The Year Democrats Lost the Internet

Spurned by Hollywood and the legacy press, the online right has spent more than a decade forging its own alternative media ecosystem out of the void conservative talk radio left behind. “Part of the work for these next four years is to dig into an ever changing informational environment and build relationships with folks that are communicating effectively across that landscape,” says Ben Wikler, Wisconsin Democratic Party chairman and one of the top candidates to lead the DNC. “There's been people advocating for this kind of changed approach for years, but it's time to make this a central part of our strategy.” Speaking with WIRED, though, some creators and Democratic strategists argued that it wasn’t the party’s creator strategy that lost them the election, but the lack of any real message for creators to deliver to their audiences. The Democrats make that impossible when they give creators nothing to defend.” The online messengers Democrats need to engage with will not always align perfectly to the party platform, Wikler suggested. Bernie Sanders, a 2020 presidential candidate, sat for an hourlong interview with Rogan; the Human Rights Campaign, a Democratic-aligned LGBTQ advocacy group, then said it was “disappointed” Sanders had accepted Rogan’s endorsement, given controversial statements he had made related to trans athletes.