The media industry was already facing serious financial headwinds and corporate restructurings before Donald Trump cruised to victory on Nov. 5. Now executives at both legacy media outlets and social media companies are facing an unexpected aftershock from this year’s nonstop campaign cycle. Call it the Great Democratic Check-Out.
Democrats are tuning away from news networks and social media platforms in numbers that are impossible to ignore. MSNBC and CNN saw their ratings slashed in half as exhausted Democrats tuned out post-election. On Twitter (now X, after its acquisition by Elon Musk), lefty users have deserted the platform in droves in favor of competitor Bluesky.
Print outlets are faring even worse, with furious Democrats still canceling their Washington Post subscriptions nearly a month after owner Jeff Bezos spiked the paper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris. One in 10 Washington Post subscribers have quit the paper since October, blowing a sizable hole in the paper’s already threadbare earnings.
That raises an existential question for media outlets and for Democrats: Where will all those disillusioned eyes go?
Decades of plans to build left-of-center alternatives to outlets like Fox News have amounted to — well, not very much. With the Democratic media landscape fractured and small, it’s struggling to compete with well-funded outlets like Fox and even new media efforts like Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire. That’s a worrying sign for 2026 and 2028.
With investors hesitant to fund left-wing media outlets since the failure of Air America Radio back in 2010, Democratic audiences simply have no media outlets comparable to the constellation of conservative and even far-right channels popping up across the Internet. That’s in part because the billionaire investors now required to build and sustain those networks aren’t keen to platform voices calling for higher taxes and more accountability for America’s wealthiest magnates.
But we can’t blame the billionaires for everything (as much as I’d like to). A stickier problem for Democrats is that the party writ large is still struggling to pin down a message that actually engages voters.
The Democratic Party has been greatly harmed by its generational transformation from a labor-first party of the working class into a D.C.-based entity that spends most of its time courting wealthy Silicon Valley megadonors. That shift has left many traditional Democratic voters feeling unrepresented, while at the same time turning the party’s messaging into something more at home in an HR meeting than on the campaign trail.
The limitations of Democrats’ corporate-speak messaging are clear. Kamala Harris is facing perhaps her most pointed internal criticism over the decision to elevate Uber Chief Legal Officer Tony West — her brother-in-law — to a prominent role within her doomed campaign. That decision coincided with a marked cooling in Harris’s rhetoric around taxing the rich and reining in powerful companies, both issues with supermajority support among Democrats.
Turn on the television or visit any of the most popular anti-establishment Republican social media channels and it’s easy to understand what a miss this was for Democrats. NewsNation’s pivot to more populist coverage coincided with a 10 percent rise in overall viewership and a nearly 20 percent boost among the coveted 25-34 demographic. Fox News’s prime-time focus on working-class outrage drove the network to its largest cable news share in history last month.
Yet Democrats, scared away from populism by Trump’s own extremely successful demagoguery, seem less inclined than ever to follow the public’s lead.
This should be a layup for a Democratic Party that has among its ranks populist messaging pros like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), who recently hit 1 million followers on Bluesky, impactful labor-centric media shops like More Perfect Union and working-class heroes like Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear (D). But those voices have been shoved to the sidelines by a top-heavy DNC that still believes it knows better than its most successful messengers.
If Democrats want to persuade investors to back left-of-center media networks, they’ll first need to show their own support by financing those operations internally. That means redirecting the flood of DNC cash currently feeding the Beltway consultant class and making real investments in media talent, with an emphasis on YouTube and podcasting instead of traditional, talking-head media.
A strong bench of lefty influencers would do wonders for Democrats’ ability to set the media agenda. Instead of scoffing at the right’s success, it’s time to draw lessons from booming conservative networks and ditch the stuffy, scripted stump speeches.
Democrats were once masters of the populist message. If they want to rebuild after last month’s electoral disaster, they’ll need to reconnect with that part of their political psyche — fast.
Max Burns is a veteran Democratic strategist and founder of Third Degree Strategies.
