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What Trump's extremely online victory means for progressive politics in Canada

As it turned out, the unholy alliance between Donald Trump and Elon Musk helped deliver the election to the Republicans. Now, Democrats have to find a way to win in the online spaces MAGA has come to dominate. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

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As Democrats continue to sift through the ashes of Tuesday’s election, they’ve begun the process of trying to understand what happened to them and their country. This was no mere fluke like 2016, and there is no single tactical or strategic decision — other than, perhaps, Joe Biden’s refusal to step down after the midterm elections in 2022 — that can explain why so many Americans decided to double down on Donald Trump. In the end, Kamala Harris never really had a chance. 

That’s in large part because her party is still fighting elections like it’s 2008. Harris had more endorsements, including most of Trump’s former cabinet. She raised more money, spent more on conventional advertising, and had the most sophisticated “ground game” — that combination of phone bankers, door knockers, and other volunteers dedicated to annoying people into voting — in American political history.

Trump, in contrast, outsourced his own ground game, such as it was, to Elon Musk and Charlie Kirk. And while his campaign was often accused of being “terminally online,” that’s actually where it did its most important work. MAGA Republicans have controlled the alternative media space in America for years now, whether that’s podcasts or streaming or other non-conventional sources of information. When Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022, that cemented the right’s control over the digital ecosystem where most Americans — and especially young men, who broke overwhelmingly for Trump — get their information and news. 

Democrats, on the other hand, still tried to filter their message through the remnants of the mainstream media. News outlets mostly did their jobs, looking critically at what was happening in and to the country under the Biden administration. The mainstream media cautioned, wherever possible, that Trump’s plans were unrealistic and often dangerous. But this warmed-over stew of complex information transmitted primarily through traditional mediums was no match for undiluted digital propaganda. 

As former FBI agent and legal expert Asha Rangappa said on social media, “Democrats aren’t going to win elections again until they build a well-oiled information ecosystem that extends to podcasts and every social media platform and can pierce the right-wing propaganda bubble. It doesn’t matter if you delivered on the economy or we are actually safer if people are being pummeled by domestic and foreign disinformation that crime and inflation are up. It’s an information war at this point.”

And when it comes to the internet, well, we’re not going back. As Infinite Scroll’s Jeremiah Johnson wrote, “I can’t help but think back to the 2000s and 2010s when people would dismissively say things like ‘The internet is not real life. Twitter is not real life. You need to log off and talk to real people.’ If that was ever correct it’s certainly not any more. It’s almost more correct to say that people knocking on doors need to get off the street and get back on the internet. To compete in modern politics you *must* be fighting in online spaces.”

Fox News has, of course, been tilting the table like this for years, pretending to pursue “fair and balanced” journalism while in reality doing the exact opposite. But the combination of social media and MAGA politics has made Fox’s influence look dowright pedestrian by comparison. Whether it’s on YouTube, Spotify, or Twitter, the right’s domination of the digital airwaves is now impossible to ignore. 

As Jon Stewart told the New York Times’s Ezra Klein, it’s time for progressives to start fighting this inferno of bullshit with some fire of their own. “We have the mechanisms. We have the talent. We have the people. We just need the will. Roger Ailes built Fox News Media out of tenacity and will and skill as a producer. We have to match that with the same intentionality that he brought to it.”

No, that doesn’t mean engaging in the same sort of naked propaganda that tends to characterize some of the most popular platforms on the right. But it means declining to rely on the mainstream media to communicate their message for them. It means making major investments in building up new voices and platforms that can reach the voters they’ve so clearly lost, whether that’s Gen-Z or working-class Latinos. And it means understanding that the facts, whether they’re about the economy or immigration, simply won’t speak for themselves anymore when there are so many places eager to disseminate “alternative” facts. 

As Democratic strategist James Carville might say: it was the internet, stupid. How Republican dominance of things like podcasts, streaming and social media ended up winning them the election, and why progressives have to respond in kind — and fast.

I’d bet heavily that this lesson is arriving far too late to save Justin Trudeau’s Liberals from a similar fate. Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives, after all, have been dominating Canada’s comparatively quaint online and digital spaces to a similar extent, and the Trudeau government’s $600 million bet on backstopping the mainstream media has only served to turn even more people against it. They — and indeed, all progressives — will have to build their own ecosystem if they want people to actually hear their message. 

If they don’t, we know what will happen. The messy complexities of our world are no match for someone armed with a simple message and a digital megaphone, and whining about the unfairness of the situation won’t do anything to actually change it. Instead, it’s now up to those of us who care about things like truth and decency to start fighting for them more effectively. 

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