hours of lies and hatred that Fox, Sinclair, talk radio, and reactionary influencers churn out daily. Don’t just complain about the media—become it.
3. Polls are for shaping your strategy, not for shaping your positions.
Both parties use public opinion research extensively, but Democrats use them very differently than Republicans. Trump and his party use polls to determine how to sell their policies. Democrats use them to determine what policies to have.
People care more about values than policies. If the opposite were true, Republicans would never win elections. Yet this inconvenient truth seems to be completely ignored by many Democratic strategists and commentators because they’ve forgotten that self-reporting is well-documented within psychological research as being subject to significant methodological problems.
People form opinions based on real-time experience, and those who have little interest or knowledge of politics shift their responses constantly, often in response to things they hear in the media, from people they encounter, and their own circumstances.
Because their political ecosystem is so minuscule, Democrats’ messages, no matter how effective, are not reaching the public. As Dan Pfeiffer put it recently: “If Republicans cut Medicaid and no one knows about it, is it really a political problem?”
Most people’s political expressions are inchoate and even contradictory, so when they are forced to fit their views into a brutalist multiple choice bubble, it can distort measurement. This reality has been well-established in political science since Philip Converse’s classic 1964 essay on the topic. In the decades since Converse’s essay, political science has shown that when asked about politics, many people simply repeat memetic slogans or vague expressions, which they will readily change if you talk to them later.
Because many people’s views about politics are fungible, public opinion surveys often unintentionally alter respondents’ answers by forcing them into unnatural cognitive states. Regardless of how neutral pollsters make their questions, there is no guarantee that their framing will actually be neutral or understandable to all respondents, or that their presentation of choices reflects the full gamut of opinions.
A recent survey conducted by the Searchlight Institute provides an instructive example of how incomplete options can skew results. The new centrist-leaning Democratic group asked a series of questions about what “the good life” entails, but almost all of the options were economic desires. Just two were familial or personal—marriage and having children. Other possible goals like becoming educated, living in a good community, being a good person, or contributing to society were excluded. This doesn’t mean that Searchlight’s data is invalid. But it does mean that it is incomplete.
The long and short of it is that public opinion is like a river. It’s constantly changing but flows in a general direction that can be changed by skilled operators. Republicans shape the river while Democrats chase the currents. Strategist Anat Shenker-Osorio calls this attitude “pollingism,” others call it “popularism.” Regardless of the label, there’s no question that it’s an incomplete conception of politics that has enabled Republican extremism rather than defeated it.
Jay Inslee, the former Washington governor and U.S. House member has a better idea.
“As far as shaping where I was from a policy standpoint, I didn’t find looking at polls terribly effective, because at least when I’ve run for public offices, it’s to try to make a difference, and that’s why I was doing it,” Inslee told Slate’s Ben Mathis-Lilley. “If you don’t want to make a difference, why are you running? Let some other schmuck do it.”
4. Messengers matter more than messages.
Ever since George Gallup released his first survey in 1935, politicians and operatives have obsessed over finding the perfect campaign message. Donald Trump threw those decades of consensus right out the window. Instead of offering a single message, he offers dozens every single day. This is why he’s been so effective.
There is no perfect message, especially in our age of millions of social media accounts, YouTube channels, and hundreds of television channels. Let people choose their own message. And listen to what they have to say.
One thing you’ll learn if you listen is that people are more likely to believe messages from people they trust: Instagram cultural commentators, Twitch gamers, YouTube lifestyle hackers, and self-help book authors. Instead of dismissing these people as stupid and shallow, you should reach out and fund them. Match donors to creators and turn them loose. No one should have to fund things they don’t like, but the days of tightly controlled media are over.
People are tired of politicians reciting poll-tested talking points. You don’t have to like it that politics has become a form of entertainment. But it has. People want to see their would-be leaders cracking jokes with comedians, bantering with baddies, and working out with bros. This is our reality. If that makes you uncomfortable, then you should make room for people who can do the job. New Republic columnist Greg Sargent is exactly right to call this a “war for attention.”
The United States is a huge country. People in different regions have different opinions. If you want “Blue No Matter Who” to mean something, then party officers have to support who citizens elect. Candidates like Zohran Mamdani might not work in West Virginia just as candidates like Joe Manchin might not work in New York.
The same principle is true in the media. Far too many pundits and podcasters have a zero-sum mentality when it comes to media. They only invite their friends on their shows and as a result, the broader left media ecosystem remains small and idiosyncratic. Instead of growing together, the anti-Trump social media scene remains siloed and feuding. It’s a terrible thing to see.
By contrast, Republicans love internal debate and elevating new voices. I know this first-hand. Back in 2000 when I was running RatherBiased.com, Rush Limbaugh quoted us at length within days. Fox News gave my site a plug within our first month. Nobody bothered to ask what we thought about tax cuts or abortion. They just knew that we were against a common enemy.
We don’t need to remove all standards of ethics, but we do need to support people with talent who might not agree on everything. Stop quarrelling about who’s right. Let a million messages bloom instead of obsessing over perfection that doesn’t exist.
5. Nothing happens unless someone makes it happen.
The recent No Kings protests were a huge success, with 7 million people turning out to demonstrate against Donald Trump’s criminal authoritarianism. There’s no question that protests are important to rally public opinion against the far right. But we have to do more than just show up every few months with some fun costumes and signs if we really want to change things.
The religious fanatics and business oligarchs who pull Trump’s puppet strings have been ruthlessly efficient at building an infrastructure to scale up their minoritarian ideology because they know that appeals to moral righteousness mean nothing to people who disagree. To enact political change, you must have an agenda and you must build power, as Karen Attiah and I recently discussed.
Thom Hartmann, who saw firsthand how the big changes of the 1960s and 70s were made, beautifully connected them to what must be done today:
Protests without public faces and follow-through are like fireworks. Beautiful, brief, and gone before the smoke clears. [...]
Like the American Revolution, the Civil Rights movement, the union movement, and the women’s suffrage movements before it, [Students for a Democratic Society’s] success in helping end the war in Vietnam didn’t just come from mass mobilizations (although they helped), but flowed out of an organizational structure and local and national leaders who could articulate a single specific demand to end the war.
As Frederick Douglass famously said in 1857, “Power concedes nothing without a demand.” That demand must be loud, specific, recurrent, and backed by organization and leadership. [...]
For more than forty years, the Republican Party has been playing a long game. While Democrats chased the next election cycle, conservatives built a media empire.
They invested in talk radio, cable news, think tanks, and local media outlets. They funded the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society, ALEC, and a constellation of dark-money groups that shape laws before most people even hear about them. They worked the school boards, city councils, and state legislatures. They didn’t just build candidates. They built infrastructure.
And it paid off.
When you’re up against a band of religious fanatics who believe that Trump is “an instrument of divine will” whom they intend to illegally give a third presidential term, it’s time to get serious. We live in a world-historical moment in which criminal totalitarians in many nations are utilizing psychological manipulation to consolidate the votes of people who are not paying attention or who prefer emotion over abstract thinking.
The only way things don’t get dramatically worse in this country is if Trump’s opponents build an infrastructure of democracy. The “arc of the universe” doesn’t bend toward justice, it bends toward whoever pulls it.
The Democratic party has failed to defeat Trump and the mainstream media has shown that it has no interest in accurately informing Americans of the horrendous scope of his totalitarianism, corruption, and incompetence. But hope is not lost. While the U.S. has become more authoritarian under Trump, our federalist system and separation of powers have made it so that he has not been able to fully consolidate power, a fact that has so terrified the neofascist activist Curt Yarvin that he says he’s planning on leaving the country.
But this state of affairs will not last long. Competitive authoritarianism is a transitory state. One side or the other usually wins. Trump still remains the most powerful person in the world and he has a Secretary of Defense who desperately wants to make war.
Nonetheless, as Virginia Heffernan writes at the New Republic, a lot of things are going wrong for Trump in the courts and in public opinion. We can do this—but only if we act with urgency and alacrity.
I have a lot more to say about all this, but unfortunately, I can’t do it alone. When I left Republican politics, I walked away from a steady income of hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. That decision cost me my life savings and destroyed family relationships. If you’re interested in more of the details of my journey, Rick Perlstein told some of it at the American Prospect about a year ago. The short version is this: I was born and raised in a fundamentalist Mormon family and fell into Republican politics by default until I realized that they were both cults.
I think my experience gives me unique insights about how to stop the cult of Trumpism, but I can’t do it all by myself.
I have a lot more to say about all this, but unfortunately, I can’t do it alone. When I left Republican politics, I walked away from a steady income of hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. That decision cost me my life savings and destroyed family relationships. If you’re interested in more of the details of my journey, Rick Perlstein told some of it at the American Prospect about a year ago. The short version is this: I was born and raised in a fundamentalist Mormon family and fell into Republican politics by default until I realized that they were both cults.
I think my experience gives me unique insights about how to stop the cult of Trumpism, but I can’t do it all by myself.
I would love to publish the other 10 sections of this essay. But because I don’t have access to any fancy consulting contracts, lucrative podcasts, or non-profit money, I need your help. If I can get at least 500 people to help me expand What Republicans Know, I would be able to support my family during the time it would take to expand it from my notes.
After that, I want to bundle them with several other chapters of historical, psychological, philosophical, and theological analysis into a full book called How This Happened: Donald Trump and the Origins of American Totalitarianism. Purchasing What Republicans Know will give you $15 off and my deep gratitude.
I think we have a lot to discuss—and to do. Let’s get serious about winning.
Thank you for your support.