Deputy campaign manager Rob Flaherty discusses Harris’ 2024 media strategy.
Maxwell Tani at Semafor:
Soon after Vice President Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee, deputy campaign manager Rob Flaherty turned his attention to sports.
The campaign needed to introduce Harris quickly to people who aren’t obsessed with politics. Sports is perhaps America’s last remaining monoculture, and Flaherty and the Harris team decided to book her on sports shows and podcasts.
But one by one, the biggest personalities and shows politely turned them down.
“Sports and culture have sort of merged together, and as sports and culture became more publicly and sort of natively associated with this Trump-conservative set of values, it got more complicated for athletes to come out in favor of us,” Flaherty, 33, told me in an interview last week. “It got more complicated for sports personalities to take us on their shows because they didn’t want to ‘do politics.’”
“That’s not to say Steph Curry and Steve Kerr and LeBron [James] and all them coming out wasn’t impactful or important,” he said. “It was more impactful because it had gotten so much harder. But certainly the culture that has been associated with heavy sports-watching has become associated with right-wing culture in a way that makes it harder for us to reach people.”
Flaherty declined to say who turned Harris down, but she didn’t appear on key shows hosted by sports figures sympathetic to Democrats, like Colin Cowherd, Bill Simmons, or the Kelce brothers. (As Semafor first reported at the time, Harris did appear on All The Smoke, a popular but more niche basketball podcast, and NFL hall-of-famer Shannon Sharpe’s Club Shay Shay podcast.)
The campaign’s failure to completely crack the sports sphere was, to Flaherty, ominous, and part of a larger trend in which some influencers who had felt comfortable engaging with the Biden White House, demurred when asked to help Harris make her case to their followers. “When it’s not cool to talk about politics,” he said, “you’re kind of afraid of the audience.”
“Campaigns, in many ways, are last-mile marketers that exist on terrain that is set by culture, and the institutions by which Democrats have historically had the ability to influence culture are losing relevance,” he said. “You don’t get a national eight-point shift to the right without losing hold of culture.”
[...]
Flaherty was also paying close attention to how the race was being run on the Republican side. Donald Trump was leaning into new podcasts, and his opponents were tapping a large network of right-leaning and conservative personalities to amplify their message.
Then, he acknowledged that the Republican Party had done a better job building up its alternative digital media ecosystem with podcasters, YouTube streamers, and friendly pundits. But he argued that the then-Biden campaign would overcome those obstacles by better navigating the “personalized internet,” by which sophisticated algorithms feed Americans highly specific information tailored to their tastes and online behavior.
Speaking with me again last week, Flaherty said that remained their theory of the case the entire time. The campaign knew from the beginning that the race was going to come down to voters who do not pay attention to politics or mainstream news and instead get their information from people on YouTube, their friends’ Instagram stories, or links or memes dropped in a group chat.
This firstly meant a shift in paid advertising from previous campaigns. Instead of just blanketing the airwaves in the battleground states, the campaign also invested heavily in ads on YouTube, recognizing the rapid growth in streaming. That’s where, the campaign’s data showed, many of Harris’ key voters were spending their time.
More importantly, this meant building out a strategy focused more on podcast appearances and interviews with influencers than on traditional media. Flaherty said the campaign skipped opportunities to talk to the major legacy news outlets because of Harris’ extremely limited time and its survey data, which showed that their audiences overwhelmingly supported Harris already.
“There’s just no value — with respect to my colleagues in the mainstream press — in a general election, to speaking to the New York Times or speaking to the Washington Post, because those [readers] are already with us,” Flaherty said.
Flaherty isn’t dismissive of television and other legacy media. “One of the most important moments of the campaign for the vice president was her interview with Bret Baier. That was a huge fundraising moment. It was a huge social moment,” he said.
“When Trump did the McDonald’s thing, it was smart, because it was a thing that obviously drove television coverage, but it also drove social media engagement too,” he said. “And those things often happen in tandem, but they don’t always, and so it was the sweet spot. It drove traditional coverage and nontraditional media. I don’t think TV is dead. It’s still probably the most important thing, but it’s the literal TV and what’s on it that matters.”
As the campaign wore on, though, Flaherty said he realized their failure to gain traction in certain corners of media reflected a deeper problem — one that wasn’t solved when Harris replaced Biden on the ticket. The Harris campaign, representing what many voters saw as an embodiment of the status quo, was running contrary not just to ideological distrust of establishment figures but to media trends. The media successes of 2024 were independent, nontraditional online personalities who themselves were avatars of the rewards of going up against the Establishment.
Rob Flaherty, Kamala Harris’s digital campaign chief, told Semafor’s Maxwell Tani that the Democrats’ loss of hold on the culture played a big role into Donald Trump’s win.
The good news is, this can be fixed with a new approach.
Ron Filipkowski at MediasPlus:
When I read the interview that Harris Deputy Campaign Manager Rob Flaherty did with Semafor this week where he gave his thoughts on what went wrong with the 2024 election, some key points he made really hit home for me. That is because I said the exact same thing in an article on this platform three days after the election.
Democrats are losing the information/messaging war against Republicans for one major reason - MAGA created an alternative media ecosystem that pumps their messaging out to tens of millions of people every single day while Democrats currently have just a handful of small outlets like Meidas to counter them.
The reason why this has happened is quite simple and obvious - the leaders of the Republican Party and MAGA movement spent years establishing, cultivating, financing, promoting, and amplifying alternative media platforms and content, while the leaders of the Democratic Party have largely ignored them as they continue to feed their messaging and dedicate their time to increasingly less relevant legacy media outlets.
[...]
He noted that Democrats reliance on traditional media and ads to get their messaging out fails to reach low-information voters who get their information from alternative sources. From the article:
[The campaign knew from the beginning that the race was going to come down to voters who do not pay attention to politics or mainstream news and instead get their information from people on YouTube, their friends’ Instagram stories, or links or memes dropped in a group chat.]
Flaherty said that there is a reason why this is happening: “Folks are seeking alternative sources of media and are turning away from political news because they don’t trust our institutions. They don’t trust elites, they don’t trust the media, they don’t trust all this stuff. So the party of elites and institutions is going to have a hard time selling to people in these places.”
I have covered the right-wing alternative media ecosystem since 2020. I watched it develop, grow, and become a powerful force in shaping public opinion. It largely happened organically as a result of a wave of right-wingers getting banned from social media platforms over covid content, anti-vaccine messaging, insensitive language on race and gender, election fraud conspiracies, then J6. Millions of right-wingers were deplatformed in 2020-2021, including Donald Trump.
They responded by creating their own platforms by necessity. RSBN, Rumble, Parler, Truth Social, Real America’s Voice, Frank Speech, TPUSA, Just The News, OAN - the list is endless of right-wing alternative media platforms. Then there are the podcasters - thousands of them, some with huge audiences built from nothing.
What is the one big reason why the Right has been so successful in building these alternative platforms? The leaders of their party nurture them, promote them, advance them. Donald Trump, JD Vance, Mike Johnson, Ted Cruz, Tucker Carlson - the list is endless of Republican Party leaders who constantly go on these podcasts. They give print interviews to writers and editors of relatively obscure right-wing platforms that few people have heard of.
But the leaders of the Republican Party go even further than that. Many Democrats have mocked Trump for posting obscure social media accounts who are Q-Anon adherents, or when he post videos or memes from people who aren’t famous or aren’t journalists. It comes across often as weird, strange and at times unhinged. But the point is that he is promoting those accounts, helping them gain followers, helping podcasters gain viewers and advertisers.
When Trump or Vance do an interview for a smallish podcast, that podcaster can clip and promote it outside their normal audience. They will gain lots of new subscribers and viewers. Then Trump himself will often post clips from these interviews - which fuels their growth even more. They end up with thousands of new subscribers, new advertisers, and can sell products to help promote their shows.
I watched Donald Trump do hundreds of podcast interviews from 2021-2023, most of them were with people you never even heard of. And he wasn’t even running in an election in those years. I watched him amplify thousands of social media posts from small accounts. So, while he was doing it to promote himself, he was simultaneously helping out the people he amplified, thereby helping to build the ecosystem.
[...]
I also saw Trump go on obscure religious podcasts that averaged only a few thousand views. But when he went on they got tens of thousands. He was not only reaching new voters by going to the places where they are, he was promoting those podcasters and helping them build their audiences, which helped him later in 2024 when those people told those larger audiences to vote for him.
Then there are the conferences. Almost every weekend, right-wingers are putting on more than one conference in a variety of places around the country where the leading elected officials, media personalities, policy think tankers, and campaign consultants are headliners. But these conferences also invite and even pay influencers and activists to speak and participate. This helps them build a following, and also helps the party identify and promote future stars.
Meanwhile, what have the leaders of the Democratic Party done in this genre? Let’s throw out election years when they are scrambling at the last minute to do some of these things. How many times did Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, Hakeem Jeffries, and other leaders of the party quote-tweet or post something from a smallish Democratic activist social media account in 2023? How many interviews did they do with progressive podcasters with less than 100,000 viewers in that year?
How many major conferences headlined by senior members of the Democratic party and media personalities, celebrities, and activists/influencers attended by thousands of people who want to get organized and mobilized to do something were held in 2023?
The answer to all of the questions above is - almost none. And that is why we are losing the information war.
We have the talent. People are out there talking away into their microphones, writing great columns on independent media, sharing ideas on policy, messaging and strategy. But the leaders of the party are doing virtually nothing to promote them. Is it because they are in their bicoastal urban bubbles, disconnected and out of touch with most of America? Probably. Not completely, but that is certainly an issue.
The only way this gets turned around is for the leaders of the Democratic Party to understand the value in the modern Information Age of a partisan alternative media ecosystem that can promote your program and your message. If the party continues to rely on network news, WaPo, and the NYT, it will continue to shrink, become more elitist, more disconnected from average Americans, and lose more elections.
But all it takes is an attitude and strategy change. Get off MSNBC and CNN and start doing some podcasts. If they don’t know where to find them, hire a staffer to find them - because there are plenty out there.
The Democrats are falling behind in the information wars, and that led them to losing the Presidential election.
It is time that Democrats build their own media structure to match the right’s.
In Wilmington, Joe Biden’s reelection team is tackling stubborn polls, Gaza protests, and third-party threats as it assembles a sophisticate
Chris Smith at Vanity Fair:
On a sunny afternoon the views from Joe Biden’s campaign headquarters in downtown Wilmington, Delaware are so clear that if you squint hard you can almost see the White House, 100 miles to the south. The floor plan is open and the windows run just about floor to ceiling, so all 200 staffers share in the sweeping vista.
With the striking exception of probably the most important person on the premises. That Jen O’Malley Dillon sits at the very center of the office is appropriate, symbolically: She is a hub of the reelection effort’s leadership infrastructure. It also means that O’Malley Dillon, officially the campaign chair, is the only person on the team who occupies a dimly lit cubicle. Four years ago, J.O.D., as most everyone in Bidenworld knows her, became the first woman to manage a winning Democratic US presidential campaign, and the first person of any gender in three decades to knock off an incumbent. O’Malley Dillon, 47, has shunned credit and most interviews since. So her nondescript current workspace—blank walls, a tiny desk strewn with papers, a small bookshelf holding a jumble of binders and framed family photos—fits her no-nonsense approach. O’Malley Dillon is ferociously focused on reelecting Biden. Gazing out the window would be a useless distraction. “You have to keep in perspective what’s at stake because every second I waste is a second that we could lose the thing that matters most to me, which is a future for my kids,” she tells me.
Her relentlessness is a good thing, because her candidate is running uphill. For months polls have shown Trump beating Biden nationally, though the race remains tight; more important, thanks to our genius electoral college system, is Trump’s advantage in six of the seven battleground states that are likely to be decisive. Things look equally rugged for Biden when you go deeper than the horse race: A majority of Americans believe economic conditions were better under Trump—despite Biden delivering record-low unemployment numbers—and inflation remains stubbornly high. In March the share of voters strongly disapproving of Biden’s job performance reached a new peak, according to a New York Times survey. Many voters under 35 are angered by the administration’s support for Israel’s military offensive in Gaza. And voters of every age group think Biden, 81, is too old to bid for a second term.
The leaders of his reelection team aren’t in denial; they understand they’re facing daunting challenges. The coalition that elected Biden in 2020 has splintered. “We believe that Joe Biden has an important story to sell and has been a historic president,” a senior campaign strategist says. “But that doesn’t mean to say that everyone is going to love him perfectly.” Which may not make for the most stirring political rallying cry. But it underlies the campaign’s methodical drive to raise tens of millions of dollars to assemble a sophisticated operation that will press the fight in both conventional and innovative ways. The plan stretches from boosting Latino turnout in Arizona to winning Michigan—despite the state’s much-hyped “uncommitted” Democratic primary voters—to flipping North Carolina to wooing a meaningful number of Nikki Haley-Republican-primary voters to aggressively educating potential Robert F. Kennedy Jr. voters about his beliefs. For months the campaign has quietly built infrastructure in key states—a foundation that is now allowing it to capitalize on Republican gifts, like the Arizona supreme court’s approval of a near-total ban on abortion. “We know exactly the voters we need to turn out,” a senior campaign operative says, “and we’ve got a plan to do it.”
That confidence flows from data research that assigns probabilities to individual voters. It is also based on a deep roster of human political intelligence, like Quentin Fulks, the principal deputy campaign manager, who was a top aide on Raphael Warnock’s winning Georgia senate reelection campaign over Herschel Walker in 2022, and Julie Chávez Rodríguez, the 46-year-old campaign manager who is a granddaughter of pioneering labor leader César Chávez. “We wanted to make sure we had strong campaign experience, but also really strong lived experience for the communities and voters that we want to reach. So it’s not by default that it’s myself and Quentin running this campaign. That was extremely intentional,” Rodríguez says. “And being able to prioritize our base targets, it’s not the way that most presidentials have been run. They don’t usually invest in doing outreach to communities of color early.”
Yet much of the work of piecing together the strategy and the machinery has occurred in Wilmington, outside the national media spotlight, which has contributed to a perception among many Democrats that the Biden campaign is eerily, delusionally calm. “What scares me to death is they think they’ve proven everyone wrong every time,” a senior Democratic insider says. “They have this outward posture of, ‘We came from nowhere in the 2020 primary, we’re the only ones who beat Trump in the general, so trust us.’ But remember, in the fall of 2020, they sent Biden to Ohio and Kamala Harris to Texas where they had no chance, when they could have been in Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona, and Pennsylvania. So let’s not get on too high of a horse.”
Maybe so—though Biden visited and won those four key states four years ago. And up close, it’s clear no one is resting on their horses, or their laurels. The 2024 campaign’s activities are intense and far-reaching, permeated by a deep sense of urgency. “I can certainly feel the weight of what we’re doing,” says Dan Kanninen, who leads the battleground-state effort. “But to be in it gives a measure of purpose that is different than just allowing your anxieties to take you somewhere else.” Biden’s lieutenants have forceful, detailed, logical pushbacks to every possible criticism of the campaign. There’s only one part of the reelection operation that feels unnerving: so much of the victory calculus hinges on voters, once they’ve heard the relevant facts, behaving rationally. That worry is compounded by the stakes. “If we lose this election,” a national Democratic strategist says, “we might not have another one.”
Rob Flaherty rates a private corner office. One of its walls is decorated with images of Biden’s trademark aviator sunglasses in a repeating pattern of green, blue, black, and orange. The opposite wall is dominated by a banner, its black background contrasting with large white letters reading “NOBODY KNOWS ANYTHING.”
Flaherty had better know something. His title, deputy campaign manager, doesn’t even hint at the magnitude of his responsibilities. The 32-year-old oversees two crucial aspects of Biden’s campaign: digital strategy and relational organizing. The first role means not simply figuring out how to target a multi-million-dollar pro-Biden online ad campaign, but trying to fight off a fire hose of right-wing attacks and disinformation. Flaherty did this craftily for Biden during the 2020 campaign, particularly in steering an effort to identify “market moving” issues—separating things that had the potential to actually influence voters, like concerns about Biden’s mental fitness, from mere noise, like the Republican obsession with Hunter Biden. In some respects—most notably Gaza and inflation—there are new substantive challenges this time. One major concern hasn’t changed: Biden’s advanced age. “The way you combat the age issue,” Flaherty says, “is, one, he gets out there and addresses it. What you see him doing in his paid [media] right now. And it’s by fighting on the issues that people care about. If we address the fact that they want to see him go and fight for them, the issue goes away pretty quick.”
Yet the online landscape has changed dramatically in four years, with media consumers fractured into ever-more-personalized content silos, many of them hardened against campaign messaging, a shift that seems to benefit Trump. “Voters who do not want to hear about politics never have to,” Flaherty says. “People who are not hearing about politics, they are not trusting of politicians, they’re not trusting the media. So it becomes incumbent on the campaign to think about, how do we reach those people where they are? You have to diversify the way you do paid media, right? You can't just spend 70% on linear broadcast television and hope you’re going to reach folks.”
One of Flaherty’s priorities is reaching tuned-out potential voters. “The voters who we think are pretty much the difference makers in this election, these voters, you have to persuade them to participate,” he says. “This is going to be a back-loaded election for when people start to pay attention. They are largely a younger, more diverse set of people who voted for us last time, who lean Democrat. They hate Trump. They are really hard to reach. And there’s just more of those this time.” A related task is neutralizing the deluge of Republican disinformation. “At the close of any campaign, I know my candidate is in trouble if key parts of the electorate are awash in more negative than positive information about my candidate,” a top Democratic strategist says. “And right now, particularly younger voters of color on social media, they’re hearing more negative than positive information about Joe Biden. How do they turn that?”
Massive spending is part of the answer. But the campaign believes the cash must be spread on a wider array of formats than ever before and in creative ways. So when Biden visited a North Carolina home in March, Flaherty’s team enlisted the family’s 13-year-old son to post a video on TikTok, generating more than five million views across a range of sites, the kind of reach a conventional rally doesn’t produce. The White House has bolstered the president’s online presence by encouraging the work of independent liberal influencers, including Aaron Rupar and Ron Filipkowski, who have driven news cycles by circulating video clips of Trump’s stumbles and incendiary comments. Biden’s team is also investing heavily in first-person testimonial ads from ordinary Americans. “Having elected officials give speeches or be on Sunday talk shows is important,” says Roger Lau, who was Elizabeth Warren’s campaign manager in 2020 and who now works closely with the Biden effort as deputy executive director of the Democratic National Committee. “But finding that nurse in Nevada who can talk about why capping the cost of insulin at 35 bucks a month is important to their families because Filipinos have a much higher rate of type two diabetes than other communities—that kind of video, digital, and social content, it just cuts through in a totally different way.”
Flaherty comes across as ebullient and exhausted, which is understandable given that he’s crafting in-real-life organizing plans at the same time he’s trying to counteract the Laura Loomers of the world online. His digital turf overlaps with his more experimental turf, relational organizing. “You have to get people to share content through their friends and family, trusted messengers,” Flaherty says. “This is important because of what I think is the second trend that is different from ’20. In 2022, half of the content shared on Instagram was in private. So if you’re running a digital strategy that is aimed just at reaching people in their feeds, you’re missing where a lot of conversation on the internet is happening.”
[...]
While Biden’s Gaza-fueled problems with younger voters have likely been overstated, the conventional wisdom has been understating the damage the war could cause the president with swing voters—and not because of their allegiances to Israel or Palestine. The conflict itself fueled a sense that the world remains volatile, though it was still happening at a distance, literally and politically. Now campus skirmishes have made the mess domestic, and the president’s brand is all about delivering calm. “Biden has got to be seen as the reasonable guy who gets shit done, where Trump is a madman,” a top Democratic strategist says. “You can’t do that when you’ve got chaos on the southern border or chaos on campuses.”
The Biden administration has put together a compelling record in some big-picture ways, including the revival of the economy, the defense of Ukraine, and advances in the battle against climate change. The campaign’s challenge is to translate the president’s record into gains that voters recognize in their everyday lives. “If we’re able to frame the president’s accomplishments in the face of Republican extremist obstructionism,” Tyler says, “you actually have a fantastic story to tell. I mean, I’ll talk about Black folks, for example, right? Since before the pandemic, Black wealth is up 60%, highest rate of small business growth for Black-owned businesses in a generation, cutting Black child poverty in half through the child tax credit before MAGA Republicans ripped it away, which Joe Biden is going to bring back in a second term to make permanent.”
There are also large vulnerabilities in Biden’s first-term record: the suffocatingly high price of housing and the immigration crisis, to pick two. But presidential elections are weird, unique animals that more often turn on personality than on policy, on what Americans are feeling they need in the White House as much as what might objectively be best for the country. Mood is a powerful force in national elections, and the Biden campaign has identified an intriguing, and ominous, headwind. “We don’t like to talk about the fact that COVID still has an impact,” a senior strategist says. “It’s easy to kind of be nostalgic for a time before COVID, to remember, ‘Oh, well, the economy was better, or I felt like prices were better.’ And you don’t hear Trump every day. People are not viscerally feeling how they felt when he was a leader, because he’s been silent for lots of reasons. So we have a lot of work to do. Now, it just so happens that Trump says such crazy stuff all the time that we have ample opportunity.” Everyone at Biden HQ is well aware of the possible consequences, both for the country and for themselves, of Trump winning and turning the craziness into policy. “The people behind him are very well organized,” a Biden campaign operative says. “It can feel like an abstraction, but actually there are people I know, and myself, who would be targets.”
Vanity Fair has a story on the Biden campaign’s re-election team that is navigating tough headwinds to get Joe Biden re-elected.
Twitter will make Joe Biden’s @POTUS account start with zero followers
New Post has been published on https://videogaming.newonline.help/twitter-will-make-joe-bidens-potus-account-start-with-zero-followers/
Twitter will make Joe Biden’s @POTUS account start with zero followers
President Biden is going to need some Twitter followers. Twitter plans to wipe out all followers from the @POTUS and @WhiteHouse accounts once Biden is sworn in on January 20th, rather than transferring the accounts’ existing followers over to the new administration, according to Rob Flaherty, Biden’s digital director.
The accounts for @VP, @FLOTUS, @PressSec, @Cabinet, and @LaCasaBlanca will also have their followers wiped, Twitter said. The Wall Street Journal reported earlier today that there was contention between the Biden camp and Twitter over whether followers would transfer over.
This is a reversal from what Twitter did in 2017 when the Trump administration took over accounts from the Obama administration. Back then, Twitter essentially duplicated the existing accounts, creating an archive of Obama-era tweets and followers and building a new set of accounts for the incoming administration that retained all of those followers without any of the tweets.
The Biden administration will miss out on tens of millions of followers
Twitter hasn’t said why it’s changing the policy this time. Twitter told The Verge it is “in ongoing discussions with the Biden transition team on a number of aspects related to White House account transfers.” Biden’s team seems to be unhappy about this change in policy, given the significant digital advantage they’ll be losing. Flaherty said the transition team “pushed back and we were told this was unequivocal.”
On Inauguration Day, anyone who follow one of the handles being transitioned will receive a notification that the account is being archived, a Twitter spokesperson said. They will also be given the option to follow the Biden administration’s new accounts. There are no details yet on what that notification will look like for users.
While the president has plenty of pulpits to speak from, there’s no denying that Twitter is a major communications tool for the president after these last four years. Those accounts have significant followings to rebuild, too: @POTUS has 33 million followers, @WhiteHouse has 26 million, @FLOTUS has 16 million, and @PressSec has 6 million.
Donald Trump’s @POTUS account will be renamed @POTUS45 and “frozen as-is,” the Journal reported. He’ll still be in control of @realDonaldTrump, albeit with fewer protections than before.
Update December 22nd, 5:23PM ET: This story has been updated with new details from Twitter on the transition of accounts.
