Whatever happened to the blogosphere?

No one in the political world talks much about blogging too much nowadays, but from the mid- to late-2000s, they were the media hot property. I had a firsthand vantage point to the power of blogging at that time as one of the right-leaning bloggers who helped to end former CBS anchor Dan Rather’s tenure as an evening news host after he presented fake documents in a story. (As most of you know, I changed my political opinions in the years that followed.)

But blogs were big on the American left too, including one that is still alive and well, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, which has a vibrant community of people who have kept the conversation going since 2004.

Flux and LGM are going to be teaming up for regular live streams, and so I figured the first one would be about our mutual history and passion for blogging on the internet. Joining me for this discussion is Robert Farley, one of the LGM co-founders, and Scott Lemieux, another LGM co-founder.

Besides writing for their own site, Rob is a senior lecturer at the University of Kentucky on international affairs. Scott is professor of political science at the University of Washington.

The video and transcript of our conversation are below, including audio chapters for your convenience. You can subscribe to Theory of Change and other Flux podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Podcasts, YouTube, Patreon, Substack, and elsewhere.

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Audio Chapters

00:00 — Introduction

11:07 — Have Democrats learned anything about media since 2004?

15:33 — The hack gap and media asymmetry

20:11 — Coalition coherence and the blogosphere

24:27 — Progressive donors and plutocratic influence

29:50 — The professor’s fallacy and voter irrationality

35:03 — Moderate Republicans and primary challenges

39:21 — The Overton window and triangulation

43:44 — Coalition fractiousness and single-issue voters

48:58 — Rural voters and the Democratic coalition

53:35 — Jeff Gannon and the U.S. right’s love of new voices in contrast to the left

58:14 — Blogosphere history and media promotion

01:02:49 — Conservative vs reactionary politics

01:07:44 — Margins matter and campaign hustle

01:12:22 — Reactionary takeover of the Republican Party

01:17:28 — Media strategy and earned media

01:22:37 — Single-issue voters and coalition openness

01:27:22 — Regular people and Republican messaging

01:32:15 — The Ariana Grande theory of politics

01:37:14 — Successful political parties focus on both short-term and long-term

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Audio Transcript

The following is a lightly edited transcription of the discussion.

Introduction

Matthew Sheffield: Hello, everybody. Welcome to a live edition of Theory of Change. It’s great to have you here. We’ll cover a few preliminaries while we wait for more people to join the livestream. I’m Matthew Sheffield, a former conservative blogger who is now a progressive. I write about politics, technology, media, and other subjects.

I’m also a programmer. I’m joined today by two other gentlemen, so why don’t you introduce yourselves? Let’s start with you, Rob.

Robert Farley: My name is Rob Farley. I’ve been blogging since 2004, primarily at Lawyers, Guns & Money. I’ve also written for Tapped at The American Prospect, a couple of blogs associated with The Diplomat, and the naval blog Information Dissemination. I’ve been all over the place, but Lawyers, Guns & Money is the biggest and longest-running site that’s still active.

Scott Lemieux: I’m Scott Lemieux, one of the three co-founders of Lawyers, Guns & Money, along with Rob. I’m also an alumnus of Tapped, the long-lost great blog at The American Prospect. I once had beers in Washington, D.C., with Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias.

My career moved much further away from mainstream recognition after that. That was probably its peak. I also had beers with Clare Malone once.

That’s about it. Go ahead.

Robert Farley: I played poker with Matt Yglesias, Megan McArdle, and a few others one evening. I think Spencer might have been there. I don’t think Ezra was there, but Matt Duss was.

Scott Lemieux: That’s right.

Robert Farley: Loomis was at that game, too, so it’s surprising anybody escaped alive.

Scott Lemieux: I also teach political science at the University of Washington.

Matthew Sheffield: You didn’t mention your academic affiliation, Rob.

Robert Farley: I’m at the University of Kentucky in Lexington.

Matthew Sheffield: He’s been looking for Mitch McConnell, and he finally found him for us.

Scott Lemieux: Are you going to start a revolt against Beshear for not replacing Mitch McConnell with somebody who would actually vote? That would supposedly be a huge win, for reasons that remain unspecified.

Robert Farley: It’s shocking how many people went quiet about the need to replace McConnell once it became apparent that he was alive and sufficiently functional that it would be impossible to remove him from the Senate. I think that had been apparent for a long time.

Scott Lemieux: Yeah.

Matthew Sheffield: Yeah.

Robert Farley: A lot of people don’t know how the institution works, but what are you going to do?

Scott Lemieux: Yes, the political scientist’s curse.

Matthew Sheffield: I forgot to mention my own background in blogging. I was blogging before the word was even invented. One of my brothers and I co-created a website called ratherbiased.com, dedicated to criticizing Dan Rather.

In those days, Rather wasn’t as open about his political viewpoints, which, as we now know, are pretty progressive. I approached things from a Republican perspective, and at the time I was also a fundamentalist Mormon, although I didn’t advertise that to readers.

My brother and I were both still in college, and we didn’t even put our names on the site because we thought CBS might sue us. We were anonymous for at least a year. It didn’t matter, though: Rush Limbaugh quoted us on the first or second day after we launched.

That was an interesting experience. Then we got constant promotion on Fox & Friends. The contrast was striking. Sorry, a quick production note: Rob, can you make the post sticky so it stays at the top of the LGM site?

It looks like Paul just put something up.

Robert Farley: Yes.

Matthew Sheffield: Blog readers have always tended to navigate to the top post.

Scott Lemieux: Our blog has almost no coordination. We’ve gotten a little better about not publishing posts within minutes of one another, but it still happens.

Matthew Sheffield: I think you can delete the image at the top, or move it below the video so that visitors see the video first.

Robert Farley: I could put it below. Let me try that.

Scott Lemieux: The way our blog is configured, there has to be an image. But placing it below the video should work.

Robert Farley: Yes.

Matthew Sheffield: Okay.

Scott Lemieux: That’ll be fine.

Matthew Sheffield: While Rob does that, we’ll give more of the audience a chance to join us. Scott, let’s start with you. How did you get into reading the rants of random people on the internet? That’s how it always starts.

Scott Lemieux: For a lot of bloggers, the Iraq War was foundational. I spent time on blog message boards trying to dismantle the weak arguments being made on behalf of the war.

It felt like we were sleepwalking into the war, and the disagreements didn’t fall neatly along partisan lines. Another important aspect of my background was being a Supreme Court scholar, which became relevant soon after I started blogging.

We’re not going to get into the orange story, but I came to the attention of The American Prospect because my now-friend Sam Rosenfeld, who was editing there, saw posts I’d written about comparisons between Samuel Alito and Antonin Scalia. My argument was that, from a progressive perspective, Alito would be much worse than Scalia.

Scalia had some idiosyncrasies and occasionally voted from a libertarian perspective. Alito was much more reliably partisan, even if he was less flamboyant. At the time, that counted as a contrarian opinion. I was teaching at CUNY and had a long conversation at an event for Linda Greenhouse with a prominent Republican lawyer who had been involved in the Watergate prosecution.

I’m fairly confident this lawyer later voted for Clinton and Biden, so he wasn’t a hardcore movement conservative. But he told me, “You’re going to be so happy that you got Sam Alito. He’s going to be very mild.” He was confusing moderation in tone with moderation in voting. Simply pointing out things that now seem obvious could get you attention back then. The Supreme Court was in flux, and it was one of the two subjects I liked to argue about. Around the same time, David—the third original member of Lawyers, Guns & Money—Rob, and I were all finishing graduate school.

I’d gotten a job, and I think Dave stayed on for another year, although I forget the exact timeline. We were all going to be living in different cities. I’m pretty sure Rob suggested that, since we were already commenting on blogs and participating in that community, we should start our own.

We had no long-term vision or idea where it would lead. Am I recalling that correctly, Rob?

Robert Farley: I don’t know whether I originated the idea. Dave was the one who founded the blog on Blogspot. Scott left for New York first, then I went to Lexington, and a couple of years later Dave headed to Dayton. The idea developed over that period.

For my part, I was interested in the interpersonal side of blogging. I was also frustrated that public conversation on the left of the blogosphere, particularly about security issues, was often vague and poorly informed.

Matthew Sheffield: You mean national security, I presume?

Robert Farley: Right. That was true even though we were involved in at least two wars, one of which was incredibly poorly conceived. Many critiques from progressives also conflicted with the realities of how the national security state works and how wars are conducted.

From my point of view, we should resist the war in Iraq, but we should do it with a sound understanding of that war.

Scott Lemieux: That’s a great point. Our frustration about the war wasn’t just with support for it; it was also with opposition that focused on the wrong arguments. You could watch Fahrenheit 9/11, a major antiwar film with a huge audience, and see 45 minutes wasted on nonsense about a pipeline in Afghanistan.

The actual arguments against the war were much stronger than that. So we were frustrated not only with the arguments made by the war’s proponents, but also with weak arguments made by its opponents, which were easy to knock down.

I want to emphasize that distinction, because it’s often missed. Some of us believed there was a very strong case against the war but also believed that case wasn’t always made as well as it could have been.

We were frustrated with both sides. Rob had more expertise in this area than I did, but I felt that frustration, too.

Robert Farley: Scott, I don’t think the English language has words sufficient to describe how thoroughly you’ve been vindicated on Alito. He’s more hackish than any of the Trump-appointed justices. That’s what’s so stunning.

Somehow, Donald Trump has been unable to find anyone as hackish as Sam Alito. That makes your origin story particularly impressive.

Scott Lemieux: I suppose I have to give myself some credit. It might seem obvious now, but it wasn’t obvious to a lot of people then. Over the past 20 years, Matthew, I’ve generally been right about the things I wish I were wrong about, and wrong about the things I wish I were right about.

Matthew Sheffield: It sucks being a Cassandra. It really does.

I’d rather not have that experience.

Scott Lemieux: People forget that Cassandra was right.

Matthew Sheffield: I’d much rather not have the satisfaction of saying, “I told you so.”

Scott Lemieux: Absolutely. I’m happy to take the loss on a lot of those predictions.

Democrats’ messaging failures and media parallels

Matthew Sheffield: Something you both said reminds me of the parallels between the early days of blogging and politics today. It’s as if Democrats have learned nothing in 20 years. Looking back at 2024, Joe Biden had a lot he could have talked about.

He had popular, helpful policies, but he wasn’t out there taking credit for them. Meanwhile, Trump supporters were putting “I did that” stickers on gas pumps everywhere.

Did you ever see those? I saw them in Southern California, where there aren’t that many Republicans, but they were still active. That speaks to a larger issue. When I got into blogging, I felt that the Republican establishment under Bush wasn’t as passionate about messaging as I was.

It also wasn’t as insistent on attacking the media. I doubly wish I hadn’t been right about how effective those attacks would be. Trump has operationalized that strategy. Steve Bannon put it aptly during the first Trump administration when he said, “Our real opponents are the mainstream media. That is the enemy.”

He’s exactly right, because Republicans don’t have to talk about their policies. Most of their voters don’t know what those policies are, and many wouldn’t like them if they did. Scott, I’m sure you can speak to the polling showing that many Republican voters oppose their party’s positions on numerous issues.

That isn’t limited to economic policy. On abortion rights, voters in Republican states have supported reproductive freedom in ballot measures.

Scott Lemieux: In Florida, they had to change the rules.

Matthew Sheffield: And in some states, those protections haven’t become law because Republican legislators have obstructed them.

Scott, let’s focus on that.

Scott Lemieux: People have written a lot about the “hack gap” and what to do about it. But one widely misunderstood aspect of Fox News is that what it doesn’t cover is almost as important as what it does cover.

There’s a big difference between a conservative media outlet and a Republican media outlet. There is plenty of progressive media, and it would be inaccurate to call an outlet like The New York Times conservative.

The difference is that left-leaning media outlets are often highly critical of Democrats. Sometimes that criticism is justified, but Democrats’ policy failures and limitations receive extensive coverage.

That doesn’t really happen on the right. Fox News isn’t asking why Donald Trump isn’t codifying his immigration policies or why Republicans aren’t pushing for a national abortion ban. Unpopular initiatives, and failures to pursue initiatives with real consequences, simply don’t get that kind of coverage.

Instead, the focus is on migrant caravans or a transgender girl playing junior-high volleyball in Idaho. It’s an incredibly disciplined machine. The problem is that I don’t think there’s much of a market for comparable media on the left.

Even if somebody created it, would people want to watch? People pay for The New York Times. I wouldn’t want to pay for the liberal equivalent of Newsmax. Part of the difference comes down to the coalitions themselves.

That isn’t an easy problem to solve. But it means Republicans can get away with a great deal. During the last campaign, for example, Trump was able to distance himself from an incredibly unpopular policy platform simply by saying, “Oh, that’s nothing.”

The hack gap and media asymmetry

Scott Lemieux: “I don’t know anything about Project 2025. It had nothing to do with me.” And then the story was dropped. I don’t think Kamala Harris could have done that. If someone had produced a white paper full of deeply unpopular far-left policies and Harris had denied any connection to it, the story wouldn’t have disappeared after 12 hours.

I certainly don’t have a solution, but that asymmetry creates serious difficulties. I’ll never forget a 2018 interview with Claire McCaskill when she could see her race slipping away.

Someone pointed out that Missouri voters supported Medicaid expansion and abortion rights. She responded that outside St. Louis and Kansas City, every gas station, repair shop, and barbershop had Fox News on.

Those outlets weren’t covering those issues. Her point was that whatever limitations her own message had, people weren’t hearing it. There was no earned media. You can argue that this is an easy explanation for a losing politician to offer.

Maybe there were things she could have done differently. I’m not absolving politicians of responsibility for their failures. Still, it’s a legitimate problem, driven not only by the rise of Fox News but also by the collapse of local media and its advertising model. We have access to more news than ever, but that news is increasingly ideologically siloed.

There isn’t much local coverage. That makes breaking Republican dominance in rural areas very difficult, even when Republican policies are unpopular among rural Americans.

It’s hard for contrary information to break through. People notice when their hospitals close, but they don’t necessarily know why it’s happening unless they closely follow politics. That doesn’t mean they’re unintelligent or incapable of understanding the issues.

Even many of my students don’t fully understand how Medicaid expansion works. It’s fairly complicated policy, and the message is hard to communicate.

Matthew Sheffield: Another problem is that much of the remaining local media is owned by right-wing groups. There’s Sinclair, talk radio, and Christian radio, which is enormous and available nearly everywhere. In many places, you have both local Christian propaganda stations and Republican talk stations.

Sometimes you can’t even receive NPR. And NPR is nothing like the networks that promote a fiercely ideological and partisan agenda.

Scott Lemieux: I didn’t realize how long Jim Bakker remained involved in the grift. I think he was literally selling MyPillows. But that’s part of a much larger media network. People our age remember taking road trips, crossing a state line, turning on the radio, and often finding a Christian station first.

Younger people may not share that experience, but those networks still exist. And many people in the demographics most likely to vote still get their news from them.

I have another thought, but I want to give Rob a chance to speak first.

Matthew Sheffield: Rob, would you like to add anything?

Robert Farley: I have some tentative theories about why the media landscape looks the way it does, especially on the progressive side. They concern differences between the Republican and Democratic coalitions.

We could spend all day discussing the different groups within those coalitions. But I think most people recognize that the Republican coalition is more demographically and ideologically coherent than the Democratic coalition.

By “coherent,” I don’t mean that Republicans’ arguments necessarily make sense. I mean that more of them agree on basic ideological premises.

Matthew Sheffield: They’re compositionally more coherent.

Robert Farley: Exactly. That made the early blogosphere particularly interesting on the progressive side, perhaps more interesting than on the Republican side. We can come back to that.

Coalition coherence and the blogosphere

Robert Farley: Bloggers came from many different groups and brought diverse views to a conversation broadly situated on the left. They were small operations, though. They didn’t have to build something the size of a left-wing Newsmax and confront all the decisions involved in managing factional disagreements.

A larger organization would have to align with certain factions and make decisions that angered others. If it had survived into what some people call “woke 1.0”—what I call the “high woke” era—it would have faced disputes about who deserved a platform and whose voices should be respected.

The broad Democratic coalition simply isn’t well positioned to develop the media coherence and organizing logic that worked so well on the right in the 2000s and still works today. There isn’t enough ideological agreement to avoid factional conflict.

Matthew Sheffield: I think that’s true, but coherence on the Republican side was also engineered.

Robert Farley: That’s true.

Matthew Sheffield: It wasn’t happenstance. Fox News, for example, wasn’t profitable for at least its first several years, as I understand it. Newsmax grew from a tiny, self-funded operation with a shoestring budget.

I have a personal connection to Newsmax’s early days. In addition to building websites and doing some political consulting, I was producing a conservative comedy television show.

I’ll put links in the show notes, and you can share them as well. The show was called The Flip Side. We were trying to do something more like Jay Leno, but on the right, without being as mean-spirited as some other conservative comedy.

In fact, some people complained it wasn’t nasty enough. We pitched it to Newsmax for distribution, although we were already broadcasting it through syndication around the country. Chris Ruddy, Newsmax’s CEO, said, “It’s a good product, but our audience is too old for this.”

He thought his viewers wouldn’t like it because of their age. Normally, television executives talk about the coveted younger demographic. Newsmax was telling us to make comedy for 70-year-olds. But the larger point is that this infrastructure was deliberately built. The Washington Times, for example, has been around since 1982 without making a profit. There are many right-wing outlets like that, some owned by religious organizations that I would characterize as cults.

The Epoch Times is one example.

Scott Lemieux: The Washington Times, too, of course—the Moonie Times.

Matthew Sheffield: Exactly. There’s a commitment on the right to promoting the message and creating gathering places and information-distribution centers. The Washington Examiner is another example; I don’t think it has ever been profitable. Neither was The Weekly Standard, which is why it no longer exists.

There’s a willingness to create media products that lose money. On the left, Al Gore launched Current TV around the time blogging was taking off. It wasn’t immediately profitable, and he eventually pulled the plug.

Imagine if he had stuck with it and followed Newsmax’s slower-growth, self-funded approach. It might still be around and have a devoted audience.

Progressive donors and plutocratic influence

Scott Lemieux: Or consider Chris Hedges buying The New Republic and, after it didn’t turn a profit within a year, effectively deciding he’d rather build more wine tunnels in Manhattan than keep funding it. More broadly, plutocrats have moved heavily toward the Republican Party. I’ve repeatedly pointed out that Democrats became accustomed to a financial advantage during the Trump era, and that’s no longer the case.

Maybe that won’t matter much in this election cycle, but it’s a change we haven’t fully reckoned with. Even among wealthy progressives, too much money goes to vanity campaigns, like Tom Steyer’s, or to odd nonpartisan initiatives.

There’s no real left-wing equivalent of the Adelsons, who seem focused on one question: “How can I use my money to elect the most Republicans?” On the left, that kind of direct instrumental thinking can seem too vulgar.

I don’t have those resources myself, so I don’t know how to persuade wealthy progressives. Philanthropy and other projects are fine, but at some point the left also needs to counteract Republican political spending.

Another thing that drives me crazy is the recurring story every March after an election about donors such as Elon Musk or the Koch brothers supposedly tiring of partisan politics.

They talk about philanthropy or perhaps forming a third party. Then, by the summer of the next election cycle, they’re putting hundreds of millions of dollars behind Republican candidates. Can we stop reporting their declarations so credulously until their actions actually change?

There are a lot of frustrations there. Another gap—perhaps one particularly relevant to the Trump era—involves media that isn’t primarily political but can introduce political content.

The important thing about Joe Rogan and similar personalities is that their shows aren’t mainly about politics. Precisely for that reason, they reach people who don’t pay much attention to it. Trump’s ability to mobilize sporadic voters and nonvoters offsets many of his political weaknesses. That makes him much more complicated to defeat than some people recognize.

He has major weaknesses, but his strengths are difficult for liberals to replicate—and even for other conservatives to replicate. I don’t know what an equivalent outlet on the left would look like. The blogosphere largely served people already interested in politics.

Reaching people who normally aren’t paying attention with a political message is incredibly powerful. I don’t know whether there is a way to create a left-wing equivalent.

Robert Farley: Sorry to interrupt, Matthew, but that connects to your observations about today’s Republican coalition. Many of its members aren’t committed to particular policies. Their ideological coherence comes from a commitment to the Republican Party itself.

That’s different from supporting everything the party advocates. Scott’s point about Rogan reminds me of Gamergate, which wasn’t exactly political but was deeply political at the same time.

The people involved could be passionately focused on one extremely niche issue, regardless of what they thought about everything else in politics. Trump could mobilize their anger around that issue, even if much of the public wasn’t aware of it.

That connects with Rogan, Barstool Sports, and other ostensibly apolitical outlets that nevertheless steer audiences toward particular political viewpoints.

Matthew Sheffield: I just recorded an episode with Kristen Kobes Du Mez on that topic, focused on women rather than the male-oriented outlets we’re discussing. Returning to the early blogosphere, one similarity between bloggers on the left and right was their frustration.

We were frustrated with our own parties and with the media available to us. I heard that from Driftglass, another early left-wing blogger. His feeling was that Democrats weren’t saying what they needed to say, and nobody in the media was saying what he wanted them to say.

There’s also been a severe shortage of openly aggressive left-leaning media. I think that remains true. There’s an epistemic problem on the left: highly educated, financially comfortable people with left-leaning views often assume everyone thinks the way they do.

The professor’s fallacy and voter irrationality

Matthew Sheffield: They really do. In philosophy, this is sometimes called the professor’s fallacy, or it relates to the myth of the rational actor: the tendency to project one’s own reasoning onto others. Cognitive psychology has challenged that assumption. Economics treated rational behavior as a foundational doctrine from Adam Smith onward, until thinkers such as Daniel Kahneman demonstrated how much less rational people can be than economists imagined.

Kahneman wrote an entire book about it. I don’t think Democratic elites have fully absorbed that lesson. By contrast, right-wing elites often have so little respect for the public that they assume voters are stupid. They organize their messaging, campaigns, and financial systems around the belief that voters won’t understand policy arguments, and that they don’t need to.

Instead, they attract people through culture. Rupert Murdoch’s newspaper The Sun in the United Kingdom was famous for its topless photographs. For a long time, it featured one on a particular page of every issue.

Scott Lemieux: Page three.

Matthew Sheffield: Exactly, page three.

Every day there was a semi-nude photograph of a woman, sometimes with contests attached. You can dismiss that as awful, and of course there was an exploitative element, particularly when the women submitting photos needed money.

Nevertheless, Fox News uses a similar attention strategy: interesting angles, unusual stories, striking photographs, and plenty of sexual content. That’s ironic given how strongly the party wants to constrain people’s sex lives.

Robert Farley: That’s an interesting point. It’s somewhat less true now that the lunatics really do run the asylum. But living in Kentucky is different from living in Seattle or another urban area, where you might go a whole day without encountering a Republican.

That’s virtually impossible in Kentucky. Over the past 20 years, I’ve had many conversations with Republican policymakers, candidates, and people connected to them. Before Trump, almost every conversation seemed to include the line, “You don’t understand how crazy these people are.”

Republican officials would describe the people they encountered daily in small Kentucky towns as insane. They saw themselves as the sane, rational shield between liberals and what ordinary conservatives really thought about them and the country.

That was an extraordinarily common way to frame being a Republican, at least here, and I think elsewhere too. Then the Trump era arrived and that posture disappeared. Republican politicians stopped presenting themselves as the shield between the lunatics and the rest of the world.

Instead, they joined the lunatics. Democratic elected officials and people in the party’s electoral ecosystem may dislike leftists, to varying degrees depending on their relationships and locations.

But they’re generally not afraid of them, except perhaps that leftists won’t turn out to vote. By contrast, many Republican officials before Trump were genuinely afraid of their own constituents and what those constituents wanted to do. I’ve always found that disconnect fascinating.

Scott Lemieux: You can see that in Washington state, too. People forget that when we moved here for graduate school, Slade Gorton was still in the Senate. Republicans haven’t held the governorship for a long time, but some of those races were extremely close.

Until fairly recently, Washington Republicans were trying to assemble majorities by combining rural conservatives with Seattle-area suburbanites. Since Trump, they’ve largely stopped trying to compete that way.

Something similar has happened in California, where Republicans were competitive around the turn of the century. Rather than looking for openings among voters dissatisfied with decades of Democratic governance, the party has embraced full MAGA politics, despite having little electoral constituency for it in the state.

California does have a conservative tradition. Republican elites used to try to hold together a broad coalition while acting as a moderating shield. That approach is now largely gone.

Moderate Republicans and primary challenges

Scott Lemieux: Part of the reason is that Republicans who try to be moderate lose primaries. In Washington, a Republican House member who voted to impeach Trump lost his seat, which helped bring Marie Gluesenkamp Perez into the House. This phenomenon is visible in many places, even if Rob experiences it more directly in Lexington. States that were competitive 20 years ago now have Republican parties dominated by Trump.

It will be interesting to see what happens after Trump. As long as he’s alive, he’ll remain the party’s de facto leader, regardless of who its candidates are. The question is whether anyone can eventually replace him in that role.

Matthew Sheffield: We have a viewer comment I’d like you to respond to. The username is CaseRay7, I think. They write that Republicans cost themselves Washington’s third congressional district by nominating Joe Kent in 2022.

Scott Lemieux: Absolutely. In many of these races, success requires both a strong Democratic candidate and a weak Republican opponent. Beto O’Rourke, for example, is obviously a gifted politician, but that probably wouldn’t be enough if Republicans ran a relatively normal conservative candidate.

Texas right now is a classic example. Talarico is a very talented politician, although perhaps more liberal than you’d ideally want in a statewide Texas race. But Texas Republicans chose a staggeringly bad candidate without gaining any ideological advantage.

Cornyn wasn’t moderate or anti-Trump. The decision is baffling. Upsets often require both parties to make a contribution, so the comment about Joe Kent is exactly right. Kent emerged after his predecessor suggested that trying to overthrow democratic government might not be a good idea. Ten years ago, that position wouldn’t have seemed especially controversial.

Democrats may have a few suboptimal nominees, but overall I think our candidate recruitment has been better. It’s remarkable that we’re barely even talking about the North Carolina Senate race.

Trump won that state three times, yet the race isn’t very competitive. In many places, Democrats have found reasonable candidates while Republican primary voters, without that old moderating shield, have made choices that help Democrats.

I still won’t quite believe a Democratic victory in the Texas race until it happens, whatever the polls say. But I hope Democrats can take advantage of this opening. Despite their many structural disadvantages, Democrats benefit from the fact that some Republican primary voters don’t care very much about winning general elections. In many places, they can afford not to.

In certain races, though, those choices really matter.

Robert Farley: I’m going to take an extraordinary personal risk by invoking Matthew Yglesias, who gets a lot of criticism for arguing that the median-voter theorem still matters, even if the reality is more complicated than his account suggests.

There are trade-offs between nominating an ideologically appealing candidate and a more moderate one. But Republican primaries offer plenty of examples of nominees who substantially reduce the party’s chance of winning otherwise competitive races.

That’s been true since at least the 2000s, with examples in Delaware and elsewhere. I wouldn’t go so far as to endorse Yglesias’s argument for replacing primaries with smoke-filled rooms.

Still, the two parties have very different dynamics when it comes to nominations.

The Overton window and triangulation

Matthew Sheffield: I want to push back somewhat. I agree that Republicans lose races by nominating extremists. But their willingness to nominate extreme candidates also shifts the Overton window to the right.

They may lose occasionally, but imagine one candidate running as Hitler and another saying, “I’m only going to be kind of like Hitler.” To many voters, the second candidate now looks moderate.

Most voters don’t know much about ideology or have a coherent ideology themselves. Surveys consistently show that many people describe themselves as moderate when asked about their political identity.

But their actual views may not be moderate. Some describe themselves as conservative because they believe the Bible is true, even if their policy preferences aren’t conservative. There’s considerable inconsistency.

Republicans are willing to lose an occasional election to gain a longer-term advantage. Democrats have had the opposite problem: they often nominate candidates who seem reasonable, but the logic of triangulation moves them closer to their opponents’ positions.

Over time, that has helped make Republicans extremely reactionary, while the Democratic Party, until recently, was much more conservative than many ostensibly left-wing parties internationally.

Robert Farley: I’m not sure I agree, especially with the international comparison. There’s a lot of political science on this. On many issues, the Democratic Party wouldn’t be seen as conservative compared with a European center-left party. People are often surprised by that when they visit Europe.

Matthew Sheffield: That’s true now, but things have changed since Bernie Sanders came along.

Robert Farley: Yeah.

Scott Lemieux: The Democratic Party is certainly to the left of where it was under Clinton, and in some respects to the left of where it was in Obama’s first term. Biden governed in a surprisingly progressive way, even though his presidency had many failures. That wasn’t necessarily what people would have expected.

As a political scientist, I also have to point out that the structure of American politics gives Republicans much more leeway. They can afford to be more homogeneous and even throw away several Senate seats under circumstances that should favor them.

They might still end up with 48 seats. Democrats, by contrast, have to win nearly every race they could plausibly win just to secure a narrow majority. The Republicans’ structural advantage gives them a choice: they could build a broad Christian-democratic-style coalition and often threaten to win 60 Senate seats, or they could remain highly conservative and assemble narrower majorities. They chose the latter.

From their perspective, that isn’t necessarily the wrong choice.

Robert Farley: Sometimes it helps and sometimes it hurts. Both during Trump’s first term and now, he would have benefited from another Senate seat. Better choices in Republican primaries could have provided one.

Scott Lemieux: So there are real trade-offs. The strong rural bias of American political institutions does create significant challenges for Democrats.

Coalition fractiousness and single-issue voters

Robert Farley: Another reason I’d push back is that I don’t think many problems within the Democratic coalition—or, more accurately, Democratic coalitions—can be analyzed simply in left-right terms.

One of the major lessons of 2024, apart from the Biden issues, was that there was no way to satisfy every part of the Democratic coalition on Israel and Gaza policy.

I know people can become hostile when we discuss this, but every step toward distancing the United States from Benjamin Netanyahu risked angering a group of very loyal, wealthy Jewish voters who have long supported Democrats partly because of the party’s relationship with Israel.

Every step in the opposite direction risked alienating a newer, extremely vocal faction of the party. And this isn’t limited to Israel and Gaza. Transgender issues create similar internal tensions.

On Bluesky, you can pretend that the Democratic coalition is uniformly supportive of trans rights, but it isn’t. Pro-trans politics can carry a cost in some Democratic-leaning communities. These conflicts aren’t captured simply by the categories of left and right.

The fractious nature of the Democratic coalition makes it harder to practice the kind of politics Republicans practice.

Matthew Sheffield: That goes back to Scott’s point about the Republican coalition’s homogeneity. It’s also important to distinguish conservatives from reactionaries, something I don’t think the left does nearly enough.

That distinction matters because many conservative voters support Democrats. It’s one reason Republicans talk so much about trans issues. As you said, Rob, the issue has little direct relevance to the lives of the vast majority of voters.

The NCAA president said that among tens or hundreds of thousands of athletes—I’m forgetting the exact figure—fewer than 10 were trans athletes.

Scott Lemieux: And most were ordinary athletes playing on ordinary teams.

Matthew Sheffield: They aren’t dominating competitions.

If trans athletes were winning all these events, we’d constantly hear about it.

Scott Lemieux: Exactly.

Matthew Sheffield: Instead, the far right keeps putting forward Riley Gaines, who lost to cisgender women.

Scott Lemieux: And she says, “I can’t believe Hillary Clinton is still talking about losing.” Really, Riley? You can’t imagine anyone still dwelling on where they finished? Fascinating.

Matthew Sheffield: Funny you mention that. You’re right that Democrats are more ideologically diverse. Pew Research Center publishes useful political typologies every few years, and I’m working on a detailed analysis of them to show the internal divisions within the Democratic coalition.

But these dynamics are not immutable. Scott, you’re right about the electoral system favoring Republicans, but that’s a feature of the current political alignment. Historically, many rural voters and rural states were progressive.

Consider William Jennings Bryan. Today, if people know him at all, they often remember him as the man who opposed teaching evolution. Earlier in his career, however, he ran for president on a platform that was progressive for its time, with some proposals that would still be considered radical.

He was also a Christian fundamentalist. It’s not that Democrats can’t win rural or highly religious traditionalist voters. I think party elites see how difficult that would be and simply don’t want to try.

Robert Farley: You’re partly right. But Democratic elites also know that many of their current voters don’t want rural Kansans as part of the coalition. Some might stop voting Democratic if they felt the party was specifically appealing to those voters.

Rural voters and the Democratic coalition

Robert Farley: That’s especially true if the party softens cultural appeals that are extremely popular in urban areas. Even small changes can make the urban coalition harder to hold together.

Matthew Sheffield: I’m not sure how that disagrees with my point, Rob.

Scott Lemieux: I see the connection, too.

Robert Farley: Those voters aren’t simply available to be won over. Under almost any plausible political arrangement in 2026, you can have one group of voters or the other, but not necessarily both.

Matthew Sheffield: I’ll respond to that, but first I want to let Scott jump in.

Scott Lemieux: One thing I want to emphasize is that margins matter. We sometimes frame the question as whether Democrats can win the rural vote.

That’s a very long-term project, because political identity is sticky. Some states may be write-offs in the short term. But in other places, there’s a huge difference between winning 32 percent of the rural vote and winning 20 percent.

Barack Obama didn’t win the rural vote, but he did much better among rural and white working-class voters than Joe Biden did. Part of that difference reflects long-term coalitional change. One of my disagreements with Yglesias is that I think he overestimates how much a candidate can gain through positioning in a single election.

You can’t simply reassemble Jimmy Carter’s coalition by running a particular kind of candidate. Still, I agree with Matthew that fatalism can set in. Some ideologically committed voters will never want to join a multiracial, diverse coalition.

But that doesn’t describe everyone. Other people might prioritize economic issues or hold more moderate views. Democrats have to recognize the electoral system as it exists and find ways to reduce the margins by which they lose in difficult places.

The goal isn’t necessarily to win unfavorable demographic groups outright, but to stop the bleeding. That’s easier said than done, but it isn’t entirely zero-sum. Reaching out to new voters doesn’t automatically alienate all your existing supporters.

Often the goal isn’t to win a majority of a particular group. It’s to keep your losses small enough that your majorities elsewhere can carry you to victory.

That’s why it’s dangerous to permanently write off whole regions. I’m not saying Democrats should follow people who insist they should have poured more resources into Missouri in every election.

Robert Farley: Mm-hmm.

Scott Lemieux: In individual elections, you have to triage.

You can’t compete for every voter all the time. But as a long-term project, you can look at Kansas, for instance. After Sam Brownback, it has moved somewhat toward Democrats, has a potentially competitive Senate race, and is attracting more liberal residents to the Kansas side of the Kansas City suburbs. Could those changes eventually make the state competitive?

Those possibilities are worth exploring. Not every state with a large rural population is Wyoming.

Jeff Gannon and the U.S. right’s love of new voices in contrast to the left

Matthew Sheffield: There’s a good comment on the LGM page where this livestream is embedded. Let me find it. Disqus moved it on me. Here it is: Chris Mote writes, “Don’t forget to discuss Jeff Gannon.” That’s actually a very relevant example.

Scott Lemieux: Excellent, Baz.

Matthew Sheffield: People who followed politics then may remember Jeff Gannon, a gay escort in Washington, D.C. Somehow he also became a far-right blogger. I’m not sure we ever learned precisely how that happened.

Those roles might seem incongruous, but he was doing both. He obtained credentials to the Bush White House press room and started appearing there. In some ways, that foreshadowed how the Trump White House deals with the press.

Matthew Sheffield: There’s a major difference in how the parties’ elites respond to their own constituencies. Republicans are often willing to include almost anyone, unless they’re openly advocating something as extreme as killing Jews—and even then there are exceptions.

Robert Farley: Even that line can be disturbingly blurry.

Scott Lemieux: Yeah.

Matthew Sheffield: For most Republicans, Nick Fuentes is a bridge too far, but barely.

Unless you’re as extreme as Fuentes, or close to him, they’ll embrace you, promote you, and fund you. On the Democratic side, by contrast, elites often despise their influencers and treat them as people to be manipulated.

They expect influencers to distribute the party’s messaging without questioning it. That creates an adversarial relationship. I knew I had it easier on the right, but when I moved left, I was surprised by how much worse the dynamic was than it had appeared. When my brother and I launched our anonymous ratherbiased.com site, Rush Limbaugh promoted it on the first or second day.

He had no idea who we were. We were anonymous people attacking someone he disliked, and he told his audience to read our website. Fox News followed suit. One Fox & Friends host, E. D. Hill, later got fired after a racist remark about Barack and Michelle Obama’s fist bump.

Remember that? She called it a “terrorist fist jab.”

Scott Lemieux: Can you imagine someone getting fired for that now? In 2026, that might be the hundredth most offensive thing on a typical Fox & Friends episode.

Matthew Sheffield: They say things like that every day now. But Hill called our site her favorite website, and Fox & Friends repeatedly quoted our material on the air.

Meanwhile, MSNBC seems unwilling to engage with people unless the algorithms have already given them an enormous following. Once you’ve gained 500,000 followers, MSNBC might invite you on.

With 50,000 followers, forget it.

Robert Farley: This is interesting, and Scott has discussed it in our blogosphere-history series. Some of the differences are structural, but others are personal. The divergent development of the left and right blogospheres partly reflects how Josh Marshall, Duncan Black, and Glenn Reynolds understood their ideological projects.

Glenn Reynolds saw his platform as a way to promote writers from across the right, including people he disagreed with. He would amplify figures under a broad right-wing umbrella in a way that you didn’t see as much from Josh Marshall or several other prominent bloggers.

I’ve wondered how much of that evolution reflected structural forces and how much reflected individual choices. And speaking of the difference between having 50,000 and 500,000 followers, it’s worth recalling that a major presidential campaign in 2008 went all in on the blogosphere.

It hired several controversial figures from the left blogosphere. We all love Amanda, but I’m not sure I would have placed her in the role John Edwards’s campaign gave her. I don’t know what Edwards expected to gain.

So the left blogosphere had complicated internal dynamics. Its history isn’t simply a story of the Democratic establishment rejecting bloggers.

Blogosphere history and media promotion

Scott Lemieux: Rob and I have been discussing these issues in our history-of-the-blogosphere series. Atrios, or Duncan Black, actively sought out people to promote, including us. Josh Marshall generally didn’t. And that’s not a criticism: Josh has built a profitable news site and does terrific work. But his blogroll might have had five names, one of them Mickey Kaus.

Discovering other people’s writing and linking to it just wasn’t the focus of his project, and that’s fine. It was a different approach. More broadly, ideological liberals tend to be individualistic rather than strongly team-oriented, which also shapes the kind of media they want to consume.

That’s not necessarily bad. I wouldn’t want a left-wing Newsmax, but there are costs to that orientation, and the same tensions showed up in the blogosphere and its relationship with the party.

Not everyone in the Democratic Party shunned bloggers. Some campaigns, including Edwards’s, tried to engage them, but the efforts weren’t always carefully thought through.

The broader relationship between party elites and media was already playing out in the early blogosphere. What strikes me is how quickly enormous conservative platforms began promoting your work, Matthew.

Younger people may not understand how influential Rush Limbaugh was. It’s hard to imagine a liberal counterpart. Even in an alternate universe where Al Franken had Limbaugh’s audience, I doubt he’d be linking to an obscure new blog right away.

That’s generally not how the left operates. The striking thing is that this wasn’t just Glenn Reynolds promoting you; it was Rush Limbaugh and Fox & Friends. They were amplifying a critique of Dan Rather at a moment when he had badly mishandled a story about George W. Bush, which ended up insulating Bush from otherwise legitimate criticism.

When someone overreaches, you can use it to discredit them. The right recognized both an opportunity to promote young writers and a larger narrative that could help its cause.

That’s something the left doesn’t have in the same form. I don’t know how to reproduce it, or whether doing so at that scale would even be desirable. But it’s a remarkable anecdote that fills in an important piece of blogosphere history.

Speaking of that history, Rob, did you ever interview Jonah Goldberg?

Robert Farley: No, I haven’t. I’ll try again. We might as well ask the old professor for his perspective. Another point I want to make, Matthew, builds on something you already mentioned.

Rush and the Fox personalities weren’t just recognizing your work. They were extraordinarily good at identifying the other side’s center of gravity. Rather than directing their attacks exclusively at Democratic politicians, they understood that Dan Rather was a valuable target and that mainstream media was, in some ways, a load-bearing pillar of the Democratic coalition at the time.

That was strategically savvy, and I don’t often see the same degree of awareness among people on our side.

Matthew Sheffield: I’m exploring some of these points in an e-book called What Republicans Know. I should turn some of my outlines into chapters. The asymmetry we’re discussing is real, and I think its origins are tied to the distinction between conservative and reactionary politics.

Conservative vs reactionary politics

Matthew Sheffield: A conservative wants to preserve things as they currently are, not restore them to the way they once were. That’s an important distinction. Many people are politically inert: they don’t know much about politics and aren’t highly motivated by it. They’re waiting for someone engaging, talented, or funny to capture their interest.

The particular issue may not even matter. Some of these voters supported Barack Obama in 2008 and, to some extent, in 2012. Suffolk University used to conduct a useful polling series about “unlikely voters,” asking why some people don’t participate in elections.

Democrats often misunderstand nonparticipation. They assume people don’t vote primarily because registration is difficult, they don’t know where to go, or they lack time. Those barriers are real for a minority of people.

But I think the main reason many people don’t vote is that no one is speaking to them and explaining, “Here’s what I’m going to do for you.”

Robert Farley: We’ve discussed this a lot on the blog. Common assumptions among both leftists and liberals about the ideological preferences of nonvoters have turned out to be largely wrong.

There isn’t a vast untapped electorate waiting to vote for socialism, nor a huge population of committed liberals who would vote if only they could make it to the polls. What’s fascinating is that Republicans don’t seem to fully understand this either.

If they did, they might be less enthusiastic about restrictions on voting. A significant number of the roughly 38 percent of Americans who rarely or never vote could support Republicans—and perhaps more of them than would support Democrats.

Matthew Sheffield: Pew has found that, and so has The New York Times. Many nonvoters like Trump.

Robert Farley: Yeah.

That finding still doesn’t seem to have changed Republican thinking about voting access, which fascinates me.

Scott Lemieux: Whenever I think about Trump, I remember something Bill James wrote in one of his early baseball abstracts. He argued that people lump bad teams together, even though they can be bad in very different ways. The San Francisco Giants, for example, developed tremendous talent and then traded it away for nothing.

That was different from the ordinary incompetence in Cleveland. The Giants combined extraordinary strengths with extraordinary weaknesses. Trump is like that. People often say he should be easy to beat, but he has distinctive strengths that other politicians lack.

He’s not easy to beat. For one thing, he was a famous celebrity able to command immense media attention. Another strength—something I saw someone note online—is his appetite for campaigning and being on the road.

He made many more appearances than Clinton. Biden’s 2020 campaign was different for obvious reasons, but even compared with Clinton and Harris, Trump’s schedule stood out. It’s frustrating, because Harris, despite some weaknesses in unscripted settings, could be very good at rallies.

She was capable of strong extemporaneous speaking. I don’t know whether she was receiving bad advice or making her own choices, but she wasn’t doing two or three rallies a day the way Trump often did. Now, I suspect Republican elites would prefer Trump to stay off the road.

They even seem to be steering him away from swing areas. But Democrats can learn something from Trump’s presidential campaigns. As you said, Matthew, they won’t reach sporadic voters and nonvoters if they never try to speak to them.

If you’re willing to travel and hold more rallies, you never know who might come along with a friend and hear your message.

Some attendees will connect with it and others won’t. The idea that there’s a huge population of nonvoters who already share a coherent ideology and just need to be mobilized is wrong. But there are people who might respond to something you say. Many sporadic voters who backed Trump don’t embrace his whole agenda; they may simply have responded to one specific promise.

Matthew Sheffield: And they don’t even know the details.

Scott Lemieux: Lower prices. That was the promise.

That sounds appealing, and many of those people won’t vote in the midterms. Some of Trump’s strengths are unique to him, but not all of them are. Some of it is simply a willingness to do the work.

Margins matter and campaign hustle

Scott Lemieux: This returns to my earlier point about margins. Elections are so competitive now that you don’t need an enormous demographic realignment. A small number of sporadic or first-time voters, or a slight shift within a demographic group, can be decisive.

Democrats should look for a 2028 candidate who isn’t merely good at communicating, but genuinely enjoys it and wants to be on the road talking to voters. I like what Jon Ossoff has been doing with debates and his willingness to engage directly.

One lesson I take from Trump—and one I’ll be interested to see explored in your e-book—is that hustle matters. Try to attract the attention of as many voters as possible.

Democrats haven’t always put enough emphasis on that. Political science shows that campaigns can have limited effects, often only at the margin. But marginal doesn’t mean immaterial.

Matthew Sheffield: It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it.

Scott Lemieux: Exactly. Margins matter a hell of a lot.

Robert Farley: Every U.S. presidential election since 2000 has been decided at the margins, except perhaps 2008.

Scott Lemieux: Yeah.

Matthew Sheffield: We have another comment from CaseRay7, making a point I was thinking about. They write, “Trump rallies benefited from outsized media attention because he largely ad-libbed them and was prone to saying insane things, and therefore got more coverage.” I assume they’re thinking especially of 2016.

That’s true, but Jon Ossoff has demonstrated that Democrats can generate attention without saying insane things. Too many Democratic elites seem to think that if they aren’t willing to behave outrageously, they shouldn’t even try to get that kind of coverage.

Ossoff mentioned Natalie Harp in a single sentence and set off a national news cycle that lasted at least a week, maybe two. How often does a Democrat do that? I can’t remember the last comparable example. People want candidates to engage. Democrats can provoke Republicans and generate attention, but they have to try. Too often, when faced with something unfamiliar, their response is, “I don’t understand this.”

Then they write another New York Times op-ed. The Times has an enormous audience—it’s one of the country’s leading print and digital news outlets and among the best known in the world—but that audience is still limited.

I have friends who work there, and some may watch this later. Hello to them. But you have to fish in more than one pond.

Trump understood that. The idea even goes back to Barry Goldwater, who had a phrase about going where the voters are. What was it?

Scott Lemieux: Hunting where the ducks are?

Matthew Sheffield: Right, go where the ducks are. Goldwater was talking about reactionary voters.

But there are also plenty of ordinary voters no one talks to. They may dislike Trump and have no intention of voting for him, but they still won’t vote for Democrats if Democrats don’t reach out. And this connects to my distinction between conservatives and reactionaries: the reactionaries who took over the Republican Party made media central to their project from the start.

They targeted a national party that had been a cross-ideological, cross-regional coalition led by professionals mainly interested in winning elections. The reactionaries realized that if they took control of the party’s institutions, those professionals would have to support them.

Reactionary takeover of the Republican Party

Matthew Sheffield: Once that happened, the party professionals had to back them. Through their media outlets, reactionaries then radicalized and frightened more passive conservatives. They told politically disengaged conservative Christians, “If you don’t vote Republican, Christianity will be illegal.”

They also say, “If you don’t vote Republican, they’re going to turn your child trans,” along with other horrible lies. Democrats rightly reject that rhetoric, but the underlying communication tactics are separate from the content. You can learn from the strategies without copying the falsehoods.

Democratic elites don’t seem to grasp that distinction. Republicans have to be better at politics because their ideas are so unpopular. If people understood their agenda, I think they’d get perhaps 20 or 25 percent of the vote.

That may be the share who truly supports those views when policies are presented without partisan labels. In 2024, YouGov conducted an interesting survey in which respondents evaluated policies endorsed by Trump and Harris without being told which candidate supported them.

It found that more than half of self-identified Trump supporters preferred Harris’s agenda. Imagine how badly Democrats must be branding and marketing themselves if their policies are that popular but many voters don’t associate them with the party.

That’s my problem with the Yglesias approach: Democrats already have popular ideas. Their problem isn’t the policies themselves; it’s that voters often don’t hear about them.

Robert Farley: Or the policies don’t matter to their vote.

Matthew Sheffield: Or they don’t matter. It’s probably some of both. Either way, Democrats are approaching politics incorrectly when they assume people vote primarily on issues. Some people do, but many don’t.

Remember the way George W. Bush was compared with John Kerry? People were asked which candidate they’d rather have a beer with. That’s a ridiculous criterion for choosing a president.

Robert Farley: Especially when one actually drank beer and the other was a recovering alcoholic.

Matthew Sheffield: It’s a crazy way to choose a president, but it’s part of political reality.

Scott Lemieux: I have another meeting at six Eastern, so I’ll have to go soon. But there’s one more point I want to make: Democrats need to use the media instrumentally. They have to think strategically about their relationship with it.

I think the coverage of the 2016 campaign was an absolute disgrace. I understand why Hillary Clinton was furious. The disproportionate attention to trivial scandals was ridiculous.

Having said that, Amy Chozick’s memoir describes Philippe Reines directing some disgusting, misogynistic insults at journalists. That might feel satisfying, but it’s not an effective mindset for a campaign that’s trying to win.

Your job is to communicate your agenda. As Matthew says, Democrats have many potentially popular policy positions. They need to get those messages out through earned media.

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter who received fair treatment. I probably agree with 98 percent of the Clinton campaign’s complaints about its coverage, but litigating fairness isn’t the campaign’s main task. Worry about that afterward, and let surrogates criticize the press if necessary.

Trump understands the practical value of the media. He’s had a symbiotic relationship with it since the early 1980s. He complains about it constantly, but he also knows how to use it.

Democrats need that kind of strategic mindset. It won’t magically make voters cast ballots strictly on policy, but in closely fought elections the tactical choices matter.

You have to ask what journalists want to cover, what material you can give them, and how to get your message into those stories. You can’t simply expect nonconservative outlets to treat Democrats fairly, however reasonable that expectation might be. Ossoff’s approach—naming someone in a way that generates stories without being offensive or making false claims—is a good example.

Media strategy and earned media

Scott Lemieux: Those are the sorts of opportunities candidates should look for. Someone compared Ossoff with Newsom today, particularly Ossoff’s calm questioning of Collins about the 2020 election. Fighting back doesn’t mean pursuing any random controversy or whatever happened to show up on television.

The fight needs to be considered and strategic. There’s nothing wrong with moderating some positions, either. But Gavin Newsom sometimes makes a point of announcing that he’s taking a moderate position. That isn’t especially useful. It’s better for those positions to fit naturally within an overall public persona.

You shouldn’t simply announce, “I’m a liberal trying to appeal to moderate voters.” That’s ineffective. The message should appear coherent and authentic, not like a series of transparent tactical adjustments.

I’m not endorsing Ossoff for 2028 at this early date. But he and other successful candidates show how Democrats can reach people who aren’t already strong supporters with messages that might appeal to them. That’s the bottom line.

Matthew Sheffield: I agree. I know you have to leave, Scott, so I won’t keep you.

Scott Lemieux: Thanks very much for having us, Matthew, and thanks to everyone who listened and who reads the blog. This was a terrific conversation, and I hope we can speak again.

Robert Farley: Absolutely.

Matthew Sheffield: That was great.

Scott Lemieux: Thanks.

Matthew Sheffield: I agree with Scott’s points. Rob, can you stay until the bottom of the hour? Okay, we’ll go another 28 minutes. Another thing Republicans do well is invest in media.

For Republicans, media is the central pillar of their strategy, not something peripheral. Trump complains about it constantly because he thinks about it constantly. Media attention is how he gets the pomp and circumstance he wants.

From an investment standpoint, many right-wing outlets aren’t profitable. Breitbart and The Daily Caller are examples. Apart from talk radio, Fox News, and Newsmax, I would argue that most of the major right-wing outlets have never been profitable and probably never will be.

Yet they survive because Republican campaigns direct some donor money toward these outlets by buying advertising. Let’s take a hypothetical example involving The Daily Caller. These numbers are illustrative, not actual figures. Suppose its annual budget is $2 million.

Suppose normal advertising revenue is only $200,000. A large shortfall could be filled partly through a nonprofit foundation that funds articles and accepts tax-deductible donations.

Campaigns also buy ads. An outlet accustomed to receiving $200,000 in annual advertising might receive $50,000 from a single week of campaign advertising across its site. That spending helps keep these outlets alive. Collectively, they’ve helped turn relatively passive conservatives into radical reactionaries.

That’s part of how Republicans became so extreme under Trump. Reactionaries had been working on this transformation for decades, but Trump accelerated it by giving them an opening to cement their control of the party.

It worked. Democrats, meanwhile, still operate like an old-fashioned coalition party without a strong unifying ideological impulse. They need one. That doesn’t mean everyone has to become a socialist or a communist. It means building common cause among people who care about different issues—environmental protection, civil rights, reproductive freedom, and others.

It’s fine to be a single-issue voter, but you also need to recognize that other issues matter and support people working on them. In that sense, you have to be like Glenn Reynolds: promote people even when you don’t fully understand or agree with them.

Single-issue voters and coalition openness

Robert Farley: Here’s where I see a fundamental disjunction. I’ve made this observation jokingly before, but I think it’s true about the Trump coalition.

Imagine a Republican voter living with five family members, three of whom are undocumented immigrants. He hates trans people so much that he votes for Trump, even though he can’t join a union and is suffering heavily from inflation.

He may also be harmed by workplace regulations under Republican governments. Nevertheless, the Republican coalition welcomes him. So, too, with a hypothetical lesbian bookstore owner downtown who is deeply hostile to immigrants in her neighborhood.

Despite agreeing with Democrats on many other issues and disagreeing with Trump on most policies, she’s welcomed into the Republican coalition. The message is, “You’re free to join us.” Democrats don’t operate that way, and I don’t think we can with the coalition we have now.

Maybe we could have done that 25 or 30 years ago. But I know how our own comment section works at Lawyers, Guns & Money. I know what some commenters think about Kentucky and the people who live here.

Single-issue voters aren’t as welcome in the Democratic coalition as they are in the Republican coalition. I don’t think that’s simply a decision by elites or party establishments.

I think it’s a feature of the coalition itself. You’re right that Democrats aren’t an ideological party in quite the same way Republicans are, and that goes back to the parties’ histories. Democrats were built as a governing coalition.

The Republican Party, by comparison, was founded around a stronger ideological core. This makes competing difficult. One possible explanation—and I’m still working through this—is that Trump is uniquely capable of exploiting the Democratic coalition’s weaknesses.

He exploits its factionalism by mobilizing single-issue voters whose common thread is hostility to some element of the Democratic coalition. That makes them available to Republicans.

Matthew Sheffield: I agree that’s a problem. Media is one of the ways Republicans exploit it. They attract someone like your hypothetical lesbian bookstore owner because she dislikes immigrants, then begin feeding her messages on other subjects.

Over time, some people change their minds about guns, taxes, and other policy areas. Sadly, some even reverse their support for marriage equality.

It’s awful to watch, but it happens. Republicans also treat someone who doesn’t fit their usual demographic stereotype as a valuable spokesperson. That embrace isn’t necessarily sincere: they don’t want to hear her views if she supports marriage equality or opposes Christian nationalism.

But if she sticks to the one issue she shares with them, they’re eager to put her front and center, despite her disagreements on everything else. Democrats underestimate the power of ordinary people with compelling stories and strong feelings about an issue.

It’s more than a hypothetical dynamic. I experienced a version of it when Fox promoted me even though I was an unknown, anonymous blogger.

Regular people and Republican messaging

Matthew Sheffield: Fox doesn’t do that just with me. Every day they’ll introduce an ordinary person—John Smith from North Carolina, angry about one issue, or Susie Q, upset about something else—and let that person tell a story.

For people who don’t follow politics, or who distrust politicians, seeing a relatable person speak passionately about an issue can be compelling, especially if they agree with that person. It’s important that these guests seem authentic, speaking in their own words rather than reciting a disciplined campaign message.

This allows Republicans to disguise how plutocratic their policies are. A very large share of their funding comes from billionaires who treat politics as an investment rather than a donation. Yet a party whose leaders want to extract wealth from the country has managed to portray Democrats as the anti-American party.

Robert Farley: There’s something to that, but I want to add a point.

Matthew Sheffield: Go ahead.

Robert Farley: Democrats win about half the time, which is what you’d expect in a two-party system. What’s striking isn’t simply the number of Republican victories; it’s that Republicans seem to have defied the median-voter logic we’re discussing by growing ever more extreme.

They’ve become more extreme without paying the expected electoral price. That’s puzzling. Media is clearly part of the explanation, but there’s also something distinctive about Trump himself.

It may have something to do with perceptions of corruption. In 2016, many people didn’t see Trump as radical; they saw Clinton as more radical than Trump. That finding has been widely discussed.

We’re still trying to explain why. Much of the answer may be what you’ve described: Democrats lack a media ecosystem capable of consistently portraying Trump and his associates as the radicals they are.

But some of the explanation may lie in Trump’s uniquely familiar public image. On our last podcast with Julia Azari, she said, “I’ve never not known who Donald Trump was.” She was born in the 1980s, I believe.

There’s never been a moment in her life when she didn’t know who Trump was. That’s unusual, and I find its political implications difficult to assess.

Matthew Sheffield: That’s a fair point. Republicans still win other races, though, so the broader political system is also strong in ways many people on the center-left underestimate. Is it Paul who has the Ariana Grande theory of politics?

Is that Paul’s idea? Could you summarize it for listeners who aren’t familiar with it?

Robert Farley: The Ariana Grande argument is similar to what we’ve been discussing. I’d phrase it a little differently, but the basic idea is that politics is a hobby or an enthusiasm, like baseball, popular music, football, or gaming.

People who are deeply interested in politics know a lot about it and have considered reasons for their views. Other people are deeply interested in Ariana Grande and only start paying attention to politics in the four months before an election.

Those Ariana Grande voters need to be informed and mobilized in ways different from what political obsessives are accustomed to. We may think about politics as a responsibility or a passion, but a huge portion of the public thinks about it differently. Their votes still count just as much as ours.

I think that’s a fair summary of Paul’s view.

The Ariana Grande theory of politics

Matthew Sheffield: I agree, and it illustrates the myth of the rational voter that I mentioned earlier.

Robert Farley: Mm-hmm.

Matthew Sheffield: Democrats need to come out of the ivory tower. Even the word “populist” has a different history from its current use. The original Populist Party in the United States was a left-wing party.

Populism is historically associated with the left. Yet even writers who should know better, including people at outlets like Slate, describe Trump as a populist. Donald Trump isn’t a populist; he’s a vulgarian.

Robert Farley: Mm-hmm.

Matthew Sheffield: That’s what he is.

Having seen how both sides operate, I think the Republican agenda is openly plutocratic. Rather than present it that way, Republicans have constructed a form of cultural populism.

They use that cultural populism to establish credibility with ordinary people, and it works. We can say it’s awful and illegitimate that they get away with it. But the useful question is what we’ll do differently in response.

I hear Democrats complain that the rules are rigged and the system isn’t fair. But that’s the system they have to operate in. Republicans figured out how to use it. Historically, votes were distributed quite differently, with competitive races in rural and midsize states such as Kentucky.

It wasn’t just the South. Utah, where I was born, had a Democratic governor in the 1970s.

Robert Farley: Idaho did, too—Cecil Andrus.

Matthew Sheffield: Exactly. Illinois and many other states also had different partisan alignments. Back then, both parties included a wider range of ideologies.

There were genuine liberal Republicans winning in Kansas and other places. Rural voters aren’t inherently unreachable; progressives need to learn to speak to them. And they need to think of themselves as a minority, assuming that most people haven’t heard their arguments or may even dislike their beliefs. They have to ask how to win from that starting point. Republicans are good at asking how to attract politically inert, nonideological, or mildly conservative voters. Those voters don’t have to love Republicans if Republicans can make them afraid enough of Democrats. I don’t think the left does that effectively.

Robert Farley: I have so many thoughts about that. First, I’d love to know who first described one of the world’s most famous billionaire New York real estate developers as a populist.

There might be a traceable first use in a major outlet, and I’d be curious to know where it originated. I also think we should take seriously the flip side of your point about formerly competitive places like Kentucky, Kansas, Utah, and Idaho.

Scott mentioned earlier that Washington is now essentially out of reach for Republicans. That wasn’t true when I was growing up. The same is largely true of Oregon.

My 20-year-old students are shocked by the idea that a Republican could win California. But I grew up there in the 1980s and remember how conservative much of the Central Valley was.

So there are two sides to this change. Democrats have lost ground in areas where they used to compete, but Republicans have also become politically unwelcome in places that were once competitive for them.

Campaign strategy and the military analogy

Robert Farley: Because I study military affairs, I often think about campaign strategy in military terms. To develop a short-term strategy, you have to make two decisions.

First, decide where you’re going to fight. Second, decide how you’ll fight on that terrain. The first is a shaping battle: choosing the issues, understanding voters’ positions, and trying to influence those positions through media, outreach, and activity outside election campaigns.

Eventually, though, you have to accept where the electorate is. You meet voters where they are, just as an army has to deal with the physical terrain: hills, rivers, fields, and walls. In a particular election, you won’t be able to move the hill.

You may not be able to move the river, either. You have to design a strategy around its existence. That would be a more productive way to talk about political consultants and their influence on campaigns.

These days, when people start complaining about consultants, I often tune out. The term has become shorthand for general frustration with campaign strategy instead of a specific critique.

Matthew Sheffield: That’s true. Another asymmetry involves donors. Many donors on the left see themselves as nonpartisan or nonideological. Someone who gives overwhelmingly to left-leaning causes once explicitly told me, “I don’t see myself as part of the right or the left.” I can’t name the person.

There are many people like that, and I sympathize with them to a considerable extent. We need donors who support civil society, including nonpartisan voter registration efforts.

I’m not arguing against arts foundations, education programs, or organizations that buy classroom supplies for teachers. Those are worthwhile things to fund.

But the asymmetry is real. Someone also needs to counteract Charles Koch, the Adelson family, Elon Musk, and Peter Thiel. Supporting civic institutions and countering partisan political influence are both necessary.

Here’s the odd part: across the campaigns and super PACs in 2016, 2020, and 2024, Democrats often had more money, but they wasted too much of it. Consultants deserve criticism for failing to invest in a durable media ecosystem.

Republicans have built a cradle-to-grave media ecosystem. Someone can enter it as a child and never leave. That may sound like a disturbing propaganda structure, but an alternative doesn’t have to consist of nonstop political messaging.

It could simply consist of interesting people talking about subjects they care about from progressive perspectives. Let them speak in their own voices. Stop trying to control every message, because that no longer works.

Robert Farley: That issue is especially close to my heart because foreign policy is an area where many analysts still place enormous value on nonpartisanship. But in foreign policy, as in other fields, fiercely partisan actors can overwhelm nonpartisan institutions.

They’ll push straight through them. Consider the Quincy Institute, which was established as a restraint-oriented, noninterventionist institution. That’s a laudable mission.

Its origins were laudable, too. But you can see how committed right-wing partisans can overwhelm the nonpartisan participants and turn such an institution in a partisan direction. Some donors understand very well the power of partisanship.

They understand how funding can create a partisan DNA within particular institutions and around particular issues. Earnest nonpartisanship alone can’t reliably resist that force. It isn’t built for that competition and may be almost destined to lose.

Matthew Sheffield: Exactly. As with your military analogy, you have to deal with the mountain or river in front of you. It’s fine to develop a long-term plan to reroute the river, but in the meantime you must operate on the terrain that exists.

And for God’s sake, Democrats should try something different. They win about half the time, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re better at politics. That’s partly what happens in a first-past-the-post, two-party system. It’s tempting to interpret victories as proof that Barack Obama or Bill Clinton were uniquely brilliant candidates.

But after George W. Bush’s disastrous presidency, was a Republican really going to win in 2008? Unless Democrats nominated someone extraordinarily incompetent or lazy, they were likely to win regardless. Too often, Democrats win because Republicans have made such a mess that voters turn to Democrats and ask them to fix it. Then Democrats mistake that opportunity for proof that their own strategy was superior.

After fixing the problem, they still don’t know how to win the next election.

Robert Farley: Right.

Matthew Sheffield: That’s the problem. The party that governs effectively and offers policies people like should win more elections than Democrats currently do. That’s my bottom line. And we’re right at the bottom of the hour.

It’s been a great discussion, Rob, and I’m glad Scott could join us earlier. I’ll also get the transcript posted. I look forward to doing more of these conversations.

Robert Farley: We’d love that. We’d also like to have you talk more specifically about your experiences in the blogosphere for our oral-history series, so we could dig further into that history.

Matthew Sheffield: Thanks for joining us, everybody. If you’re watching after the livestream, make sure to subscribe to the channel on YouTube. Thanks again.